Pokémon/Headscratchers/Archive

Older general Pokémon Headscratchers entries are archived here. JBM's specific to the Headscratchers, Arceus and the Jewel of Life, Headscratchers, Headscratchers, Headscratchers, and Headscratchers should be placed on their respective pages.

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For the active discussion, see Pokémon/Headscratchers.


 * I noticed that most of the Gym leader Japanese names are from plants. Is Satoshi hungry?
 * Theme Naming. Why they chose plants is anyone's guess, but hey.
 * Not any more than Akira Toriyama, that's for sure.
 * I wonder if he'll ever use something like Lantana..


 * The Slakoth/Vigoroth/Slaking evolution line. Over its lifetime, the Pokémon's personality does a complete 180 --twice! How do any of them manage to reach the Slaking stage without having severe identity crises?
 * Teen rebelliousness and acting out that dies down with maturity.
 * Vigoroth don't gradually mature and re-evaluate their worldview like a human teen might. Presumably, they're wild and energetic one moment, reach level 36, and then suddenly evolve to lose all interest in anything but eating and sleeping.
 * I always saw it more like "Ohp, my metabolism isn't as good as it used to be, and I never learned how to compensate! Guess I'll- just... zzz... try... zzz... to... zzz... compensate... zzz... some... zzz... other... zzz... Sloooooooooooowpoooooooookeeeeey... zzz... way..."
 * Another way to think of it, Diamond/ Pearl's entry for Slaking says "When it is lounging. It is actually saving energy for striking back." And Slaking has the highest base stats of any non-Legendary, so an explanation could be that using its power takes away so much energy, that it needs to sleep to regain energy. Legendaries don't have this drawback because they have the power to wield this much might without any drawback.
 * If I'm ten years old and don't have any Pokémon, why do I have a Potion in my PC?
 * Either the main character bought it or received it as a gift from someone else in anticipation of becoming a Pokémon trainer someday.
 * Gift From Mom, sometimes. In at least one set of games (The second generation?), it was from the/a local Professor.
 * They're delicious. Same reason why lemonade is the best curing item ever.
 * But Lemonade only does 50 hp up if I recall correctly. It's the bitter stuff that does the trick, and oh boy, do your Pokemon hate you for giving them THAT. (There is, of course better stuff, but we don't know the flavour.)
 * Lemonade restores 80 HP. It's the Fresh Water that restores 50.
 * The Ken Sugimori illustrated card "Mom's Kindness" shows Dawn's mother slipping a Potion into her bag.
 * The addition of new Pokemon always bugs me. Are the lands so isolated that we don't know any Pokemon from other lands? I know there are out of universe explanations, but in universe?
 * Probably. It stretches a little too much when it comes to aquatic mons (who should be free to roam around from land to land), but it appears the Pokedex is the first attempt on cataloguing Pokemon, and it's slowly spreading from region to region. How those previously unencounterable Pokemon suddenly appear after you get the new and improved National Dex, though... I'll leave that for the MST3K Mantra.
 * Not necessarily on the water thing, for big Pokemon like Wailord, I doubt they'd be found in shallowish waters, and other Pokemon might prefer shallow water. Also, fresh water vs salt water. There are also some species on earth that are only found in certain lakes or so, like one albino blind crab that's found in one lake in one of the Canary Islands. By that logic too, bird Pokemon should be able to be found everywhere, because they could fly there.
 * I think you're failing to take in account how small the Pokemon world is. Each region is not that far from each other so, while it'd be the case that big salt water mons wouldn't be found in shallow waters, you'd expect Relicanths and Luvdiscs living near Wailmers and Mantines. And the problem about birds is also valid. But, frankly, I think the way previously unavailable mons suddenly appear after you get the National Pokedex (again, notice: not Universal, not International, not Continental: National; this is a small world, after all).
 * I've always thought that, for example, some water Pokemon may already be from another region, but have drifted away. For instance, Tentacool might have originally been native to say, Hoenn, but it's already spread everywhere. Does that make sense? And then other Pokemon just stay where they are because it suits them. I dunno... just my view.
