So… ghost types. It’s pretty well implied that ghost pokémon are spirits of the deceased, but you can breed them… and hatch ghost pokémon from eggs. Does something have to die somewhere for the egg to be laid? Or do they just… procreate new spirits, who may eventually incarnate a living being? (you can breed yamask, btw) Shedinja is handled well; it’s a shed skin with sentience. Froslass, though… fact: Gengar is white on the original red/blue box art.
…is it? I mean, very clearly they have an affinity for death, the dead, and places of spiritual power, but if anything I’d say that they are implied to be very much not what everyone thinks they are.
Just looking through the Pokédex for Ghost-types who are actually said to be the spirits of the dead, I count Yamask, Spiritomb, Phantump, Honedge, and arguably Froslass and Banette. Most of the others are supposed to have a bunch of abilities that allow them to interact with the spirits of the dead in a variety of ways, but honestly I don’t think we have any reason to believe that they are literal ghosts at all – just creatures that exist between the worlds of the living and the dead. Froslass, if anything, is the one that proves it, since she demonstrably evolves from something that is not a ghost, which suggests that the legend about Froslass being the spirits of women who died in icy mountains is exactly that – a legend. A Pokémon like Yamask or Spiritomb breeding – assuming we do accept their grim origin stories – to me suggests a form of adaptation to their new existence, either creating more like themselves from nothing, or finding other lost souls and guiding them into vessels.
Pokémaniacal 