We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
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Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

I’m Luke Summerhayes, and I love Iron Crown.
In my episode on Cobalion, I first touched on the novel The Three Musketeers, set in the seventeeth century but written in the nineteenth. For myself, born 106 years after its first publication, the Three Musketeers felt not like a piece of recent pop culture, but a historical article only fit for reading if the teacher insisted. I only read it for the first time in preparation for the Swords of Justice episodes of this podcast.
The reading with which I opened this episode was by British writer Samuel Butler and is often cited as the first writing to imagine machines supplanting us, their makers. Without the Book of the Machines, as this section of a longer novel is called, we would not have Terminator, the Matrix, Battlestar Galactica and so on, clips from which prefaced my earlier podcasts about paradox Pokémon. The Butlerian Jihad from Frank Herbert’s Dune, the reason there are no computers in that universe, is a sly wink to Samuel Butler. And yet this was written ten years before Alexander Dumas first penned the Three Musketeers.
Iron Crown is a steel and psychic-type future paradox Pokémon which resembles a robotic Cobalion. It’s caught after following a quest for Perrin in the Indigo Disk DLC for Pokémon Violet, mirroring both the paradox beasts in Pokémon Scarlet and a similar quest with Sonia in Pokémon Sword and Shield’s DLC to catch the original Swords of Justice.
While Cobalion’s Pokédex entries mentioned that it battled humans in a righteous crusade to protect Pokémon, Iron Crown sounds more dangerous, and less heroic.
Scarlet
It resembles a mysterious object introduced in a paranormal magazine as a cutting-edge weapon shaped like a Cobalion.

Violet
There was supposedly an incident in which it launched shining blades to cut everything around it to pieces. Little else is known about it.
Iron Crowns really is a cutting edge weapon. Despite seeming in some ways to be the opposite of Cobalion – psychic rather than fighting, special stats rather than physical, slow not fast – its history on the competitive scene mirrors its predecessor, initially overlooked in favor of the more immediately hard-hitting Iron Boulder, its greater versatility eventually lead to it being the more popular monster.
The name Iron Crown could refer to Cobalion’s position as leader of the three musketeers or the Crown of France which they served, or even the deerlike antlers in its head.The Japanese name Tetsunokashira, or Iron head, has a similar kind of double meaning as a physical head or as a leader of a group.
Miraidon is the powerhouse of the future Paradox Pokémon, of course, but perhaps when the machines do rise up, it will be Iron Crown who is leading them.
Original music for Luke Loves Pokémon is by Jonathan Cromie. Artwork is by Katie Groves. Funding is provided by listeners at Patreon.com/PodcastioPodcastius. For just a dollar a month, supporters can listen to episodes a week early and also help cover hosting and fees, making it possible for me to keep making episodes every week.
I love hearing from listeners! Get in touch about upcoming Pokémon on twitter or facebook at LukeLovesPKMN. Drop a comment if you’re watching the video, or a review on apple podcasts or spotify. Coming up are Iron Boulder and Iron Leaves, so please get in touch about those or any other monsters.
Even if you don’t feel like doing any of that, thank you so much just for listening.
I love Iron Crown. And remember, I love you too.