 * Actually, with Pokemon Black and White the new region will be very VERY far away from all the other regions.
 * That still doesn't explain how people don't know of pre-evolutions. I can understand how added evolutions can possibly not be found in some regions (Magnezone only evolves in one specific area with unusual magnetic fields, the Shiny/Dawn/Dusk stones are very uncommon in the earlier regions), but how does an area which naturally has Pikachu not have Pichu?
 * Pikachu will always have Pichu. But a Chansey will only breed a Happiny if it is holding an item as rare as a Shiny Stone can be.
 * I can't talk for other pre-evos, but for Pikachu, it was specifically stated once or twice that "no one had ever seen a new-born Pikachu" or something very similar. Since you weren't able to breed in first gen, it's not much of a stretch to say NO ONE did; wild Pokemon guarded their young, and we humans never saw them. For the third gen and onwards, all pre-evos required something that wasn't available to the previous generation.
 * This is just a wild idea of a sleep deprived troper, but what if there were other animals besides Pokemon in the Pokemon world? What if Pokeballs don't work on them? And then, what if, as a naive 10 year old kid, you don't know which are Pokemon and which aren't? Would you waste your time trying to catch something not in your Pokedex, or even bother trying to fight one? Then, later in your journey, you get a new Pokedex, and you realize all of those animals you've been passing up have, in fact, been Pokemon. Then you backtrack, this time engaging those new Pokemon in battle.
 * How the hell does Remoraid (which is a fish) evolve into a freaking octopus?
 * A useless fish becomes a rampaging behemoth. A horseshoe crab becomes bipedal and grows scythes for its arms. A turtle grows metal pipes out of its shell. A lizard sprouts wings. A different lizard turns into a cocoon and then into a dinosaur. And a fish becoming an octopus bothers you the most? File it under MST3K Mantra and call it a day.
 * It has also been explained in this same page that the evolution isn't exactly "fish to octopus", but "handgun to cannon".
 * Though you've got me on the others, the fish turning into a rampaging behemoth is actually based on the fact that the useless fish in question is a carp. There's a legend in Asia about a carp swimming up a river to a certain point and being rewarded for his efforts by being transformed into a dragon.
 * On a somewhat related note, how the hell does a fossil of dried up sap turn into a wyvern-based pterodactyl?
 * It's probably assumed to have a mosquito in it, which in this case would have Aerodactyl's blood and therefore a DNA sample. Rather Jurassic Park-inspired.
 * In Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, there are routes where it's always raining and have patches to plant your berries. Why then, do I still need to ride down there every few frikkin' hours to water the damn things. What, is the constant (and I do mean constant - it never stops raining there) stream of the stuff not enough for these things?
 * The most likely explanation is that the watering can you use is actually filled with Miracle-Gro (or some equivalent) and not just plain water. Therefore watering the plant makes it grow better than leaving it for the rain.
 * Adding to that, the rain changes the soil quality. Some berries will grow better in the rain than in places where it isn't.
 * Maybe this should be under Fridge Brilliance, but Gary's Raticate dies... and they barely touch on this.
 * To clarify: In RBY you fight Gary on SS Anne. With his Raticate. Next time you see him is in Lavender Tower, which is where people pay their respects to dead Pokemon... and Gary noticeably is missing his Raticate. And only has five Pokemon...
 * Maybe he just let it go.
 * That would make sense if he had a substitute. But why would he let it go and run around with only 5 Pokémon instead of 6?
 * Head on over to the Nightmare Fuel page for this.
 * ...am I the only one who merely thought he stored it away in the PC Because he didn't need it as a Disc One Nuke anymore? When you see him on the S.S. Anne, he says "I already caught 100 kinds, pal." Why doesn't he send one hundred Pokemon at you if he only carries the Pokemon he caught? Because he's only sending his A-Team. Raticate stops becoming useful at around that period of time, so he probably put it in the PC. Who says the PC is only for you to use?
 * I think there are rules that doesn't allow a trainer to use more than 6 Pokemon, or at least in the games.
