Did you really get "someone deliberately built it" from these dex entries?
Isn't the implication here very plainly that Voltorb's creation was most likely not intended, and was instead an accident?
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SPOILERS! Mysteries and Conspiracies of Pokemon
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Did you really get "someone deliberately built it" from these dex entries?
Isn't the implication here very plainly that Voltorb's creation was most likely not intended, and was instead an accident?
How would that even happen? I'd say that there is probably plenty of uses for an electronic storage unit, and a sentient bomb is a pretty useful bioweapon.
...how does any accident happen? As the dex says, it's theorised that a Pokeball was subjected to a pulse of electrical energy. How that came about is left unsaid.
I'm not saying it couldn't have been intentionally created, just that literally nothing in the series to my knowledge implies that it was. If it had been, surely more would be known about it instead of its origins being unknown - pretty much all other manmade Pokemon in Gen I, like Mewtwo and Porygon, are called out as such explicitly, i.e. "it was created by scientists", "it is a man-made Pokemon". But Voltorb's dex entries repeatedly describe it as being "discovered" rather than created, indicating that no credit was taken by anyone for it.
Pragmatic answer is that the Pokédex is just like that sometimes, for reasons only known to Game Freak. For instance, why does Stakataka’s Ultra Moon entry say this:
> “When stone walls started moving and attacking, the brute’s true identity was this mysterious life-form, which brings to mind an Ultra Beast.”
“Brings to mind an Ultra Beast”? Like come on guys, we know it categorically is one. There’s no need to get all Cosmog/Necrozma-style ambiguous with the thing introduced to us as UB Assembly.
I think there’s only so much they can realistically do here, because Hisuian Voltorb is, plain and simply, a retcon. Kantonian Voltorb’s entries were written that way because, at the time, that was their vision for it within the lore of the world. Later, they decided to introduce its antecedent, but also wanted to preserve the ambiguity around Voltorb’s existence as a whole, and so didn’t try to connect the wires directly. Since Voltorb’s origins have always been kept vague and mysterious, the introduction of Hisuian Voltorb into those origins doesn’t really contradict anything specific. It just adds to the curiosity of the thing.
I mean, on one hand, I’d say that Pokémon is a fun kids’ game about collecting magical creatures that doesn’t take itself too seriously, so it’s never exactly looking to secure itself with iron-clad logistics.
On the other hand, even off the top of my head, I can think of a similar example of that scenario which has already been documented — Kabuto. Many of its Pokédex entries mention that while it lived 300 million years ago, there have been extremely rare cases of living specimens being discovered. So despite being considered perilously close to extinct, we know that there must still be some populations of Kabuto out there which have managed to persist for considerably longer than the entire existence of humanity. Compared to that, I think a pod of Hisuian Voltorb huddling up next to a Poké Ball factory during the transition to industrial Poké Ball production is fairly reasonable.
As for what happens if a future region shows Hisuian Voltorb out in the wild, I’m just not really concerned about that, personally. I don’t need a fun little theory I crafted to bridge the gap between Voltorb forms to be thoroughly futureproofed so that it can uphold the lore of the series in perpetuity — if and when the games present new evidence, I’ll simply do as the Pokémon themselves do, and adapt.
And that, in turn, is yet another possible theory, which works just fine because again, Voltorb’s origins are deliberately left mysterious. We don’t know what birthed Hisuian Voltorb any more than we know what birthed Kantonian Voltorb. We have a couple of hints, but that’s all.
The only thing I would say I’m skeptical of about this, though, is that I’m not really sure it’d be that much trouble for them to trademark a single term, especially when they’re going to have to trademark a whole slew of new terms anyway. While I can’t claim to have any insight into the legal procedure of Pokémon development, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were something like, “Game Freak come up with what they’re going to come up with, then hand it off to TPC’s legal department to sort out, and then adjust based on the results.”
Actually, now that I think about it, given that Kitakami is just the name of a real place, would they even need to trademark it? I’m not sure what kind of nuances that would introduce.
Yes. And what I’m saying is that there’s enough vaguespace for Hisuian Voltorb to have been somehow involved in that accidental process.
Alright, random theory of mine to throw out there. The reason Charmander dies if its flame goes out is because it needs to have a high body temperature to survive, and it uses the flame to heat itself up.
My theory is that the Charmander family's tail flame isn't what's keeping them alive, but it's a sign of their vitality. You can dump water on it or even submerge it and as long as its healthy even a small flame will still be present as it's always igniting itself. However when it dies all body functions cease to function, including the igniting organ in its tail, thus the flames goes out.
