(no subject)

i sometimes think about people worried about Disney transmitting The Wrong Values to our kids (and the general 'what are the effects of reading/watching/etc certain kinds of fiction?' question)

it seems like most Disney classics have a mostly unquestioned pro-monarchy stance as a background assumption. At worst it's 'if you get the bad king it's bad but with a good king it's good'. yet 'let's bring back the monarchy' is way outside of the overton window of societies whose kids more or less universally grew up on Disney classics.

it'd be odd if fiction had zero effect on the opinions and values of people who consume it. people become aware of lots of aspects of their world via fiction first and stuff. but apparently disney's implicit pro-monarchy stance is not the kind of thing that has a measurable effect, or it's not enough to overcome the pro-democracy memes in the rest of the relevant cultures. Maybe it's just that they have pro-monarchy messages but not anti-democracy ones.

if violent video games don't make us violent and monarchist movies don't make us monarchist, what effects of fiction on personality or ideology or whatever have we actually observed?

(no subject)

most of my team was at level 36 or 37* when i reached the second gym in pokemon X. that's somewhere between Erika and Sabrina/Koga in gen I terms, or just before Clair (final gym leader) in gen II.

I did not do any deliberate grinding for levels! what I did do is a lot of going through the same area to make sure I'd caught every pokemon that shows up there I didn't already have (or could evolve). I didn't fail many catches, the time consuming part was just trying to find that last low probability encounter for most areas.

the exp mechanics got more generous in gen VI, now you don't split exp. Instead, everyone who fights gets a participation trophy the full experience for the encounter. if you have exp share turned on, then everyone who doesn't participate gets half as much exp. This incidentally also means that 'catching up' a newly caught pokemon to the level of everyone else takes longer, even if you let them and only them take every fight, because everyone gets a decent chunk of xp anyway.

Maybe i should just think of the exp share as 'easy mode' and turn it off.

*except my Axew, who was a relatively new addition to the party and was somewhere in the high twenties.