Well, is there only one Pokémon League (or only one Ranger Union, for that matter)?  I always got the impression that, with the exception of Kanto and Johto, each region had its own League which was more or less autonomous.

Anyway.  I only ever played the first Ranger title, so take anything I have to say with a grain of salt, but my understanding was that Fiore has a Ranger Union and not a Pokémon League for cultural reasons more than anything else.  People in Fiore don’t train Pokémon.  It’s just not a part of their way of life; they have a very different relationship with the Pokémon that live in their region.  Why would an organisation that is primarily responsible for Pokémon trainers and competitive Pokémon battling want to be involved with anything that happens there?  Likewise, the Ranger Union exists to deal with problems in human/Pokémon relations that would be handled by high-level Pokémon trainers in regions that have them.  Their purposes and activities don’t really give them any reason ever to be in competition with each other, as far as I can see.

I suppose it might be that the point of the machine is actually to move the Pokémon themselves from one Pokéball to the other – we know that Pokémon in the anime do seem to be tied to their own Pokéballs (take, for instance, Pokémon Food Fight, when Ash has to drag Snorlax over a mountain because his Pokéball is broken – for whatever reason, he can’t just, say, stick Snorlax in Pikachu’s Pokéball for a few hours).  When you give a Pokémon away, you normally give away the Pokéball with it, so you don’t need a special machine.  Of course, that just raises the question of why they’re so damned possessive about their Pokéballs that they aren’t willing to let them go when they make a trade.  Could be some sort of weird throwback to a period when Pokéballs were rare and valuable artisanal objects – before production was automated and standardised, they might have been covered with valuable decorations, or emblazoned with a noble trainer’s crest, so that traditionally trainers would want to keep their own Pokéballs even when trading their Pokémon away.  Basically the machine’s function is actually completely insignificant for the vast majority of people, but they use one because that’s how trades have always been done.

I’m going to go with “because then we wouldn’t be able to catch them.”  This sounds like a cop-out, but it has the advantage of probably being the real reason for it, and maybe it can work in-universe as well.  There will inevitably be Pokémon trainers who want to catch these things, and historically would have had the right to take any risks they wanted in order to do so.  Almost all Pokémon can be dangerous if you’re not smart in your interactions with them – Ash almost got killed by a bunch of f$#@ing Spearow on his first day, remember – so once you accept the notion of allowing young people to do this sort of thing in the first place, it becomes difficult to start drawing lines.  Also, training is the first and most important way that people in this world have of interacting with Pokémon, so deciding that trainers aren’t allowed to do so of their own free will probably seems like a really extreme reaction to them – like “holy $#!t, you’re saying that these things are so dangerous we can’t even let the monster-taming nut-jobs near them?  RUN AWAY!”

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard it quite that way around.  I feel like the games and anime, when they leave hints about that kind of thing, are more likely to suggest that humans are from ‘Earth’ and Pokémon are the interlopers.  Putting things this way around is, I suppose, one efficient way of explaining why there are humans in this world at all, but I actually don’t think it’s the only way, and I’m not sure I can think of any other questions that it simplifies, particularly.

I’ve never really given Elgyem and Beheeyem the attention they deserve, but my thinking on Clefairy has always been that there’s actually an interesting possible alternative that gets overlooked.  Clefairy are capable of space flight and they’re obsessed with extraterrestrial materials and celestial phenomena… exactly like some humans.  That could mean they’re from space, or it could mean that they’re from Earth and interested in extraterrestrial exploration, just like humans are.  Having said that, though, I think the explanation Game Freak and the anime’s writers are probably trying to point us to is more likely that life on Pokémon Earth resulted from some form of panspermia-type event – a ‘seeding’ by organisms capable of surviving in space (rather than, say, some kind of bizarre Noah’s Ark scenario), implying that there may be other planets where descendants of the same species continued to evolve independently.  In the real world, people who favour this hypothesis will point to bacteria and other resilient microorganisms that might lie dormant on asteroids for millions of years at a time, but in Pokémon we actually have complex organisms who can survive in space for extended periods – namely, Lunatone and Solrock.  If that happened, though, it happened so long ago that it really no longer makes sense to consider Pokémon ‘alien’ – we’re most likely talking hundreds of millions of years for something like Solrock to give rise to the myriad species that exist today.  Humans might be descended from those first Pokémon, or they might be descended from microorganisms that were there already – it’s sort of hard to say why it even matters.  All of this… hrmm… conveniently fits with some of my wild speculation about mineral-form Rock-types being the ancestral state of all Pokémon (damnit, I hate finding evidence that I might have been right about Pokémon evolving from rocks), but then on the other hand, if I’m right about Carbink, they might even have been around since the damn planet formed in the first place.

