The language is vague and I only take them mentioning Protect as an example not the only thing it bypasses.
Okay, I
think I see the problem...
I'm about to talk about grammar - specifically, I'm about to refer to something on the official site that I consider to be nonstandard - so important disclaimer:
There is no "right" or "wrong" in language - it's really just a matter of what people say
and what people don't say,
and being "correct" only matters to the extent that one is understood. When enough people start doing something nonstandard that it becomes widely understood, it just becomes the new norm - languages change all the time, and there's no way to stop that as long as the language is actually being spoken, so I don't agree with calling someone "wrong" for using nonstandard language. For that matter, even concurrently, different groups of people will always have somewhat divergent ideas of how to speak a language.
Grammar is useful because it gives us consistency
when interpreting language - it keeps us all on the same page and helps us to understand each other - but that doesn't mean someone is wrong
and needs to be stopped and corrected if their use doesn't conform to the rules of your dialect of English. You just... might sometimes need to ask for clarification when something like this actually inhibits your interpretation of the sentence.
With that said, in this case, I'm making what will doubtless look like a stupidly minor nitpick about a single comma and describing a "rule" that some people may not follow, and I just want to emphasize that this is an attempt to illuminate the meaning of the sentence that will make it more easily understood, not an attempt to call it incorrect or to criticize the writing.
ANYWAY
The thing about the quote is that - as far as I know - a comma isn't really
expected here:
"This Ability lets the Pokémon deal damage when it attacks with moves that make direct >>> contact
, even <<< if the target defends itself by using moves like Protect."
I think this comma is probably what has you confused, because it makes the rest of the sentence look nonessential. It's making you think that you can read the sentence without it and still have the basic meaning. Here are examples of sentences with commas used in this way:
"If you speak, even quietly, they'll hear you."
"Everyone was surprised, even me."
"It was really fun, other than the time when I fell." (Compare: "I didn't have any symptoms other than coughing." In this case, "other than coughing" is crucial to the meaning of the sentence, so there is no comma.)
"We don't know anything about Cosmog, not that we'd tell you!"
The thing that all of those examples have in common, though, is that none of their "nonessential" components are
entire subordinate clauses. The last one is particularly telling: the word "that" is used to
transform a clause
into a noun phrase so that it can be fit into the structure and remain nonessential.
With that in mind, if what followed the comma in the example quote were
anything other than a complete subordinate clause, I would be inclined to agree with you that it's just an example, not the entire purpose of the Ability.
Admittedly, I don't know if there's an actual rule about this, but I'm
pretty sure I wouldn't ever treat a subordinate clause as nonessential. You can't really say "it's not essential to the meaning of the clause" - it
is the clause, and it can't exist without
itself. In fact, there's a totally different reason to use a comma before a subordinate clause: a case when it can change the meaning of the sentence, as is sometimes the case with "because."
I'm not really sure how the comma was supposed to help or what it was meant to clarify in this specific case, and I would still consider it nonstandard, personally - but generally speaking, using a comma before a subordinate clause does
not mean that the sentence isn't a complex sentence, and it means something totally different from labeling it nonessential.
Anyway, in the case of this sentence, what was separated with the comma
is a complete subordinate clause, meaning that if you get rid of the subordinating "even if," you have another complete sentence: "The target defends itself by using moves like Protect."
That means this is a
complex sentence. Grammatically,
both clauses are necessary components of the sentence; the subordinating conjunction "even if" is there to clarify their relationship, and that, too, informs the meaning of the sentence as a whole.
If I were the one writing the sentence, I would not likely have separated these two clauses with a comma. When combining two clauses with
coordinating conjunctions (for/and/nor/but/or/yet/so), one will
almost always put a comma before the conjunction, but with
subordinating conjunctions (including this "even if"), a comma is
usually used only if the subordinate clause is
first, not if it comes
after the main clause. (That said, there are exceptions to both of these.)
Accordingly, you might find it easier to interpret the sentence without the comma, like so:
"This Ability lets the Pokémon deal damage when it attacks with moves that make direct contact even if the target defends itself by using moves like Protect."
Now that the comma is gone, it should no longer be possible to interpret the clause as nonessential; you can see clearly that it's integral to the meaning of the sentence.
(That said, it also looks pretty
weird for the sentence to have two consecutive subordinate clauses. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's quite rare; that's probably why the writer thought something was missing and wanted to add a comma, but I don't think it helped.)
For reference, the descriptions of Feint and Phantom Force are structured very similarly, but they don't have a comma in the same place, and their meaning is much clearer as a result.
Here's something that might make the meaning slightly more obvious, though!
When you're working with complex sentences in English, you can
reorder the clauses without changing the meaning at all. (For reference, if the subordinate clause comes
before the main clause, the clauses
are traditionally separated by a comma.) Let's try doing
that with this sentence! This sentence has three clauses:
Main clause: "This Ability lets the Pokémon deal damage."
Subordinate clause: "when it attacks with moves that make direct contact" ("It attacks with moves that make direct contact." is a complete sentence, so you can tell that this is a subordinate clause. "When" is being used as a subordinating conjunction, which is why this can't stand on its own anyway.)
Subordinate clause: "even if the target defends itself by using moves like Protect" ("The target defends itself by using moves like Protect." is also a complete sentence, so it's the same thing here.)
I think it might be easier to parse the sentence if their order was something like this:
"Even if the target defends itself by using moves like Protect, this Ability lets the Pokémon deal damage when it attacks with moves that make direct contact."
You could also try something like this:
"When it attacks with moves that make direct contact, this Ability lets the Pokémon deal damage even if the target defends itself by using moves like Protect."
Crucially,
all of these variations are the same sentence! Absolutely nothing about the meaning should change when you reorder a complex sentence in this way - it's just a matter of which version conveys that meaning the most clearly.
(These... uh... sure look pretty long, don't they? I'm not really sure why the description had to be worded this way in the first place. I'm starting to see why it was so confusing to interpret!)
I hope that helps a bit, though!
Comma or no comma, this sentence was probably not the clearest way to express the function of the Ability, and the punctuation making an important clause look nonessential to you certainly can't have made it any
easier to interpret.
Still, I'm fully confident that this was the writer's intention; just recognizing that they were trying to compose a complex sentence makes it easier to see how the pieces fit together, and maaaybe this will also give some more insight on how complex sentences are structured in general and how to avoid ambiguity like this in the future?
(This also might not have made any sense at all, haha. If that's the case, that's okay because it will probably never be relevant again anyway! XP)
EDIT: someone privately made the
very good point that the amount of tiny text in this post made it difficult to read, so I've done my best to make the formatting more approachable! I'm generally more used to browsing Smogon on mobile, so I hadn't considered how much of an issue the font size changes could be for someone who can't zoom as easily - I'll try to be more mindful of that in the future and not rely so much on that!
