Anonymous asks:

What do you think shininess to do with Pokémon evolution, if anything? I remember in the Johto games, the shiny Gyarados was red because it was force-evolved from the naturally-red Magikarp, right? And is it a coincidence that Mega Charizard X has similar coloration to a shiny Charizard?

I’m sceptical. Like, what happens at Lake of Rage, supposedly, is that they’re forcing a whole bunch of Magikarp to evolve. The red Gyarados that you fight isn’t the only Gyarados there, it just happens to have caught everyone’s attention because… well, it’s red. Team Rocket’s original plan in Mahogany Town (aside from perfecting their radio technology for their later plot in Goldenrod City) was to turn a tidy profit converting useless Magikarp into valuable Gyarados – not just one, but several. Honestly they probably would have been better off without the extra attention drawn by the red one, but once people did start getting curious, they opportunistically started making a bit of extra money on top of that by setting up a toll booth near the lake. Or at least, that was my reading of it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mega Charizard X and shiny Charizard are both black, but I don’t think that’s the direction of the causal relationship; I think they’re both black because of a third, unrelated factor – namely, black Charizard are super badass (also, none of the other mega evolutions have this relationship, and the only one who does, Charizard, also has another mega form that doesn’t).

Anonymous asks:

Why are Alolan Marowack, Sensu Oricorio,and Decidueye ghost types? They’re not dead!

Well, I don’t think being a Ghost-type necessarily means you are a literal ghost. Maybe half of them, tops, are said to be the spirits of the dead in legend and folklore (my rule here is “read the Pokédex because it’s really important, but for the love of Arceus, don’t trust it”), but most of the others have their type and abilities on the grounds of an affinity for death and the dead, or in some cases power over them. Pokémon like Dusknoir and Pumpkaboo, for instance, are known for leading spirits and people between the worlds of the living and the dead, while Chandelure and Jellicent are spiritual predators; I don’t think anyone ever claimed that any of them are the ghosts of dead people or Pokémon, but they can all interact with ghosts. Similarly, Decidueye is a sort of shaman with the ability to interact with souls as though they were physical things, and Alolan Marowak can summon the aid of spiritual powers through their ritual dances.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

If you watch Treesicle’s What Are Pokemon – The Story You Never Knew the archaeologist and pokémon nerd inside of you will die a little. (spoilers: did you know mammals evovled from trilobites? Did you know the earth was once populated by typeless Mews who eventually became all the pokémon we have now? Just a reminder, Mew is the ‘New Species’ pokémon)

…it’s 14 minutes long, do I have to watch it?

Ugh, whatever…

Continue reading →

chels202 asks:

What are your thoughts on the topic of man-made Pokémon?

What about them, exactly?

I think they’re an interesting thing to have. There’s an obvious moral dimension to the creation of new living things, or to repurposing created life thousands of years later as we do with ancient Pokémon that may be artificial like Sigilyph and Golett – let alone whatever Spiritomb is. Ecologically they’re curious since you wouldn’t expect an artificial life form to fit neatly into any preexisting ecosystem, although for some of them, like Grimer (if we can consider Grimer “man-made”; it is a byproduct of human civilisation, at any rate) there is a ready-made niche for them to fill as a result of the circumstances of their creation. The technological level that must go into creating Pokémon – even by accident, as might have happened in Voltorb’s case – is interesting to think about, particularly in terms of whether the ancient ones were created by “technology” as we understand it or by some mystical practice. And equally curious are the Pokémon who aren’t explicitly artificial but look like they should be, like Klink and Magneton – what’s their relationship with human science and engineering? There’s a lot of different directions you could potentially go with them.

Anonymous:

How do you think Pokemon breed?

…hoooooo boy.

So I wrote this thing about it once upon a time, and I think the big takeaway from it should be not so much anything I actually said, but that we know so little, and what we do know makes such little sense, that you can pretty much say just about anything and have it be on some level justifiable. Game Freak has always been quite insistent in telling us that there’s an awful lot about Pokémon reproduction that no-one knows at all. Back in the original Gold and Silver, a Pokémon egg was supposedly a major discovery because before then, no-one actually knew for sure that Pokémon hatched from eggs, which sort of makes you wonder how Pokémon ranchers and the like ever managed to do their jobs. Then in X and Y, sensing that we foolishly thought we knew what we were talking about, Game Freak decided to remind us that we don’t know a damn thing by telling us that Pokémon eggs aren’t really eggs. At this point you could tell me that Pokémon come from spontaneous generation and I wouldn’t quite be willing to rule it out (I mean, I’m also on the record as suggesting – only half-jokingly – that Pokémon originally evolved from rocks, so it’s not like I’ve got a whole lot of credibility to protect here).

The Philosophical Sheep asks:

“Spiritual energy” huh? Is it possible that that’s what all pokemon are made of, at least primarily? Pokemon, as we’ve established, seem to be awfully high energy beings, and their physical form can be easily altered by way of energy (such as with pokeballs or mega stones).

Gonna be honest, I mostly intended that phrase to mean “[insert handwavey bull$#!t here]”. All I’m really trying to say is that I think Primal Kyogre’s appearance is meant to suggest that it, specifically, is somehow less physically substantial than most other Pokémon, in a way which is probably magic and which we are almost certainly not meant to understand or think very hard about.

Phi8 asks:

Why do you think Kyogre was flying in the last episode of Generations? Isn’t it supposed to be swimming, since it’s a whale/fish? Because if it’s flying it actually shares a lot of similarities with Lugia, who also flies and also summons storms and also has weird fins/wings with fingers on it.