I wasn't challenging that specific point, that absolutely could be fitted in somehow. Just the supposition that Voltorb was deliberately created.
I feel like this isn't even theory at this point, the anime and a few pieces of Media depict Charizard as being doused with or even completely submerged in Water and surviving with the Tail Flame still intact.
I do think that the anime is a good baseline for pokemon information, as it fleshes out some parts not covered by the Pokedex. it should not however be taken as an infallible source of information, for obvious reasons. The anime can be used to gather information, but don't count on the reliability of that information.
The specific instance I was referring to was Pokemon Origins, which as an Anniversary Nostalgia bait hemmed a lot closer to the games than the Mainline Ash Anime did. This one in which Charizard is flung into and submerged in water with its Tail still visibly burning under the water.
the flame still burning. this does not disprove my theory.
That’s pretty much what this thread is specifically designed for. Because doing that is fun.
I'm not categorically criticizing this attitude, but it's a bit strange to me in some specific cases.
I was reading a much earlier discussion of Arceus and whether or not it was the creator of everything, and it's strange to me that users are citing evidence from the games' flavor text in order to make a point --- text that the actual writers shat out and called it a day, text that any of those Smogon users could have written more carefully.
I just don't quite see the point of bickering over issues the evidence for which is in-game text that took 2 minutes to write, on the basis that the text is written by official Pokémon writers and is therefore sacrosanct.
a huge amount of thought goes into game design. A level of thought most people aren't ready for. and still, I can confidently say that the people this thread attracts put 10 times that thought into it. I personally once put research into whether or not a biological organism is theoretically capable of splitting the atom for the sole purpose of finding out how golem uses explosions to travel from mountain to mountain.
Well, first off I think completely writing off that the writers just shat something out is...dumb? Is there stuff they didn't think about fully? Almost certainly. Plenty of things are written to such an exaggerated proportion just because it sounds cool, as an example. & I definitely think there's other stuff they could have taken a third pass on. But to say no thought went into everything they write, that it's all just thrown together and called a day, is pretty reductive.
But secondly, yeah when theorizing you tend to try and base it off something in the games (or any other work or franchise). That's, like. how it works. Thing is in game as the germ of something or as something to contextualize or refute a theory. Or something to pick at and go man, this thing they wrote was a dumb idea. Or even "what WERE they thinking with this". Or sometimes, yes, even an analysis that results in "it's kind of lame they didn't put more thought into it, huh". As much a discussion on what it could mean as it is a discussion on what the developers thought when making it.
That seems pretty valid to me, and has been a cornerstone of fandom discussions for as long as there's been fandoms.
If I came off as say the people in that discussion were wrong or destructive. I apologize. That was not my intention.
I 100% stand by what I said regarding the poorness of the lore, though. There is not something magic dividing fans from official employees, and making the latter more valid than the fans' own made-up stories. A quick look at the Pokedex entries shows you there are large areas where it's hard to deny that a fan-made theory could have been more interesting.
I 100% stand by what I said regarding the poorness of the lore, though. There is not something magic dividing fans from official employees, and making the latter more valid than the fans' own made-up stories. A quick look at the Pokedex entries shows you there are large areas where it's hard to deny that a fan-made theory could have been more interesting.
In general, I have no issue with this statement, but this is a thread specifically devoted to examining strange, confusing, or otherwise unexplained elements of the Pokemon universe as it's presented to us, not a fanfiction thread (however interesting that might be).
For me, the appeal of this thread lies in how it challenges you to be creative and analytical within the confines of a canon that's often opaque, contradictory, or even physically impossible. I doubt anyone here thinks that Pokemon's writing is infallible, but it serves an important function as a baseline for discussion so we're all (mostly) on the same page.
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On this point in particular, is there a reason why you’re specifically honing in on Pokédex entries? Because those have always been intended to be short blurbs about the Pokémon, and especially in the early days, they would have had to be conscious of space limitations. I don’t think most people are really expecting the Pokédex to be dispensing elaborate reams of lore, and most Pokémon in the roster don’t really warrant that kind of excessive exposition in the first place. Like, there is only so much that a person can physically have to say about Gulpin.
A while back, we wound up talking about Clefairy and the whole "was considered to be original mascot" thing and how weirdly proliferated it was as fact despite coming (seemingly) entirely from a Beckett magazine interview (?) with I believe one of the English arm people with no specific quotes transcribed. And some places would even go onto say that Pikachu was a "last minute" decision for the Anime.
It always seemed odd because despite lots of interviews about the franchise (both games & anime) over the years, it just never seemed to come up even though it feels like trivia that would be fun to talk about.