 * Quick trip to Bulbapedia reveals that he only uses 5 Pokemon for the Pokemon Tower battle, and experience from HGSS shows that Raticate can be extremely powerful if used right.
 * I'm always bugged by the fact that, honestly, Weedle doesn't look hairy at all for a Hairy Bug Pokemon...
 * Why is Ice not super effective against the frickin' WATER type?
 * ...because Ice will just melt if you throw it at the water, it will not freeze the water, it will not do anything other than lower a bit its temperature without outside effects, it just isn't effective at all. Icebergs? They don't do anything else than float and if it weren't that the climate is cold already they'd just melt.
 * I was thinking about that, but I always figured that the ice was concentrated for the Pokemon's attack, creating enough cold to freeze the water or something.
 * Just because they're water type doesn't mean they're made of water you know. It means they live in it, and thus would be resistant to cold temperatures.
 * Then why do they resist Fire-type attacks?
 * That's... a good question, actually. They should suffer worse from dehydration. Maybe it only makes sense in an "elemental scale", still considering ice cannot harm water(probably because ice melts into water, making it some sort of "child element").
 * Why aren't electric types strong against steel? Or poison better in general? The answer is, because the type system is weird.
 * If Poison were better in general, then Poison would be OP. Technically, Poison should be good against normal, grass, water, bug, dragon, flying, ground, and rock, if the arguments for it have any meaning. Basically, it should be good against anything corruptible/with a pulse, which counts for about 400 or more Pokémon.
 * rock ground and water wouldn't work under your logic, since they aren't actually alive. corrupting the ground only actually harms the plants and animals on it, hence the super effective against grass
 * You are aware that water can be made undrinkable/uninhabitable? Also, you claimed ground wouldn't work with the scenario. Yet, you mentioned that you'd have to "corrupt the ground" to harm plants. Corrupting the ground. Hmm.
 * On that note, why aren't Flying types weak to Water-type attacks? If you wet a bird's wings, it can't fly. I'd imagine the same would apply to a Pidgey hit with several thousand pressurized gallons of water.
 * Charmander supposedly dies if left in the rain long enough to extinguish its tail flame (see: Anime, Pokédex, Manga). But it can fight underwater if you've used Dive on the field.
 * I always figured that (in the Pokedex case, at least) instead of Charmander and kin dying when the tail flame goes out, that the tail flame goes out when it dies, sort of like a human's heart will stop when he dies, but not everyone dies when their heart stops (at least, not immediately). I guess the Pokedex maker saw the correlation, but put the causation backwards. Also, in the Manga, Dive surrounds the Pokemon in a bubble of air.
 * Simply putting: what's the difference between Type 1 and Type 2? Why is, for instance, Geodude Rock/Ground and Rhyhorn Ground/Rock, when that'll mean they have the same weaknesses and strenghts?
 * I mean, Geodude is a Pokemon that looks like a stone, hence the rock/ground. Rhyhorn is a being that lives underground (according to the Pokedex), and has stone plating, rather than being made of stone. Ground/rock. It's not a gameplay thing, but a nice little differentiation between pokes that have the same time.
 * Type one is the primary type, while type two is the secondary attribute. I.e. Charizard is a Fire-type with flying characteristics and Bulbasaur is a Grass-type, but poisonous.
 * And yet Moltres and Ho-Oh are both Fire-Flying, instead of Flying-Fire, as one would suppose...
 * NOTHING is primarily Flying. Flying is always a secondary type.
 * And that just keeps bugging me!
 * What bugs me is that Gyrados, Mantyke and Mantine are all Flying types too... when they live in the ocean and don't have wings.
 * But Bulbapedia states: 'Unlike real-life manta rays, which can only "fly" through water, Mantine can literally fly in the air if they gain enough speed.' Sooo...
 * Gyarados (when will people learn to spell it correctly?) is partly based on Chinese dragons, which are pretty well known for flying without wings. The Mantine line's pectoral fins basically qualify as wings - to the point where they even learn Wing Attack - and they're explicitly stated in the Pokédex as being able to fly out of water with enough speed buildup.
