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I'm currently on my first playthrough of Pokémon Violet and nicknaming every Pokémon I catch. I just caught a Summer Form Deerling and tried to name it "Summer Deer", but the game objected and said it wasn't allowed. (I tried "Sun Deer" instead and it accepted it.)

I can't think for the life of me why "Summer Deer" would be objectionable. Presumably there's some form of foreign-language Scunthorpe problem at play here, but what exactly is the game objecting to?

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  • Try "Some Are Deer"
    – msouth
    Jan 5 at 20:53

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Generation VI onward, the Pokemon games use its own built-in profanity filter when entering in a nickname by the use of regular expressions. While I do not know what kind of processes go on in the profanity filter, I'm assuming many of the pre-determined banned words1 from Generation V are included.

From the linked source, the word merde is in that list (a French swear word) and it's likely rejecting the proposed nickname because of "SumMER DEer"

1 Warning, lots of vulgar swear words
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    Yeah, that's gotta be it. I knew about the profanity filter but didn't think to check it myself before asking.
    – F1Krazy
    Jan 3 at 19:28
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    Good answer, bad feature. I want to be able to name my deer the way I want to! I guess there are many examples of normal names that won't work with this implementation. Banning all swear words of every language for every language causes these misunderstandings
    – Chrᴉz remembers Monica
    Jan 4 at 9:08
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    @ChrᴉzremembersMonica This is a well-known issue with automated censorship known as the Scunthorpe Problem. Unfortunately stakeholders keep insisting on automated censorship as a cost-effective token-effort to create safe environments for children.
    – Philipp
    Jan 4 at 13:45
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    @Philipp And Pokémon is rather notorious for this type of thing at this point. For a while back in 2011 when they originally implemented this type of filtering for online trading, it was actually impossible to trade certain Pokémon without giving them a nickname because they forgot to whitelist their own character names...
    – Austin Hemmelgarn
    Jan 4 at 14:15
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    @Philipp Yep; it's a clbuttic problem in game/social software development.
    – Tim Sparkles
    Jan 6 at 20:03

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