One of these days I really need to try drinking heavily before attempting to deal with $#!t like this.  It might make more sense that way.

Tricky… I too am fond of quieter, more remote towns.  In a world where technology is as pervasive as it is in Pokémon, most of the convenience of living in a big city can be had just about anywhere with a little work, and it’s nice to be able to see the stars at night.  Geosenge Town has some cool archaeology going for it, as does much of Sevii.  I’m fond of Fortree City as well, but it might be a little too rustic… it’s nice to be able to turn the nature off once in a while.

Oh, here it is.

Pretty much, yeah.  Black and White were really interesting, for exactly these reasons (although I do want to notice in passing that “at that point—the point where you can truly communicate with them—they are no longer intelligent pets; they are people” is very quietly sneaking in a proposition that in the real world would be an extremely controversial one, because there are animals that we can truly communicate with, and whether they should legally be considered people or have the same rights as humans is in question, so you can’t just say that as though it’s obviously true), and at the same time somewhat disappointing, again for exactly these reasons.  It’s fun, and interesting, to read Black and White with N as the hero and the player as the villain.  It’s just kind of a let-down when you get to the part where N only believes the things he does because he was deliberately surrounded by Pokémon who’d had terrible experiences with humanity, and about half of Team Plasma had little or no philosophical commitment to his beliefs anyway.

I don’t think I quite agree with the starkness of the division – i.e. Black and White were awesome, Black and White 2 were a total disappointment.  I do think Black and White were better than the sequels on the whole, but there’s a limit to how far you can push the points this article is making.  It was never realistic to imagine that the games could possibly end with all Pokémon being released, because that would be the end of Pokémon as we know it, and that is just way too frightening a prospect for Game Freak to contemplate (which gives the whole thing an interesting metafictional twist to it; the people writing the story have to be on the side of the enslavers, because that’s what their own livelihood is based on).  The problems of Black and White 2 start with the way Ghetsis and N are portrayed in Black and White, and at the same time the sequels present ideas that have merit as well – they give us the benevolent half of Team Plasma, now under the leadership of Rood, and they end with N continuing to envision Pokémon liberation, but seeing it in a new light (he now wants humans and Pokémon to be equal, but not separate as he initially hoped, and he seems to think that Pokéballs are somehow the root of the problem).  I think when you read the two together, the message they’re trying to push is that Pokémon training is basically a good thing, but is also extremely prone to abuse because of the way it’s practiced in the modern world.

Hmm.  My suspicion is that more than three stages would not be advantageous from a natural selection perspective.  Unevolved Pokémon are, in general, vastly more common than evolved ones (even ones like Butterfree that evolve very quickly), which suggests that the majority of them don’t ever make it to their final forms in the wild.  To pull some numbers out of the air, maybe only 5-10% of all Bulbasaur ever become Ivysaur, and only 5-10% of those ever make it all the way to Venusaur – between 0.25% and 1% of the total population.  In order to evolve a hypothetical fourth evolution (…damnit, I hate it when I have to talk about Darwinian evolution and Pokémon evolution in the same sentence), there would need to be a significant selective advantage conferred on (for example) Bulbasaur who possessed the genes for that fourth stage versus Bulbasaur who didn’t – but if any individual Bulbasaur with the appropriate mutations has less than a 0.1% chance of ever using them anyway, then for most of them it won’t make any difference at all.  Essentially, the sheer odds against a wild Pokémon ever reaching its fourth stage make it pointless even to have a fourth one.