 * Flying is something Pokemon do. It's not what Pokemon are. (Then again, by that logic, nothing should be primarily Fighting.)
 * But, as most major martial artists will tell you, you don't simply fight, you ARE a fighter.
 * But birds aren't flyers by nature?
 * What about Piplup and its ilk?
 * Piplup's line are based on penguins, which are flightless.
 * ...'Flying without wings'? WESTLIFE SECOND MOVIE ENDING FLASHBACK. God I love that song.
 * I was just reading through, then I realized that every single team in every single game is profoundly stupid. Currently, Team Galactic dissolved as soon as Cyrus disappeared, and after speaking with Saturn, I found that these guys had no idea what they were doing and basically went along with the plan just because Cyrus told them to. Can't there be ONE team member that is actually smart other then the boss?
 * Saturn is in denial. He's the first person to tell you what the team's ultimate goal was, so he can't really expect us to believe him when he tells us that he had no idea.
 * Cyrus' plan would have involved destroying the universe. Anyone he told about it would refuse to help him unless they were as crazy as he was.
 * I'm not sure if this is in Diamond/Pearl, but in Platinum, Cyrus told Team Galactic that he'd use Dialga and Palkia to remake the world, presumably with them in charge. He was lying to their faces, but it's still a valid motive.
 * Cyrus wasn't lying. He did plan to remake the world. What he didn't tell them was that he'd be the only one to survive the pressing of the universe's Reset Button.
 * Cyrus stated he has no emotions whatsoever and plans to erase everyone else from existence; he clearly doesn't care if his grunts are smart or well equipped so long as they can do the simple tasks he assigns them.
 * He's also a lying liar who lies. He clearly HAS emotions, and in all honesty he doesn't hide them all that well.
 * In the first generation, Red defeated Team Rocket's boss Giovanni, who goes into hiding subsequently. In the next generation games, it is shown that Team Rocket is still active, even without Giovanni. Sure, they're trying to find out where he went, but they're managing, having spread throughout Johto, taken over a radio tower, and other various crimes.
 * It's implied that these crimes came after three years of a lack of activity in Kanto or Johto. And what's the actual question? That new Team Rocket is dumb? Well... maybe.
 * Or they could've been being smart for once and laying low until they grew stronger again.
 * And in the third generation, Team Magma's plan to "expand the land" involves blowing up a small, landlocked volcano. The lava wouldn't even make it past Mauville, let alone all the way to the ocean.
 * emerald fixes this by having groudon under there. the eruption would have presumably woken it up
 * Not to mention the fact that an erupting volcano would be far more likely to destroy every nearby town and ruin the land, making it impossible for humans or Pokemon to live there. Then again, Team Magma's plan was to cause a volcano to erupt by using a meteorite.
 * Charon, of Team Galactic, seems pretty savvy before he gets caught--he doesn't care about Cyrus or all the universe-destroying stuff, he's just in it to extort large amounts of money. Jupiter and Mars know when it's time to beat feet. And at least Team Magma/Team Aqua wise up when they see the damage they've done.
 * Why is the main character constantly asked to deliver packages and letters in the games? Do those regions not have a postal service or something?
 * With ten-year-olds running around for free labour, as well as Pokemon such as Zigzagoon or Wingull that can deliver messages... Who NEEDS a postal service?
 * They probably just gave the packages and stuff to the protagonists because he/she is on their way there anyways. It's free to send a random person who knows the person who you're sending it to.
 * Then again, the postal service between all but the largest towns may consist of no more than a guy on a bicycle, and a pokemon trainer would probably be more reliable than even a truck to get the package unharmed to another town.
 * In the mystery Dungeon games, the freaking POKEMON have a mail delivery service, essentially consisting of wingull delivering letters. So why don't humans just do that? Many different species of animals in real life have been trained to do that, and pokemon are FAR more intelligent than pigeons.
