You can't act like how a pokemon is presented in other media won't affect how it's received in game. Most people will come to play pokemon because they saw some somewhere and want to use them. Therefore, the personalities starters are presented with in other media have a huge effect on their reception in the games. You can't talk about them in a bubble.
Yes I can because the games themselves are meant to be a separate primary source of Pokemon media and are reviewed as such. The audience knows the staunch difference between the Pokemon you see on the anime and the Pokemon you capture in the games. The average player can and should be able to make their starter's distinct from the anime. If what you're saying about the anime is true, then the starters in the game are worse off for having an indisputable singular personality directly tied to the anime, instead of objective creative freedom given to you by the game.
Firstly, I challenge your premise. Pokemon are literally all shapes and sizes, from sentient blobs to humanoid, and starters have never been a grand indicator of the variety or monstrous possibilities you proclaim they are.
I never said that. You are putting words into my mouth. You have already interpreted my own argument down to two sentences, yet neither me or you mention that the starters are meant to represent the region as a whole. Your false counterargument and examples does not work here when its counters a strawman that never existed.
Secondly, I challenge your premise that pokemon with less defined personalities will make for better starters. I distinctly remember gravitating to some starters specifically because of clear-cut personality - hell, there were whole memes about Smugleaf Snivy's personality, and I personally gravitated to it for that. These characteristics don't make them blank slates, but depending on the person, they can be the seed from which ideas grow about their nuances of their personality, or the personality they're embedded with might be naturally attractive regardless.
Snivy's "Smugleaf personality" may be a creative extrapolation of a single teaser image back from the 4chan image boards, but that type of anthropomorphism is nowhere within the games themselves, you've proved my point. The less distinct the personality a starter pokemon has, the more freedom of creative expression there is within.
(On a related note, I find your drawn line of Gen 6 very dodgy, and not acknowledging the careers and personality expressed in at least Empoleon, Infernape, Blaziken and all the Gen 5 starters.
Because none of these examples have nearly as much anthropomorphic traits as the Pokemon starters from the 3DS era and beyond. The gen IV and V starters references ancient history and mythology, not a career, or a human profession. Blaziken's hakama-like leg feathers isn't nearly as egregious as Delphox's wizard wand, Primarina's jewelry, or Rillaboom's drumkit. Blaziken's fighter-based personally is hardly conspicuous when every single Pokemon battles in the games.
Putting aside that your final word in the first one talks about which Pokemon are most beloved, yet you never explain how you determined that...
My previous sentence was persuasive hyperbole but I've made clear within said statement that, as you've eloquently put it:
- Pokemon are generally monsters first and foremost, and the starters should emphasize that.
- Starters should thus not have clear basis in human jobs by default, and should instead emphasize the beastly traits to be more flexible in personality, allowing the player to anthropomorphize them freely.
I'd say that's a clear method for determining which of the 24 starter Pokemon lines is the most beloved, more or less.
Trying to argue that one set is "objectively" better designed is stupid, and you should know better. You have a standard by which you're measuring, but it's a completely arbitrary one that isn't really based in anything other than your perception of what kids will respond to best - which you haven't evidenced.
I cannot make this any more clearer, the objectively better Starters are the ones less anthropomorphic, and therefore more easily creatively malleable by the player. That standard of measurement seems universally fair IMHO.
As for the rest of the paragraph, that is my point you dumb of fuck. You are trying to apply an objective veneer to an incredibly subjective topic, one that is heavily influenced by dozens of factors external to the character design itself. Which is why, to me, the standards you are measuring don't stand up to scrutiny. You're applying them after the fact, trying to apply a simple yardstick to an inherently subjective and infinitely corrupted topic.
My point is not that these starters are as good as the classics. My point is that trying to act like there's some single objective measure of what makes a good starter is ridiculous, and this is where the shaky parts of your argument come from.
There are only EIGHT trios of starter evolution lines to sort out dude, It ain't as impossible as you make it out to be. The less athro, the better. Simple as.
