On your entry about Goodra you got a comment from someone who (rather crudely) claimed that male Goodra were worthless. I first looked at this comment and thought it was rather stupid… but it isn’t. A female doesn’t need a male of the same species to reproduce. In Goodra’s case any Dragon egg group Pokemon will work. Surely this puts the species with a larger percentage of females at a massive advantage? And for that matter how do you think male species like Tauros can exist at all?
Just so that no one is in any danger of taking it seriously, I will quote here the comment that we are currently referring to:
“Goodra is a girl. She cannot be male.It’s nice to see you agree. There’s a place called 4chan who is in denial about it. They constantly say that Goodra can be male, but it’s obvious she can’t. As for me, I’ll keep reminding them that she is indeed of the female gender only. I hate male Goodra to the point where I spam on 4chan about how horrible it is. I hate it with a fiery passion that nobody could ever match. As for the female, It’s just that in reverse. I love her with an angelic passion that nobody could ever match. Nobody likes male ones. They’re treated like pigs because that’s really what they are. Whatever you do, never refer to Goodra with anything other than female pronouns. OP, you focused very heavily on using femnouns and I salute you for it.”
…quite.
Anyway. Tauros is sort of a bad example because you can plausibly argue that Miltank are female Tauros. Actually, most male-only Pokémon do have fairly obvious female-only counterparts – the only ones who don’t are the Hitmontriplets (who are always extremely rare), Throh and Sawk, and Braviary (unless you buy Mandibuzz being female Braviary, which personally I don’t but I suppose you could make the argument). There are many more female-only Pokémon who lack male-only counterparts: Kangaskhan, Blissey, Jynx, Lilligant, Mandibuzz, and Florges (and Vespiquen, I suppose, but Vespiquen’s gender ratio is a very particular sort of odd). I think that suggests that on some level Game Freak are aware that male-only Pokémon are somewhat more of a problem than female-only ones. Now, in answer to your first question, whether or not having more options for breeding puts majority-female species at an advantage… well, hypothetically yes, but the problems then become 1) that we know very little about the social structures of most wild Pokémon; they don’t necessarily pair up in a one-to-one fashion in the wild (in fact it seems very likely that we would get harem-type scenarios in species with unbalanced gender ratios), and 2) that it’s unclear how often interspecies breeding happens without human intervention. One imagines that it must happen as a matter of course for the female-only species, but then that leaves the male-only species still in need of an explanation – not to mention the poor genderless species who apparently have to seek out Ditto for help when they want to reproduce. The problem here is that when any sort of remotely official source talks about Pokémon breeding they tend to take the line that no one actually knows quite how it works; you even get bizarre non sequiturs like the one from X and Y about Pokémon eggs not really being eggs at all. At this point you should probably take a look at this article I wrote about Pokémon gender one time, which I must warn you not to take very seriously because it is easily one of the most bat$#!t things I have ever written. Whether or not anything in there seems even remotely plausible to you, though, what I’d like you to take away from it is that we should not assume Pokémon breeding works the same way in the wild as it does in the circumstances under which we observe it. Considering how difficult it is to get many species of real animals to breed normally in captivity, it would be foolish of us to expect it to. Or at least that’s what I think.
Pokémaniacal 