 * I think in this case, it's more like "So you're going to ___? While you're there, could you just deliver this for me, if it's not any trouble?" And at the start of the games, like in GSC, the whole errand thing was more "I'm busy with research and you just want to get out and travel a bit. The town's a few minutes away, so could you pick this up for me kthx?" Living in a village, I go on errands like this all the time for my parents, so it's not that big a deal. Also, consider that it's not that big a deal for you, but some of the people who need these things done don't have pokemon, and even if they did, most of them would be kept as pets and wouldn't be suitable for battle. Personal safety and common sense dictates that they should just leave it to someone who has more protection.
 * "Your Pokemon are fully healed, we hope to see you again" .... These friendly nurses HOPE that your Pokemon all faint again? What a bunch of jerks.
 * She's just being polite. Like most politeness, it is empty and meaningless. She doesn't really "hope to see you again" anymore than the great majority of people asking how you are doing want an answer other than "fine."
 * Actually, it can likely be construed as "We hope that if you should ever need a PC, healing for your Pokemon, or a safe place to rest, you will see us as capable and trustworthy."
 * I could buy that if Pokemon centers were a business, but they are offered free of charge.
 * There's a very simple answer to this: the entire point of the game is going out and battling. Any good trainer will want to make sure their partners are kept healthy. Since this is common sense to the nurse (but apparently not to so very many players, since this is still being asked), she's simply saying that she hopes you'll be a good trainer to your Pokemon and get them healed after battles.
 * Even if you don't take a pounding in a battle, you're still losing PP when you turn the enemy poke inside-out with Spacial Rend. They're hoping that not only do you keep them healthy, you also make sure they get enough "sleep".
 * Then again, consider how dangerous Pokemon can be. When she says "We hope to see you again!" she could actually be saying "We hope you aren't maimed/killed by any feral Pokemon!"
 * HeartGold and SoulSilver changed it to the more benevolent-sounding "Please, come back again any time!" Presumably, whatever organization is in charge of Pokémon Centers became aware of the Unfortunate Implications.
 * This troper thinks they should say something else maybe along the lines of what they said in HG/SS, "Please come back again any time", in Isshu. Especially since there are marts inside the centres in Isshu. Maybe because Isshu is based off of America, which likely wouldn't have public health care (what keeps Pokemon centres running, dur.) they have to have marts in them to keep from going bankrupt and there aren't Pokémon insurance companies to charge for uninsured 10-15 year olds coming in.
 * In Platinum (in the German version at least), the nurse sometimes says something around the lines of "I hope you will become a famous trainer!", which sounds a bit weird coming from someone you don't know personally and who probably doesn't know anything about what you did, except maybe from the occasional TV interview.
 * Okay, so playing Platinum, I get all this flak for almost going into the tall grass with no Pokemon of my own at the start of the game from the NPCs. But if that's the case, how do people get their own Pokemon to begin with other than a gift from someone else? Did Arceus assign the first Pokemon to a first trainer when he created the universe or something?
 * Life actually was pretty dangerous before they learned to capture and train Pokémon, you know. They just killed the Pokémon with machetes.
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation. Many people actually have their Pokémon like pets(out of the Pokéball) or capture them without a Pokémon in the mangas.
 * The Vendor trash, and other first stage/baby mons have sucha high catch rate that you can catch them with a normal Pokeball with perfect accuracy without needing to weaken, also take into consideration the safari, where you don't weaken Pokémon to catch them, you just need the right equipment.
 * I imagine that the most common way for trainers to get their first Pokémon is to either get one of their relatives who is already a trainer to go out and catch one for them, or like Wally in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, they visit their local gym leader and get them to help them catch one.
 * Isn't visiting the gym to get your first "starter" Pokemon how it worked in the anime?
 * Nah, not the Gym. We see in a Hoenn episodes that towns without Professors get their starters from Nurse Joy.
 * Ash and the other guys from Pallet Town got their starters courtesy of Professor Oak, who gave them away for free.
 * Also, there were three starters and four guys. They were clearly special mons, not just any starter. Actually, in yellow Prof. Oak personally captured your Pikachu for you.
 * Other aspiring trainers could go and catch their first own Pokemon themselves, but your character is a 10 year old kid who has no business fighting wild Pokemon with his own hands.
 * Maybe it was the same way early man domesticated wolves?
