Oranges of Speciousness

For a while now I've had a fondness for all-female teams. It started with my Greek Goddess-themed run of Black, and I've kept it up since then. Back in Gen III I learned the value of having a female starter; Ditto was unavailable for a while, and so the only way to breed more of your starter Pokemon was if you lucked out and got a female.

I get the impression the 1 in 8 gender ratio was introduced to create scarcity, because in almost every case, you find it on a one-off Pokemon, like starters, fossils and gifts: you only get one of them and breeding more is deliberately difficult. The only Pokemon with the ratio which don't fall into these categories are Combee (which has the ratio for the obvious reason of making Vespiquen hard to get) and Relicanth (which I've long suspected was going to be a fossil Pokemon at some stage in development).

This can create some oddities. Leaving single-gender Pokemon aside, feminine Pokemon have traditionally had gender ratios skewed towards more females than males: Pokemon like Lopunny, Corsola, Gothitelle and Jigglypuff. Similarly, masculine-looking Pokemon like Machamp, Hariyama and Conkeldurr are skewed towards males. So under normal circumstances, you'd expect the rather feminine Chikorita line to be mosly female, but the traditional starter gender ratio overrides that. Another example is Eevee with the exception of maybe Jolteon and Umbreon, all members of that family look feminine. And yet a female Eevee is a rare sight.

Usually if you want a female Eevee, you can get it the same way you get a female starter: reset, reset, reset. B2W2 instead have them available in the wild, at a very low percentage chance of appearance. And so I spent most of last night running into far too many Rattata and Cottonee while encountering the occasional Eevee, all of them male. And then I kicked myself because I remembered there was an easier way, and it was something that had bitten me in the arse back in my recent Platinum run.

So there I was, looking for Feebas, which as you're probably aware is a bloody nightmasre to find. Eventually, I found one of the Feebas tiles, and for some reason... every Feebas was male, and I wanted a female. This went on and on, to the point where I thought it was some sort of glitch.

Then... yeah. I realized that I had a female Lopunny with Cute Charm at the front of my party.

So, back to last night, I realized I could use this same method to get my female Eevee. All I needed was a male Pokemon with Cute Charm, and sure enough, Minccino was available not too far away.

Except, guess what? Minccino are mostly female. And I could not find a male. And so I ended up catching a female Cute Charm Minccino, using that to a attract a male Cute Charm Minccino, and finally dragging that one back through the Castelia sewers to that one above-ground bit, where we were finally able to entice out a female Eevee. She has a Sassy nature, and I'm thinking I might go with an Espeon. Haven't used one of those in a while.

Right now, the permanent members of my team are:
Xenian the Servine, my starter.
Irondar the Lucario, who I found at the ranch and who evolved really, really quickly. Not since Crobat have I had such a powerhouse on an early-game team.
Jenny the Buneary, who I caught in the same spot as my Eevee, and who's probably going to take an age to evolve because of their naturally low Happiness.
Prose the Eevee, who'd better damn well be worth this hassle.

To complete the team, I'm almost certainly going to get a Sandslash, which I've never used in-game before. For the final slot, I could really use a Water-type, and so I might go with Corsola, which I had a lot of fun using back in SoulSilver.