Category: Pokémon Biology Questions

Anonymous asks:

I know Pokémon’s weaknesses, resistances, and immunities don’t always make sense, but what do you think is the deal with 1) Normal being immune to Ghost but Fighting isn’t, and 2) Steel being immune to Poison and Rock and/or Ground aren’t?

I think the Normal immunity to Ghost attacks comes from a sort of obliviousness to the paranormal.  Ghosts and spirits have no hold over you if you don’t believe they can harm you, and Normal Pokémon are just too normal, too mundane, too out of touch with the supernatural, to know that they should even be scared.  Steel and Poison… well, Rock and Ground do resist Poison attacks, despite not actually being immune to Poison attacks or the poison status, so I think we probably shouldn’t read too much into it.  However, I suppose I would say that what I think they’re implying here is that Steel-types are more divorced from normal Pokémon biology than Rock-types are; Rock Pokémon have layers of anatomy that are in some sense “normal” underneath their silica-based shells, but the bodies of Steel Pokémon are radically different through-and-through at the level of their biochemistry, which makes them invulnerable to ordinary poisons.

vikingboybilly asks:

If diamond is harder than steel, shouldn’t the rock and steel weakness/resistance to each other be reversed?

I see no compelling reason for it, unless we believe a) that Rock Pokémon are made of diamonds or something equally hard, b) that Steel Pokémon are made of ordinary carbon steel and not some kind of bizarre bio-alloy, and c) that Mohs’ hardness is a good indicator of how a Pokémon’s body holds up under the diverse stresses of battle.  On the other hand, I see no compelling reason for the way that relationship works currently either, and Steel-types have too many damn resistances anyway, so sure, go nuts.

Anonymous asks:

How do you think “fainting” came about in the Pokemon universe and what is its purpose? I might be stretching things, but it seems to be some sort of specific process that’s different from being knocked unconscious, due to the way ALL Pokemon, even ones that are totally different – dragons, starfish, floating magnets – faint in the same way, and faint in the same way in response to a wide variety of totally different attacks.

Do they?

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Anonymous asks:

It’s been implied in certain Pokedex entries that only a select few Pokemon are actually capable of understanding human speech. If this is true, how is it that all Pokemon are able to understand the commands for each their attacks right after being captured, with no training whatsoever?

Difficult to explain, but I suspect they understand the intent behind words, as expressed through a combination of tone and body language, to a degree that is unusual for humans.  They may not know, right off the bat, exactly what words mean, but they can tell instinctively whether the tone of a command is aggressive, or cautious, or desperate, and they can tell the difference between being told to use a regular technique and being told to do the most powerful, dramatic attack in their arsenal.  The first couple of battles will often be rocky; that’s part of what characters in the anime mean when they talk about having to learn to work in unison with your Pokémon, and it’s part of why empathy is so often stressed as a vital quality for a Pokémon trainer.  You don’t see this in the games, of course, but, well, would you like to?  It would just be a pain.

Anonymous asks:

Do you think there’s any relationship between Pokémon like the Magnemite line, the Beldum line, and the Klink line? If so, what might that be?

The ‘mechanical’ Pokémon, that is?  Honestly I think it’s impossible to say, although Magearna might shed some light on all of that, once we learn more about her.  Voltorb are supposed to have appeared suddenly around the time of the invention of mass-produced Pokéballs, and Professor Juniper discovers that Klink appeared in Chargestone Cave about a hundred years ago, so I wouldn’t rule out their creation having something to do with human influence.  I doubt they were deliberately made by humans, because they mostly seem to be thought of as mysterious Pokémon and no one seems to know exactly where they came from, but they might be the result of human activity in much the same way as Grimer (i.e. the waste products of human technology, stimulated by “X-rays from the moon”).

Anonymous asks:

Reaction to Magiana?

Certainly very curious… presumably she’s the vanguard of generation VII, and of course that’s exciting, but the really interesting part is that this is a legendary Pokémon who was explicitly built by humans – and not thousands of years ago by mysterious forgotten magic like Golurk, nor genetically engineered from an existing template like Mewtwo, but in the 16th century with mechanics and clockwork, with the same kind of principles that modern engineering still functions on.  I think there’s a lot Magearna might tell us about the history of Pokémon training, and how it changed at the dawn of the modern world.  What really catches my eye is that she seems to have Pokéball emblems built into her design, and given that Pokéballs as we know them are supposed to be quite recent inventions, that makes me wonder what the connection is.  Did the symbol mean something different five hundred years ago, or was the design of the first Pokéballs based on Magearna’s body?

Anonymous asks:

What do you make of the weight of various Pokemon. For example, why does something like Beautifly weigh as much as a young child, while giants such as Primal Groudon weigh only about a ton. (Primal Groudon seems especially weird in that its almost fifty percent larger than its normal form, but only weighs about one hundred pounds more. Primal Kyogre is even more bizarre.). This seems to be a trend among Pokemon, with small species being super dense, while big ones are ultra light, like Wailord.

This has always bothered me, but upon looking into it, I think many of them actually hold up quite well.  In some cases part of the difficulty is that it’s not always clear what a Pokémon’s listed “height” actually means – like, if Beautifly’s body is one metre long from head to toe (does… does Beautifly have toes…? Bah; whatever) then I could easily see her weighing 28kg; if 1m is, say, from the tips of her antennae to the ‘tails’ of her wings, or maybe even a 1m wingspan, then it becomes a lot harder to swallow.  In general I’m mostly fine with the weights of small Pokémon.  

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Anonymous asks:

How does Venonat evolve directly into Venomoth? I mean, why isn’t there some “cocoon” variant of pokémon in the middle?

I think this is the wrong question.  Lots of Pokémon go through metamorphoses just as dramatic or more so (Magikarp being perhaps the most extreme example) and don’t need the kind of intermediate form that many real-world insects require.  Why should we be surprised that Venonat works exactly like the vast majority of other Pokémon?  Surely it’s Caterpie, Weedle, Wurmple and Scatterbug that demand an explanation – why do they need transitional forms that most other Pokémon can do without?  I think it probably has to do with how quickly they evolve; they just don’t have the time to prepare for evolution to their final forms gradually the way most Pokémon do, and have to devote a whole extra form to focus on building reserves of energy.  Kricketot is sort of the exception that proves the rule – the only other Pokémon who reaches his final form at such a low level, and he does it without a dedicated cocoon phase, but the only attacking move he starts with is Bide, which is all about storing energy.