 * This used to bug me too, until I realized how easy it was to go out and capture a Bug or Normal type (like Weedle or Bidoof) with just a normal Pokeball, which costs as much as a can of fizzy. Presumably a lot of trainers start out like that.
 * The old man catches them. He doesn't need to weaken Pokemon.
 * Then again, the old man is also the Gatekeeper for your friendly neighborhood Eldritch Abomination, so one would think catching a Weedle isn't too hard for him.
 * Some of them might be given hand-me-down eggs from older siblings or friendly trainers, others probably save up and go to the Safari Zone.
 * Obvious solution: The first trainer stole a Pokemon egg and raised it once it hatched.


 * Am I the only person who thinks that Fire types should be strong against rock types (considering some rocks can be melted at the right temperature), and poison strong against fighting and water types (Since water can be polluted and most fighters are beaten by getting poisoned, though a cliche in movies)?
 * Well yes, rocks can melt. At ridiculously extreme temperatures. You put a rock in your average campfire, and it's just going to get hot to touch- it's not going to get changed. Most fire types don't spit out fire that hot. With poison vs. fighting, there's a case for it, but there's also a case then that poison should be strong against all the meatwads. For water, I would tend to think the opposite- poison gets quickly diluted in water and rendered ineffective.
 * Actually, this is why rocks are resistant, because it takes so much energy to melt rock that it makes them effective at blocking heat, see Rock Beats Laser (See the part talking about real life).
 * You didn't really explain the deal with poison vs fighting.
 * Sure, he/she/it did, if not very clearly. Since fighting types are assumed to be buff, fit Pokemon, it could also be assumed that their bodies would be more capable of resisting and filtering toxins. In metaphor; If you present one dose of venom to yourself (A "normal" body), and one dose of the same venom to Michael Phelps (A body that's in ridiculously good shape), Michael Phelps is a lot more likely to come out of it with less damage than you are.
 * To wit: Most fighting-types have a high metabolism and possibly a fast heartbeat, which allows poison to spread rapidly through their bloodstream.
 * Incorrect: generally the healthier you are, the stronger your heart is, which means that your heart rate is slower because it can pump more blood with one beat than a weaker heart.
 * This troper holds that Poison should be strong against both Fighting and Psychic types (you try moving or thinking much when you're sick). It would make the poison-type more viable, certainly, and it makes more sense than Psychic overpowering Poison.
 * This Troper thought of it as thus: Fighting is weak to Poison because they have to touch the toxic things, whereas Psychics can lob 'em around telepathically. And as a child, she thought Water would beat Poison because it'd purify it or something...
 * Personally this Troper would like to see Water become weak to Poison, if only to give it more than one type to be super-effective against. And back to the Fire point, I find it funny that Fire isn't effective against Rock but works wonders against Steel-type Pokemon.
 * Well, with steel, there is this little thing known as 'blacksmithing'...
 * Metal conducts heat really well. Like, super well. Ever tried putting a seatbelt on on a hot day? Used to drive me nuts as a kid.
 * Rocks get hot on the outside, and take forever to get hot on the inside. Steel-type Pokemon conduct heat so well that it will heat up inside quickly, boiling whatever internal organs they have if they are exposed too long.
 * Gameplay purposes - if Rock was weak against fire, then why bother using it? Maybe to take out flying and bug types, and maybe an ice type if you're lucky and they don't know any water type move? Granted, it's alright enough considering enough types don't resist it a lot.
 * Just picked my old Gold version the other day, and realized something with a bit of Fridge Logic. The rival in these games is depicted as cruel and fundamentally evil, who could care less about his Pokémon unless they're strong. He has a Crobat near the end. Golbat only evolves into a Crobat through happiness, and the way that the rival treats his Pokémon doesn't seem like he'd treat one nice enough to get it to evolve. Especially since it's a Golbat; they aren't that strong of a Pokémon compared to a lot of others, so how did it evolve? It wasn't traded, either, you fight it as a Zubat earlier.
