Category: Pokémon Worldbuilding Questions

Godzillakiryu91 asks:

I don’t know if anyone’s asked you this, but how do you think the Dragon Type works, and why does it have the weaknesses it does?

Ehhhhhh… well, the thing is, I used to go by the description given by one of the trainers in the Blackthorn City Gym way back in Gold and Silver (‘cause, y’know, you’d expect Dragon Pokémon trainers to have some idea how Dragon-types work), and what they said was that Dragon Pokémon are “Pokémon that overflow with life energy,” or something like that.  Dratini’s assorted Pokédex entries have some similar lines.  So if you’re okay with some abstract “life force” being a real thing in the Pokémon world (which seems more or less fine), then we could understand Dragon-types as Pokémon who have access to a sort of internal “wellspring” of that power, granting them perks like long life and rapid healing.  This sort of fits generally with the holy status of dragons in East Asian mythology, the large number of legendary Dragon Pokémon with load-bearing positions in the Pokémon world’s cosmology, and whatever the hell the Dragon Force in the Victini and Reshiram/Zekrom movie is supposed to be.  Dragon-types’ attacks are strong against each other because Dragon attacks are among the only things that can directly attack that energy source and overwhelm it.  Steel-types resist Dragon attacks because, being partly mechanical, they are less reliant on life force than most other living things.  Ice attacks… honestly I’m unclear on this, but in the real world a lot of processes that are essential to life are slowed down by cold, so maybe in the Pokémon world life force itself can be slowed and congested by extreme cold?

The reason this suddenly becomes more complicated is that, as of X and Y, we now have Fairy-types, and Xerneas gives us fairly concrete reason to believe that it’s Fairy Pokémon who are most closely associated with life force, not Dragon Pokémon.  And you can maybe make some vague hand-wavey suggestions that get around that, like saying that Fairy Pokémon can manipulate and master life force while Dragon Pokémon can only tap into it by instinct, so that Fairy-types can block Dragon attacks effortlessly while also damaging the Dragons’ connection to the source of their power.  When I start to do that, though, I become worried that I’m just defending my own existing ideas rather than looking for the best possible explanation, and it also seems like Game Freak’s own ideas about what the Dragon type is have evolved since Gold and Silver – I mean, it’s hard to imagine Druddigon as holy, or having a special connection to some abstract life force.  So I don’t quite know.

batabid asks:

Could you talk a bit about Evolutionary Stones, particularly the more mysterious ones like the Dawn Stone (maybe relating it to your Pokémon Gender/Breeding theory?) and why the Nidos evolve with the Moon Stone

You know, I think I’ve been asked this before, ages ago; hold on a bit…

Yes, here it is; the second half of this question.

…wait, hang on.

That was YOU!  YOU’VE asked me this before!

Ah, whatever; it was nearly four years ago, I’m sure I have different and even more wildly speculative things to say about it now.

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Anonymous asks:

Homosexuality in the Pokemon series? maybe realationship between human characters or the life style of some species, how feasible is it?

I’m not totally sure what you’re getting at here – by “feasible” do you mean “would Game Freak get away with it?”  Because I imagine in Japan they would but in America it might be a bit of a tough sell, which is probably why we don’t see it in the anime (not that romantic relationships are a major theme of the Pokémon anime anyway).  As for the Pokémon themselves… well, pretty much the one thing we know is that you won’t get an egg from two Pokémon of the same gender, and that Attract never works on Pokémon of the same gender.  Since the only real constant in how the games talk about Pokémon breeding is that no-one actually seems to know much about how it works (not to mention the fact that some Pokémon species appear to be single-sex), that could mean just about anything.

Homosexuality is well-documented in many animal species in the real world, most famously giraffes (who, on average, actually seem to have more gay sex than straight sex), bonobos, penguins, and dolphins (who have been known to engage in – I swear I am not making this up – blowhole sex).  I think it’s reasonable to assume that the Pokémon world works like the real one unless stated otherwise, so homosexuality is probably just as common; it just gets totally lost in the obscuring fog that surrounds everything even remotely connected to Pokémon reproduction.

Phi8 asks:

If you had the chance, would you rearrange the National Dex? And how? I’m also talking the possibility of merging spiecies like the Nidorans or Illumise/Volbeat, that kind of stuff.

Well… yes and no?  By which I mean the National Pokédex doesn’t remotely resemble how I would structure the Pokédex if I were starting from scratch (I think I would arrange Pokémon by habitat, similarly to what you can do with the Fire Red and Leaf Green Pokédex, or perhaps by egg group), but seeing as we have the damn thing as a known and established entity, I don’t think that getting rid of it or changing it would serve any particular purpose.

randomaccessmain asks:

In the Japanese version of Pokemon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, there’s a story that references that at one point in history, humans and Pokemon used to intermarry. And, well, we know what usually happens after marriage. Though given the fable-like nature of the Canalave stories, this probably doesn’t mean anything in terms of the game’s canon history, but it is something to think about.

