Pokemon Go player baffled after Unown nickname thwarted by “inappropriate text”

An Unown collector innocently labeling their various forms of the Gen 2 creature in Pokemon Go has had to rethink their nicknaming strategy.

Lamenting the unforeseen roadblock that would destroy any chance of uniformity for their army of living letters, the user took to Reddit to complain.

“Literally just trying to rename the letter ‘U’ Unown but they won’t let me,” the thread’s author vented, explaining they were just trying to put the letter in parenthesis as they had for others.

They continued, “In what way is this inappropriate?” and added, “Niantic needs to get its head out of the gutter.”

Several users commented on the oddity and confirmed that “Unown U works without the parenthesis for whatever reason.” Others suggested why the author’s naming convention may have been blocked.

“It’s inappropriate because it looks like a certain body part of the male variety head-on,” one player proposed. Whether this is the case isn’t clear, but numerous replies quickly provided screenshots of Unown U not being flagged as inappropriate using different forms of punctuation.

Elsewhere, users bemoaned the oversensitive nature of Pokemon Go’s profanity filter. “The in-game censor sucks so much,” came one reply, adding they were unable to use a desired nickname for their Oricorio because of its different meanings between languages.

Conversely, others suggested that the occurrence amounted to nothing more than “An old bug” and that “Some names give this error message for no real reason.”

Whatever the case, if you’re in the process of categorizing your own Unown, it might be best to stay away from the dreaded parenthesis for the foreseeable future.

Alternatively, if you’re yet to catch any of the enigmatic alphabet-shaped critters, check out our guide on how to go about finding them.