 * It's only a Crobat the final time you face him, right? By this time, he's taken Lance's lessons about treating his Pokémon right to heart, so I think Golbat's evolution is supposed to be a symbol of that. Then again, if you go by pure game mechanics, it's not that hard to get a Golbat to evolve so long as it doesn't faint in battle much. Assuming it never fainted aside from the times it fought you and Lance, it wouldn't take that long to evolve. The third possibility comes from Prof Elm's aide when he claimed that a Pokémon used by an evil trainer will eventually turn evil itself. I guess Zubat/Golbat grew to agree with the Rival's outlook on Pokémon and how they should be strong.
 * It's because the rival changed his attitude on Pokemon. How was that not clear to anyone? The REAL question here is why CYRUS has a Crobat in Diamond/Pearl.
 * It's not that hard to get a Pokemon's happiness up to max. Just battle with it for a few days.
 * Happiness in Slavery
 * Cyrus isn't as emotionless as he'd like to think. You'll notice he's also a bit quick to anger for someone trying to destroy such passions.
 * he could have just stolen it
 * Nah, I'm pretty sure in Platinum at least he's shown to have a Golbat. He could've discarded that and nicked a new Crobat, but...
 * Just think of his Golbat like a hammer (that's, at best, how Cyrus would consider it). Do you deliberately leave your hammer sitting in a can of salt water? No, you keep it in good condition. Since Cyrus is amoral instead of immoral, he doesn't mistreat it, so basically it figures things could be a lot worse and evolved.
 * Pokémon seems to be a pretty idealistic bunch of games, maybe they were trying to show that even "gray" villains like Silver weren't entirely evil people, just wrong about a lot of things. Maybe Silver only caught Pokémon who had a similar obsession with being the strongest, anyway, and as long as they were strong enough to win battles he didn't berate them too much.
 * What bugs me about this is that Silver is never really depicted as 'evil', just he had a strong desire to be strong and he didn't care for weak Pokemon. He still could've cared for his Pokemon. Near the end he realizes it's probably better to train rather than catch strong Pokemon right off the bat. At least that's what I think.
 * His obsession about power came from the fact that he saw his father Giovanni as weak after he was defeated by Red, and when Giovanni left him he set off to "become strong on his own". He eventually realizes strength isn't everything.
 * Magcargo's body temperature is 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface of the sun is 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
 * The Pistol Shrimp can make that temp with its ever-so-awesome nuclear bubble. It's not impossible, just really, really, retardedly hot. Then again, that temp would basically burn all the oxygen off our atmosphere, so maybe we should re-think this.
 * Presumably Macargo is capable of keeping its body heat contained. In the animÃ©, there was a Ponyta who would burn anyone it didn't trust with its mane, but once it did trust someone, they could ride it without suffering any pain at all.
 * One suspects the real temperature is 180 degrees Fahrenheit and someone accidentally added the extra zeros when typing up the entry.
 * The Pokedex researchers Did Not Do the Research.
 * See also, Alakazam's IQ being over FIVE THOUSAAAAAAND!!!
 * Because many Pokedex entries are obviously not true I think some of the entries are just myths, urban legends and Common Knowledge.
 * Dude, one thing is to assume Shedinja's hole will suck someone's spirit. That's vague and creepy. Another one, totally different, is tacking huge and definite numbers there. That's just bullshit.
 * And how come you don't get your soul sucked out when you use Shedinja?
 * Supposedly Raticate slows down if you cut off its whiskers, which you would presumably only know by actually doing that. Whoever compiled the Pokedex is clearly an out-and-out liar/psychopath.
 * And is also, apparently, you.
 * During the very very first episode of the anime, the Pokedex said something about Rattatta (actually, I can't remember what Pokemon it was, but let's say it was Rattatta) and how it likes to play pranks on stupid trainers? All I know is that it called Ash stupid.
 * The people responsible for the Pokédex entries have no sense of scale.
 * The Pokedex research are based from YOURS, or rather, THE CHARACTER'S point of view. It's like a scientific diary or journal or something. Obviously if you're just 10 yrs. old you'd exaggerate.