At this point bulbapedia has removed those references, but it always stuck with me. After all maybe that interview was actually very accurate & to the point, who could say? It'd be nice to have more closure on it. So I obviously did what any reasonable person would do and bought
Pokemon Story, a book from December 2000 accounting for the early history of the franchise, from Japan. I learned about this Book when Dogasu translated the portions pertaining to the Pokemon Shock incident, bringing the series over to America and he also translated the table of contents which had this specific thing catch my eye
And it's like, hello??? This is about as primary as a source could get short of a direct word for word interview. After obtaining the book (a pain) and finding a translator (also a pain), I got Aaron Riley ( www.thelanguagequest.com ) to translate the relevant pages for me.
I'll post the full transcription in the anime thread, but as for the stuff about Pikachu specifically
Ta-da!
Basically:
-GameFreak didn't give any specific edicts to begin with, and seemingly had no direct input on mascot status (or lack thereof)
-Pikachu was chosen by the anime pretty definitively in the planning stages. Clefairy was considered (& Jigglypuff, seemingly) but from the wording it sounds like it was just a brief consideration. Either way it definitely wasn't a "last minute" decision from what this implies
-Ironically it sounds like the manga (& I must underline here, this is referring to the Pocket Monsters manga with the talking Clefairy) influenced this decision a lot. It was the primary other major piece of ongoing Pokemon media at the time, so that makes sense. People focus on the Clefairy understandably, but Pikachu was added to the story in very short order and never left; it was basically the second main character (or third, I guess, after the trainer).
-Popularity polls also helped (and-speculation on my part- that was probably also influenced by the manga)
-The only person who seemed to actively suggest Clefairy was the guy representing CoroCoro
Now in fairness this is all focused on the Anime half of things, but glancing through the table of contents it doesn't seem like there's any point where they really talk about the manga or selecting a mascot before this. So there's always a chance they were like "yes, choose Clefairy for this manga, let's see how it cooks" and it's just in another untranslated part of this book or some other interview out there that's just been lost to time. But at least with respect to the media that would define the franchise's mascot, Pikachu seemed like a hard lock.
So maybe not 100% Mystery Solved, but to me it's a solid Mystery Probably Understood.
The full section is pretty neat and has other details, I'll post it to the other thread in a minute.
It always seemed odd because despite lots of interviews about the franchise (both games & anime) over the years, it just never seemed to come up even though it feels like trivia that would be fun to talk about.
At this point bulbapedia has removed those references, but it always stuck with me. After all maybe that interview was actually very accurate & to the point, who could say? It'd be nice to have more closure on it. So I obviously did what any reasonable person would do and bought
Pokemon Story, a book from December 2000 accounting for the early history of the franchise, from Japan. I learned about this Book when Dogasu translated the portions pertaining to the Pokemon Shock incident, bringing the series over to America and he also translated the table of contents which had this specific thing catch my eye
And it's like, hello??? This is about as primary as a source could get short of a direct word for word interview. After obtaining the book (a pain) and finding a translator (also a pain), I got Aaron Riley ( www.thelanguagequest.com ) to translate the relevant pages for me.
I'll post the full transcription in the anime thread, but as for the stuff about Pikachu specifically
Ta-da!
Basically:
-GameFreak didn't give any specific edicts to begin with, and seemingly had no direct input on mascot status (or lack thereof)
-Pikachu was chosen by the anime pretty definitively in the planning stages. Clefairy was considered (& Jigglypuff, seemingly) but from the wording it sounds like it was just a brief consideration. Either way it definitely wasn't a "last minute" decision from what this implies
-Ironically it sounds like the manga (& I must underline here, this is referring to the Pocket Monsters manga with the talking Clefairy) influenced this decision a lot. It was the primary other major piece of ongoing Pokemon media at the time, so that makes sense. People focus on the Clefairy understandably, but Pikachu was added to the story in very short order and never left; it was basically the second main character (or third, I guess, after the trainer).
-Popularity polls also helped (and-speculation on my part- that was probably also influenced by the manga)
-The only person who seemed to actively suggest Clefairy was the guy representing CoroCoro
Now in fairness this is all focused on the Anime half of things, but glancing through the table of contents it doesn't seem like there's any point where they really talk about the manga or selecting a mascot before this. So there's always a chance they were like "yes, choose Clefairy for this manga, let's see how it cooks" and it's just in another untranslated part of this book or some other interview out there that's just been lost to time. But at least with respect to the media that would define the franchise's mascot, Pikachu seemed like a hard lock.
