Do you think there are any similarities between the creations of Pokémon like Claydol and Golett, and Pokémon like Porygon? To me the former always seem to have been created by, I dunno, psychic Pokémagic and the latter via science/technology… but then Golett’s Pokédex entry states it was created by “ancient science” and, come to think of it, does magic even exist in the Pokémon world? And what about Castform? Do you think creating a Pokémon is a long-standing tradition in the Pokémon world?

Mmm, but what is technology and what is magic?  If the forces we call ‘magic’ work according to rules that are observable and knowable, then magic can be approached scientifically, and one’s knowledge of how to use it is a form of technology, in exactly the same way as our knowledge of how to extract electrical energy from the wind and tides is “technology.”  If ghosts, spirits, psychic powers and souls are real things in the Pokémon world, and can have tangible effects on the physical universe, then you can observe them, formulate scientific theories about them, and create technology that interacts with them.  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” says Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, or to put it another way, ‘magic’ is what we call technology we don’t understand, and I suspect the writers behind Pokémon would incline to a similar idea if you were to press them.  “Ancient science” here perhaps means that the people who created Golett knew how to construct vessels that could contain a soul after death and allow it to interact more easily with the physical world, and to me that’s a sort of technology – just one that’s wholly beyond the Pokémon world’s modern civilisations.  When they talk about creating Pokémon, they tend to see it as something new, experimental, something they’re just playing with in its earliest stages, but maybe some of those experiments were inspired by ancient stories, and pushed forward by scientists who had exactly this kind of opinion about ‘magic.’