Well, I don’t think it needs to fly to be similar to Lugia; they’re both colossal aquatic guardians of the deep ocean, even if Lugia isn’t a literal Water-type. But as to the question… well, since Kyogre’s primal form is transparent and doesn’t seem to have much in the way of insides, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it turned out to be somehow made of “spiritual energy” or something, and just isn’t subject to gravity to the same degree as its normal form (note that the primal form is more than twice as long, and presumably twice as wide and twice as tall, so we should probably expect it to be more than eight times heavier, but in fact its weight increases by less than 25%). Besides, do you want to be the one to tell Primal Kyogre that it can’t fly?

Anonymous asks:

What are your thoughts on Seadra’s extremely bizarre Pokedex entry that mentions the “presence of a gene not found in Horsea”? Other ridiculous Pokedex entries could be explained away as myths or mere exaggerations, but this one is implied to be based on actual scientific research. What do you think this could mean for Pokemon biology, and why do you think they chose Seadra out of all Pokemon to assign this piece of information to?

…huh. Y’know, I never noticed that before. That’s… odd. I think the reason the writers say this about Seadra in particular is because they want to hint at the gradual awakening of Horsea’s Dragon-type abilities as it evolves (note that this line first shows up in the second generation, when Kingdra was introduced). That doesn’t mean it makes sense, of course, but I think that’s what they’re trying to get at. They also note that this discovery quickly became “a hot topic” so they’re clearly aware that what they’re describing is an odd thing. Animals… shouldn’t gain extra genes partway through their life cycle. Bacteria can do it; a lot of bacteria have specialised enzymes that allow them to splice bits of DNA from other bacteria into their own, but animals can’t really do that because they have billions or trillions of copies of their DNA spread out over their cells. If an animal undergoes metamorphosis, all the genes that do everything the adult form needs should be there from birth; they just require particular stimuli to switch them on. Now that could be what this really means – that scientists identified a gene that wasn’t being expressed in Horsea but was in Seadra – but that doesn’t seem like it would be worthy of comment. So is it possible that something actually adds a whole bunch of extra base pairs to one of Horsea’s chromosomes when it evolves…? Hell if I know. If I had to speculate, I’d guess that there’s some symbiotic bacterium-like organism, possibly related to Pokérus (call it a midichlorian if you like), that goes through the body subtly altering the DNA of cells it encounters, and when the number of altered cells reaches a certain tipping point, the process dramatically accelerates and evolution happens. This is a total guess, based on real-world phenomena I happen to be vaguely familiar with, but if I were a Pokémon Professor I’d start with a hypothesis along those lines.

Anonymous asks:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how hot is Arcanine?

Well, almost all Fire Pokémon are explicitly described by the Pokédex as having a very high body temperature or extremely hot fire attacks. Even if it doesn’t give us an exact temperature (and we shouldn’t necessarily believe these anyway; the 10000 ºC quoted for Magcargo’s resting body temperature is hot enough to vaporise steel), it likes to wax lyrical about the intensity of the fire produced by many Pokémon, telling us in Emboar’s case, for instance, that “a flaring beard of fire is proof that it is fired up,” and “it can throw a fire punch by setting its fists on fire with its fiery chin,” and “fiery fires fire flaring fire fiery flares fire” (okay I made that last one up but you get the idea).

Growlithe and Arcanine are just about the only Fire Pokémon whose Pokédex entries contain no reference to their fire abilities at all, focusing instead on their loyalty, speed, and regal appearance. Also, while Arcanine’s special attack is high, it’s not that high; it’s actually about average for a fully evolved Fire Pokémon, and two of Arcanine’s three possible abilities (Flash Fire, Intimidate and Justified) are not Fire-related. So I think it’s likely that Arcanine is actually on the low side by the standards of Fire Pokémon – maybe a 3 or 4, with Growlithe likely being 1. Of course, if you were to compare them to all Pokémon (of which Fire-types comprise only 8% of the known species) you’d probably still be looking at a 9.

thephilosophicalsheep asks:

About the evolutionary stone thing, wouldn’t it make sense that pokemon were once able to naturally evolve into their “stone evolutions” simply because the world was brimming with primal energy?

Not quite sure which “evolutionary stone thing” we’re talking about, but it makes sense given some of the things that I like to believe, namely:

1) In the “Primal Age” described by Zinnia in Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, the boundless life energy that allowed Groudon and Kyogre to achieve their Primal forms may have had similar effects for other Pokémon, and this may be where Mega Evolution and perhaps the giant Pokémon in The Ancient Puzzle of Pokémopolis come from.

2) Evolved forms that require evolutionary stones are vestigial, having disappeared from the natural world because they are no longer suited to changing environmental conditions – there could be a whole lot of species-specific explanations for this, or you could just attribute all of them to the waning life energy of the world after the end of the Primal Age.

It also fits rather nicely with the fact that, so far anyway, there are no Mega evolutions of Pokémon that have evolved using stones (except Gallade, but he needed one for symmetry). This could still change in the future; I don’t think we have good reason to believe it’s a Rule, but as long as it stays true, I think we’re allowed to suspect that the two phenomena may be similar in other ways too.

The thing is, I don’t really have proof for either 1) or 2); 1) is just part of a lot of mad speculation I came up with while playing Alpha Sapphire for the first time as a result of being convinced that all our information was coming from incomplete and biased sources, while 2) is a consequence of trying to view Pokémon evolution in the light of how evolution works in the real world, which is dangerous territory at the best of times. So I would like it if things worked that way, but I’m nervous about coming out and saying “yes, this is how it works.” If that makes sense.