So maybe not 100% Mystery Solved, but to me it's a solid Mystery Probably Understood.
The full section is pretty neat and has other details, I'll post it to the other thread in a minute.
Have you considered reaching out to Did You Know Gaming about this? This seems exactly like the kind of thing that's up their alley these days and i dont think they've done their own debunk of "clefairy was almost the mascot"A while back, we wound up talking about Clefairy and the whole "was considered to be original mascot" thing and how weirdly proliferated it was as fact despite coming (seemingly) entirely from a Beckett magazine interview (?) with I believe one of the English arm people with no specific quotes transcribed. And some places would even go onto say that Pikachu was a "last minute" decision for the Anime.
It always seemed odd because despite lots of interviews about the franchise (both games & anime) over the years, it just never seemed to come up even though it feels like trivia that would be fun to talk about.
At this point bulbapedia has removed those references, but it always stuck with me. After all maybe that interview was actually very accurate & to the point, who could say? It'd be nice to have more closure on it. So I obviously did what any reasonable person would do and bought
Pokemon Story, a book from December 2000 accounting for the early history of the franchise, from Japan. I learned about this Book when Dogasu translated the portions pertaining to the Pokemon Shock incident, bringing the series over to America and he also translated the table of contents which had this specific thing catch my eye
And it's like, hello??? This is about as primary as a source could get short of a direct word for word interview. After obtaining the book (a pain) and finding a translator (also a pain), I got Aaron Riley ( www.thelanguagequest.com ) to translate the relevant pages for me.
I'll post the full transcription in the anime thread, but as for the stuff about Pikachu specifically
Ta-da!
Basically:
-GameFreak didn't give any specific edicts to begin with, and seemingly had no direct input on mascot status (or lack thereof)
-Pikachu was chosen by the anime pretty definitively in the planning stages. Clefairy was considered (& Jigglypuff, seemingly) but from the wording it sounds like it was just a brief consideration. Either way it definitely wasn't a "last minute" decision from what this implies
-Ironically it sounds like the manga (& I must underline here, this is referring to the Pocket Monsters manga with the talking Clefairy) influenced this decision a lot. It was the primary other major piece of ongoing Pokemon media at the time, so that makes sense. People focus on the Clefairy understandably, but Pikachu was added to the story in very short order and never left; it was basically the second main character (or third, I guess, after the trainer).
-Popularity polls also helped (and-speculation on my part- that was probably also influenced by the manga)
-The only person who seemed to actively suggest Clefairy was the guy representing CoroCoro
Now in fairness this is all focused on the Anime half of things, but glancing through the table of contents it doesn't seem like there's any point where they really talk about the manga or selecting a mascot before this. So there's always a chance they were like "yes, choose Clefairy for this manga, let's see how it cooks" and it's just in another untranslated part of this book or some other interview out there that's just been lost to time. But at least with respect to the media that would define the franchise's mascot, Pikachu seemed like a hard lock.
So maybe not 100% Mystery Solved, but to me it's a solid Mystery Probably Understood.
The full section is pretty neat and has other details, I'll post it to the other thread in a minute.
Not a bad idea, but kind of seems they're hitting other franchises right now. And I'm not sure how much they'd be thrilled with handing them an already translated portion by someone else, from some rando.
For now I'm happy just having this translation out there
Nowadays, Psychic/Fairy has become one of those kind of annoyingly common typings, but when the Fairy type was first introduced in Gen 6, there were only two Pokemon with that combination.
Now, Mr. Mime I understand. It's partly based on clowns, and real clowns are fae creatures that exist only in folklore. But Gardevoir doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Fairies.
Now, Mr. Mime I understand. It's partly based on clowns, and real clowns are fae creatures that exist only in folklore. But Gardevoir doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Fairies.
It's an elegant Pokemon with connection of emotions - one of the things they do sort of try to associate with Fairies - makes sense to meNowadays, Psychic/Fairy has become one of those kind of annoyingly common typings, but when the Fairy type was first introduced in Gen 6, there were only two Pokemon with that combination.
Now, Mr. Mime I understand. It's partly based on clowns, and real clowns are fae creatures that exist only in folklore. But Gardevoir doesn't really seem to have anything to do with Fairies.
And then from a gameplay perspective, they probably gave it Fairy to let it stand out a bit from someone like Alakazam, Gothitelle & so on. and it helps mirror Gallade's fighting type.
& from a marketing perspective, it's a notable Pokemon that meshes with the "vibe" they want on Fairies, so when they unveil the typing and retypings to go with its one you can point at and go "whoa!!"