It certainly is something to think about.  I think it would be extremely generous to regard these things as being remotely historical without some sort of corroboration (legends about, say, Dialga and Palkia we are compelled to give more credence because of our firsthand exposure to the power of those Pokémon; there’s nothing comparable for this story).  We are, after all, talking about what an ancient civilisation believed had happened in their ancient past, so that’s two levels of “ancient past” removed there.  Myths of humans marrying animals exist in the real world too and we don’t believe that that means it ever happened.  Practically every civilisation has myths of a primordial age when the “rules” were different in some way.  I think the existence of those myths says something about the people who told the stories (as all myth does), and the vagueness and offhandedness of what we’re told makes it difficult to say much of that kind.  However, I suspect what we’re looking at is an ancient culture that was built (much as the Pokémon world’s modern civilisation is, perhaps more so) around partnership between humans and Pokémon, and had a vested interest in portraying that partnership as equal, regardless of whether that was actually the case.

vikingboybilly asks:

How come some plants are pokémon, but most are not? Humans are the only known non-pokémon animal in existence (besides pokédex mentions of Indian elephants and stuff), so is there some kind of bias because the world’s environment and obstacles isn’t made out of meat?

I think probably because if all plants are Pokémon too then you begin to run dangerously short of things that are okay to eat.  Game Freak seems to be very uncomfortable with the idea that humans eat Pokémon, at least in the present day – hell, in recent years they even seem to have become uncomfortable with the idea that wild Pokémon eat each other.  When you ask them about it, they make reference to the huge variety of wondrous fruits and vegetables that exist in the Pokémon world.  I suspect if all the plants become sentient too then they run out of wriggle room.

Anonymous asks:

what do you think about sexualization of pokemon species. Some historical antecedents?

I’m afraid I don’t really know what you mean by “historical antecedents” in this context… do you mean like bestiality in mythology?  I’m not by any means well-informed about world mythology generally; I would only consider myself an expert on Greco-Roman myth, and I think what’s going on there is a very different sort of phenomenon.  When Pokémon are portrayed in a sexualised manner in fan art and the like, that tends to involve accentuating their human-like traits, particularly feminine ones.  The most important cases in Greek mythology involve a male god in the form of an animal (or in the case of Pasiphaë a male animal and a human woman under the power of a god), and make no effort to humanise the animal form in any way.  I think the point there is probably something about humans being at the mercy of nature and the divine, ’cause sex is almost always about dominance in Greek culture, and the exemption of deities from human rules and social norms.  

A different sort of case again, where a non-human thing does have its human traits emphasised and sexualised, would be creatures like mermaids, and in folklore those tend to be seen as devilish temptresses who are out to kill men, like rusalkas in Slavic myth, so those are about the dangers of temptation and, essentially, a fear of female sexuality.  With Pokémon the human is imagined as being emphatically in charge, and the Pokémon are probably in a position where they will habitually seek their trainers’ approval… which makes the whole thing a bit icky the way I see it, in the same way as sexual relationships with children (particularly between teachers and students) are icky.  

Anonymous asks:

What do you think the in-universe justification for the national pokedex is? like why is kanto first, then johto, and so on. Is it because Oak created the pokedexes?

I think maybe the better question is “why is there an order at all?”  

They’re not physical books; they don’t need to be printed, so there’s no need for the entries to actually exist in any sort of canonical order.  The user can just ask for one specific entry, or for a list of entries arranged alphabetically, or by type, or by geographical distribution, or whatever.  In-universe there is no obvious reason why, for instance, the Pidgey line should come immediately after the Weedle line.  And then, of course, the one clear ordering principle – the fact that evolutionary families go together – is then violated apparently at random (again, from an in-universe perspective) by Pokémon like Pichu or Kingdra.  

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thephilosophicalsheep asks:

War has been a concept alluded to several times in the pokemon games, but has never outright happened. What would you think of a pokemon game in which the whole premise was that a war has started to break out, and your job was to stop it? War in the pokemon world sounds like an interesting concept, and using pokemon as tools of destruction could eventually be shown to be an unspeakable sin.

Well, we do have Conquest, don’t we?  That’s not really what you’re asking, but I think that would be Game Freak’s answer, that they don’t want that kind of theme in the core series; Pokémon’s preferred tone is a good deal more optimistic than that, and in fact even in Conquest war is pretty seriously declawed, from what I’ve seen of it.  Which is the problem, of course; Pokémon’s been around so long that you have people like me who’ve grown up with it, and wish it could have grown up bit more with us, and think that something exploring themes like that would be really interesting, but then you also have Game Freak, for whom Pokémon is (I think) a vision of what they wish our world could be like.  Evil exists, but it can always be overcome; people get hurt, but they can always be healed.

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