Pet-shaming, the Internet trend of mocking a disobedient pet by picturing them with a sign, written in first-person, detailing what they did wrong, is a relatively harmless exercise. That’s at least partially because most housepets aren’t capable of doing a ton of damage.
Not so, in the world of Pokémon, where young children often run around accompanied by monsters with powers that range from spewing fire, all the way up to complete control over time and space. Punishing a creature that can spit poison in your face is a much dicier prospect, but it hasn’t stopped online artists from turning “Pokémon-shaming” into a thing. Kotaku’s Pocket Monster blog has collected a gallery of images of people trying to teach morality to unstoppable god-monsters.
Some are fairly innocuous, if destructive. If you keep a massive rotund pet like a Snorlax around, you’re going to lose some furniture. And no one can deny that Digletts gotta dig.
But the trend also highlights just how nasty and dangerous some cute-looking Pokémon can be. Take Chandelure, Lampent, and Litwick, the happy, lightsource-based trio who cheerfully consume human souls.
And that’s before getting into the fact that some Pokémon, like Palkia, are, in the mythology of the setting, actual gods, capable of destroying the world on a whim.
It’s all extremely silly, although not all that much sillier than a universe in which kids keep soul-devouring monsters as pets. You can see the rest of the gallery here.