Really love your blog! I was wondering if you could clear something up between the relationship of a pokemons type and there relation to a pokemons physicality or physiology. Like, rock types are weak to fighting cause they are made of rocks and with enough strength, someone could shatter one. But in the case of, lets say, a ground type, it isn’t necessarily made of ground? Like, Hippowdon is just a sandy hippo, so why would it be weak to grass?
Ground is… tricky… I tend to sort of recuse myself from attempting to explain anything to do with the Ground type because I don’t think it actually makes sense and I’m not sure there’s a good reason for it to exist. You could probably explain those particular relationships by positing that they have sort of porous exoskeletal plates which can become waterlogged very easily, and from which Grass Pokémon can also drain water effectively (that being notionally the same reason Grass is strong against Water). Honestly, though, I’m not totally convinced there is a consistent relationship between type and physiology. We know that the same type can encompass Pokémon with radically different biology, and we know that Pokémon within a type do not necessarily share a common ancestor. I kinda lean towards thinking that “type” is just something humans came up with to describe how Pokémon behave in battles and create a heuristic for which of two Pokémon is likely to be favoured in any given match-up, not a real biological phenomenon.
Pokémaniacal 