Pokémon White - Basic Badge

Venturing into Pinwheel Forest before beating the Gym Leader of Nacrene City leads you directly to a blockade of Team Plasma members whose proclamations have a very left-wing sound to them. I quote:

"In order to eliminate the old-fashioned way of looking at things..."

"We will steal Pokémon! You'll never play together again!"

"If their Pokémon are liberated, Trainers will no longer be Trainers!"

"We are in the right!"

"Everyone else is wrong!"

"If you don't think the same way we think, we'll use all our power to eliminate you!"

I bet these punks voted for Obama.

The Journey continues after the jump.

Nacrene City
At some point, I guess Gamefreak must be running out of names to give to NPCs, but Loblolly? Really? It sounds like the kind of pretentious name an artiste would give themselves. She makes furniture for a living, there's no reason to be so haughty.

The museum (which you can enter after defeating N outside) is just a front operation for the gym, much like the restaurant was a front for the gym in Striaton. There's a completely inane puzzle you have to solve before you can access Gym Leader Lenora's underground meth lab and I probably should have caught and trained up a fighting type from the forest first. Servine's Leaf Tornado kept missing Herdier for some reason so by the time that finished, it was nearly done in. Then she brought in Watchog. Once I had finished laughing, she proceeded to wipe the floor with me, killing 3 of my pokes in one hit. What the hell is this move Retaliation anyway? Servine came back out and got in a lucky hit to end the fight, and the Basic Badge was mine.

Lenora is the first black character I remember in a pokemon game by the way. Some might call that surprisingly progressive, I just call it surprising. "Progressive" and "liberal" are words that are misused more than any other. There are a lot of ways to approach this topic, I'll just say that if they're in there, great but if they're not? I'm not going to pretend I care about any lack of minority characters in East-Asian produced media. As much as America would clearly love to breed the yellow out of there, it is and should remain a homogeneous region that puts the welfare of its own people first.

Pinwheel Forest
Caught: Pidove, Tympole, Throh, Timburr, Venipede, Petilil, Sewaddle, also tracked back to Dreamyard and caught a Musharna.
It's possible my team sucks because I found myself having to run back to the nurse a whole lot while fighting my way through here. One of the bosses of Team Plasma as we find out is called "Gorm". I was all prepared to make a lame joke about how he's gormless when I realized, actually he's the opposite - he has gorm as opposed to being gormless. Which beggars the question, what the hell is gorm, anyway?

Active Team
Servine - Lv 21
Drilbur - Lv 21
Munna - Lv 20
Blitzle - Lv 20
Tympole - Lv 21
Patrat - Lv 4 (Cut)