Eh.  How you think about this kinda depends on how widespread and diverse you believe non-Pokémon animals are in the Pokémon world, which is awkward because early generations and anime episodes often implied that there were quite a lot of them and then later on they were sort of quietly swept under the carpet and it’s hard to tell whether they were retconned out of existence or we just don’t care about them, and personally I kinda tend to lean towards the former, but… meh?

In any case, I don’t think the groups in which Pokémon are defined are terribly scientific – like, I actually think “able to use certain fighting techniques” is probably pretty damn close to how they actually think about it in-universe.  Type, I’ve pretty well convinced myself now, has absolutely nothing to do with shared ancestry and in many cases (Flying, Ground, Normal, some others) not a whole lot to do with biology either, but is more of a descriptive framework for how a Pokémon functions in battle.  Bear in mind that people have supposedly been training Pokémon for hundreds if not thousands of years.  Pokémon training probably far predates any sort of scientifically rigorous approach to evolutionary biology, so the relevant terms and classifications are most likely to have utilitarian rather than analytical relevance – i.e., when you ask “is it a Pokémon?” early trainers would understand you to mean “can you battle with it?”

This question continues: “…*cont* leap over a mountain. Why didn’t natural selection kick humanity’s ass during their development, leaving only Pokémon? What circumstances would lead to humans surviving alongside Pokémon?”

Well, now, that is a difficult one, isn’t it?  I’m inclined to suggest that the way to get the answer is to go back to how natural selection and Darwinian evolution actually work.  ”Survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean that the biggest, fastest, strongest, or even smartest species survives.  It means that the species (or individual) survives whose traits are best suited to make efficient use of the available resources and reproduce.  My own country, New Zealand, provides some illustrative examples here.  Before its colonisation by the Maori people in about the 12th century AD or so, there were no land mammals in New Zealand – no dogs, no cats, no mustelids, none of that; in short, there were no land-based predators (although there were once giant eagles – some of the stuff in the Lord of the Rings is actually true).  What do you think happened to the birds?  Well, a great many of them, over the course of millions of years, lost the ability to fly.  Flight is expensive in terms of energy consumption, hugely so.  If you don’t need to fly, then that energy is better put to use having more babies.  Evolution dislikes waste intensely, and this can cause it to do things that often seem counterintuitive to us.  Primates, including humans, are among the most intelligent animals in the world, have excellent colour vision, and like all mammals can maintain a constant body temperature in the face of fairly significant environmental change – and we pay for those things dearly; we’re forced to rely on relatively large amounts of high-energy foods like meat and fruits while slower, stupider animals can just sit and munch on leaves all day.  Consider Pokémon, then, who have a myriad of abilities that must be every bit as costly as flight or great intelligence, from a metabolic perspective.  They must have a very high energy diet to sustain those powers.  I don’t know what’s in those berries, exactly, but I suspect it’s got a lot more of a kick than the standard fructose/sucrose mix you find in fruits like apples.  An entire Pokémon ecosystem has a number of specialised organisms – powerful Grass Pokémon, for instance – who help to cycle energy around and increase the efficiency of the whole thing by accelerating growth and decay, but we’re still looking at a world populated by organisms who consume and use a fundamentally ridiculous amount of cellular energy on a daily basis.  Now, to an organism whose energy requirements are relatively frugal by comparison, this looks like a very attractive environment – sure, predators and competitors are both very dangerous and powerful, but you can live for a week on the equivalent of a bunch of grapes and half a banana, and you can easily outbreed them.  Humans, I think, found a niche for themselves within that context by doing something slightly different, based on taking interspecies cooperation (something we see a lot of in the Pokémon world, even in nature) to a whole new level of organisation and complexity, which they can do because of pretty much the same things that got us ahead in the real world – namely intelligence and complex languages.

We could probably go on at this for a while, but I think that’s enough for today.