Sexuality in the Pokemon World

This is a really stupid and silly question, but I kind of need to know this for... a reason. I swear.

I'm careful to think of the pokemon world as different from our own (e.g. I don't think they're organized religion in the pokemon world). But I'm wondering about sexuality; namely, would people in the pokemon world use any labels for sexuality? Like gay, straight, bi, asexual, etc.? Or would they just think of sexuality as about the same as saying something like, "I only like to eat broccoli?"
Or can I still use these same labels as if they exist in the pokemon world?

What I do about sexuality in the Pokemon world is just simply put it as our world. Our writing of the Pokemon world is different in the Pokemon movies or TV shows, well for me at least. It's like in the original series of Pokemon they showed the feelings when Ash liked Misty but didn't show their expressions or actions. They did this because it was rated PG.

It's all based on your imagination and how you create the character.

I think it would be very similar. Sexuality is a natural thing, so people are naturally going to be attracted to different people, even if they are in another universe, or whatever. So, my answer is yes.

Why am I trying to answer this at 4:00 AM?

Erm, heh... I use the same labels for sexuality in my Pokémon fanfics as I do in real life. I even make minute rude jokes about certain characters orientation (remember Miror B.? You have no idea how many jokes I snuck into Feral Twilight about him and his minions about them being "butt pirates," yar...no offense to real gay people, mind you, that's just part of Jay's character to make fun of others jokingly).

I like to think of it this way: Ditto exists. With that example most sexualities are easy to understand for children and adults alike. Therefore, people are tiny bit more open than normal about that sort of thing. Also keep in mind that in the games themselves there has been at least one transgender who talks about it like it's a common occurrence.

Other than that, I assume it's about the same.

A good point on the above: children in the Pokémon world have much better reason to be open to it than we have. At age 10 they go outside to meet people on the road and they catch and train creatures that, depending on continuity, are just as animalistic as our world's.

One would also expect schools to be open about it too, since children don't seem to really go to the open unprepared. There's probably small courses on "When a Beedrill and a Butterfree like each other very much…"

As a consequence of that approach to normality, though, I think people are not going to attach strong labels to different forms of sexuality in the Pokémon world. Probably the common ones grown from the structure of the language, such as "bisexual".

Projectwolfie said:

Also keep in mind that in the games themselves there has been at least one transgender who talks about it like it's a common occurrence.

Click to expand...

Oh yeah... and it looked like she was a transwoman who had had surgery, right? I forgot about that. Considering how advanced technology is in the pokemon world, I wonder what kind of sex-reassignment processes they have. Oh well, that's a question for another day.

solovino said:

As a consequence of that approach to normality, though, I think people are not going to attach strong labels to different forms of sexuality in the Pokémon world. Probably the common ones grown from the structure of the language, such as "bisexual".

Click to expand...

So "homosexual" or "heterosexual" probably make sense, but "gay" would not, since it's etymology is rooted in history+changing meanings and not root words?

Less that it wouldn't make sense and more like it wouldn't be... concurrent, I guess? Between the differences in history, maturity and all that, the connotations of words like "gay" probably have different weights than in ours, similar to how thirty years ago some people at least remembered that "have a gay old time" was perfectly valid and fashionable an expression about wishing someone a good, joyful time.

I'm guessing the world would be there, but they would be mostly free of their in-our-universe stronger tones, such as pejorative or exclusionary categorization terms.

As it's not addressed in canon, I'd say you have liberty to decide how you want to portray this type of thing. There's plenty of fics that portray the world presented in the games as a false utopia, for instance, with unspeakable social injustice occurring in the margins. It ultimately depends on what you want to do with your story, the tone you want to strike, and the material you want to present.

An aside: just because a culture is technologically advanced doesn't mean it wouldn't have its fair share of social conflict. Science is neutral; people are not. These things can and do progress at different rates, often exclusively of one another.