Two things today:
1. Messy Pokedex listings > straightforward listings.
This topic has come up before - there was some talk a while ago about how certain dex listings don't follow an obvious logic (with Pokemon who appear early positioned late, or vice versa) while others "make sense" (Hoenn's is the most logical of all the listings, with nearly every Pokemon having a number in the listing that reflects its position in the game). But I think the ones that make sense are just... dull.
I was looking at the Hisui Dex earlier and it's just so gloriously all over the place. Loads of Pokemon which one would expect to be early in the listing (Budew, Ralts, Machop) are way back, possibly to contrast with Sinnoh's numbering. The Sinnoh starters are spread out and not in the usual Grass-Fire-Water order. Once again Garchomp (and Goodra for that matter) is in the middle of the dex instead of at the back, while Lucario occupies the typical "pseudo-legendary position" of being the final regular species before the legendary section. Rotom, which generally also tends to be near the back, is similarly free-floating.
Obviously PLA is open-world therefore less beholden to any logical expectations about order when it comes to numbering the Pokedex, but I'm talking in terms of Pokemon strength and rareness as much as anything else. Generally speaking, weaker and common Pokemon tend to come first while strong and rare Pokemon tend to come later.
And what's especially janky to me is the legendary ordering. Phione, Manaphy, Shaymin, and Darkrai all come after Arceus - which makes sense for the latter two since Shaymin and Darkrai aren't mandatory encounters, but it still feels so profoundly odd to have anything be after Arceus.
But you know what? I like the messiness. Honestly the fact that I'm expecting there to be any conventions or traditions when it comes to numbering demonstrates why the orderings should be messy. I feel like the Pokemon fandom as a whole often tends to expect things to fall into patterns and then we get surprised when those patterns are broken.
2. I really like the way that, with less than three months to go, we know pretty much nothing about Scarlet and Violet beyond the fact that it's a Pokemon game. I know a lot of people are annoyed that the pre-release cycle isn't following the same sort of pattern previous games did, and if you'd asked me a few months ago I'd have been adamant that I want to know as much as possible, but it's been honestly so refreshing not to have loads of little scraps of information to obsess over like has so often been the case before.
I think we were all expecting a slow but steady trickle of trailers and images, in which we'd see new characters and Pokemon. Instead, we've been told virtually nothing. We still don't know the region name; we've been shown... what? 8 or 9 of the new game's Pokemon (out of what I'm cautiously assuming is going to be around 80 or 90); it seems fairly clear that the games will have a modern/historical divide based on the professors and the mascots. That's about it.
I will still obsessively follow all the coverage of the game once it's released, on here and on other sites like Serebii, but for now it's been nice to just sit, knowing only that the new games are coming but not much else. It's been a refreshing change of pace.