So we got our latest “Pokémon made up of separate entities” (Falinks) and I was thinking… how do these exist as a single Pokémon? What happens if you… separate them entirely? What if you divide an Exeggcute into two sets of egg-seeds and keep them apart? Could they still evolve? Can one or two members of a Falinks survive on their own? What would we call them? I never could wrap my head around the idea of multiple creatures making up a single Pokémon, especially when they don’t evolve from a single unit (like Dugtrio or Magneton)…
There’s gotta be an anime episode that covers this.
…
…huh. I don’t think there is? Or at least I can’t find one.
Well, we know Exeggcute at least must be able to survive on their own, because we’re told that a new one forms from an Exeggutor dropping an extra head… but six is clearly the optimal number for them to be healthy. I suppose in nature Exeggutor live in groups, so that there are always plenty of spare Exeggcute lying around to form clusters of six. When they’re with trainers… well, when they’re with trainers they lay eggs that hatch into six more eggs, so that doesn’t really help us much (maybe this is one of the examples we should think of when looking at that one random X and Y NPC who claims that Pokémon eggs “aren’t really eggs” but “more like a Pokémon cradle” – in nature they actually don’t lay eggs but have other, weirder forms of reproduction). Honestly I think an Exeggcute that loses one of its heads and can’t get it back may just be permanently impaired, and if it gets down to less than three it could well be impossible for it to evolve. On that point, though, what I want to know is, if Exeggcute form clusters of six and Exeggutor normally have three heads, what happens to the other three? Maybe the three heads don’t each correspond to one of the six Exeggcute heads at all, and their consciousnesses all sort of blend together during evolution (after all, they’re Psychic-types and make decisions collectively via telepathy anyway). Now, Falinks… the whole point of Falinks is that it’s supposed to reference ancient Greek and Roman infantry tactics, fighting styles where teamwork and cohesion are the units’ main strength (and we can debate ad nauseam exactly how hoplites and legionaries actually fought and whether Falinks is a good representation of either, but… dear gods, please not now), so I kinda think it would be thematically appropriate if a lone Falinks without its comrades just couldn’t survive – couldn’t fight predators, couldn’t find food, just generally couldn’t function. Maybe different numbers are viable, maybe you can have a five-member Falinks or a seven-member one, but they haven’t evolved to live independently. As a trainer you might be able to separate them and support them individually, but I suspect it would be psychologically damaging and frankly kind of abusive.
Pokémaniacal 
There was a Pikachu short before the second movie where Exeggcute lost one of its eggs. The rest of them have adopted Togepi as a substitute, if I remember correctly. They found the missing memeber in teh end. We also know, from Pokédex entries, that Exeggutor sometimes loose their heads and these lost heads gather together to form more Exeggcutes. I presume that the three heads that don’t make it into Exeggutor upon evolutions just hop away in search for more heads.
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Ah! That’s it! I knew it must have come up somewhere! But yeah, that seems more or less what you’d expect, given what the Pokédex says: losing one of the heads is a crisis that the Pokémon is driven to resolve as soon as possible, using a poor substitute if nothing else is available. From memory, I think that Exeggcute also evolves at the end of the short, which maybe suggests that you *do* in fact need all six of them to create an Exeggutor.
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What about fused Pokemon. Does both Pokemon merge their consciousness? Does one take over while the other gets supressed? I know lunala loses its will when Necrozma takes over, but what about kyurem and reshiram/zekrom? I know N said he can hear the voice of ….eh maybe this is a conversation for another time.
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I feel like Black and White 2 imply that Reshiram/Zekrom is “in there somewhere” but Kyurem is basically the one in control, as with Necrozma.
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I always just assumed Exeggutor grew another head in place whenever one fell off to become part of an Exeggcute
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I mean, that would make sense, but the way the Pokédex puts it, Exeggutor heads fall off when they *already* have extra ones.
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This also makes me wonder…are the consciousness of the Exeggcute line technically immortal? This is assuming that an evolved Exeggcute’s consciousness is still present in the evolved Exeggcutor then the heads of that Exeggcutor also retain that consciousness. Are Exeggcute and Exeggcutor a hive mind, or just a close knit of telepathic individuals? This Pokemon brings up so many interesting and existentially troubling questions.
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…huh
well, it…
hmm
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Also considering that six exeggutor heads cluster together into a single exeggcute, which in turn eventually evolve into a single exeggcutor, and each head could potentially come from a different exeggcutor, exeggcutor heads could technically count as a type of gamete, each probably even carries a sixth of the genetic information they had from their original exeggcutor.
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And I just realized I made that part of a movie short where an Exeggcute accepted Togepi as one of their heads a bit more disturbing…
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