Well, it nicely explains how Cubone and Marowak are able to exist as a species. If all Cubone wear their mothers’ skulls, then we’re looking at a maximum of one child per coupling, which is not sustainable; even if we relax that limitation to allow them to wear their fathers’ skulls, it’s difficult to see how they can maintain their population. They must come from somewhere, and the orphan Kangaskhan argument makes as much sense as anything. It makes a great deal of sense that, for a species which is all about motherhood, losing one’s mother would be an extremely traumatic event, so I kind of like the idea that they have this specific cultural response to it: orphans become outcasts and devote themselves to battle and self-reliance, in contrast to the herd- and family-focused lifestyle of Kangaskhan.
You still need to reconcile their gender ratios, of course – all Kangaskhan are female, while 50% of all Cubone are male. I think it might be stretching it just a bit to suggest that all Kangaskhan who have male children die. Of course, there are species in the real world capable of changing sex in response to unusual stress, so it’s conceivable that about 50% of infant female Kangaskhan react in a similar way to becoming orphans (this may be easier to accept if you buy into my insanity about what Pokémon gender actually means).
Marowak, I think, are the ones who really get it. They understand grief and loss on a level that goes far beyond what most humans ever experience, and they kinda buy into it, in a way; they think that you can only ever become truly strong by overcoming the pain of loss, and that the most important thing to fight for is the memory of your ancestors. As a result, although they can and do have children of their own, they also sometimes adopt orphaned Kangaskhan and raise them to share the same beliefs. This, of course, makes the Lavender Town sequence with the orphaned Cubone and the mother Marowak that much worse, because it’s possible that the Marowak was a ‘mother’ by virtue of adopting a bunch of Cubone whose birth mothers had died too.
Pokémaniacal 