 * When did you fit in the scientific research between catching the pokemon and seeing the entry. Apparently, Prof. Oak's dream is to have a random kid enable every entry in the Pokedex. Imagine a hacker getting ahold of a Pokedex. "You captured every single Pokemon in the world? You were never even given a starter pokemon!" I'm seriously starting to doubt Oak's trustworhiness.
 * I don't see why it can't be an accurate measure of Magcargo's power. Somehow its skin is just super-insulated so it doesn't cause ridiculous convection currents and superheat the atmosphere. Why isn't Magcargo the undisputed most powerful Pokemon then? Easy. They all have similar levels of power. Steelix is several times harder than diamond, Charizard can melt boulders, Tyrannitar causes maps to be redrawn, etc. This also provides a convenient explanation for why a ruthless crime syndicate like Team Rocket never just pulls out a gun. Any Pokemon is several orders of magnitude more powerful than a firearm, so they have no reason to bother with conventional weaponry.
 * Even Magikarp? Pre-evolution?
 * Yes, even Magikarp. Sort of. The Platinum Pokedex entry for it states it can use Splash to potentially jump a mountain...it just can't hurt an enemy.
 * So Pokémon are to humans as 40,000 is to everything else in existence?
 * This is probably why Rocket/Magma/Aqua/etc. grunts don't just attack you after you beat their Pokémon. Even a Pokémon that's low on HP and exhausted from battle is presumably able to wipe the floor with an average human.
 * Well, Magma and Aqua grunts generally believe themselves to be good guys, and so wouldn't mob a small kid. And Rocket grunts seem to be more along the lines of petty thieves than murderers.
 * And then there is Galactic who had no problem blowing up a whole lakeside with all life inside of it. But when I think about it: the Magikarps survived the explosion. So Pokémon really have to be several times tougher than a human.
 * And then we have Jessie who caught her Ekans by beating it up! Then again, the anime is hardly canon.
 * Pokémon Ranger crunches the Willing Suspension of Disbelief so hardly... How is circling a Pokémon with a top supposed to be any demonstration of "friendship" or whatever good feelings the phlebotinum is fueled by? I mean... you can shock the Pokémon, trap them in a bubble, throw rocks at them... and they'll recognize your friendship! How's that supposed to work?!
 * Well, my Willing Suspension of Disbelief is hardly challenged at all by Ranger's concept, honestly, mainly because it looks only like a gentler variant of how in normal Pokemon games, attacking wild Pokemon much more offensively than in Ranger and "enslaving" them in Poke Balls causes them to be perfectly obedient and friendly to you as you use them in battles from then on. I just figure that there's some sort of X-technology-or-element within Poke-Balls that's magically infused with the feelings/personality of the trainer holding them, which is mixed with a generally becalming influence in that same technology/element, and when a Poke Ball captures a Pokemon these feelings and that influence are projected as one to the Pokemon enough that the creature is mentally persuaded to accept/not be overly angry at whoever captured it (That would be my answer to other Poke Ball-related questions below). The Ranger Styler here appears to use this same system in a different way, which in this case is administered in incremental "jolts" with each loop of the Styler's energy-line-looping setup, jolting any Pokemon within the loop's field with this influence until the influence's been layered enough times that the Pokemon isn't angry at you and other things in general. Well hey, maybe Pokemon are a lot more agreeable to being enlisted by humans temporarily if they aren't being permanently "enslaved" in Pokeballs, which is why this strange and more cumbersome-looking Ranger method actually works?
 * I feel there's a strong subtext of dominance under the Pokémon concept. Something in the veins of the good ol' "I'm stronger than you, you should join me!" stuff. But at least in the games it makes sense, it feels more like you are ''forcing' the Pokémon into becoming yours(the whole weakening and, sometimes, rock throwing stuff). Ranger just makes it look stupid, every five minutes reassuring it's not "beating", but "befriending".
 * It wouldn't be the first time we've seen a character get the crap befriended out of them.
 * Why do Venonats look so much like Butterfrees? Did the sprites get mixed up or something?
 * This Butterfree/Venomoth peculiarity actually appears to be a mistake. While there are plenty of different species that look similar, it's clear that Butterfree and Venomoth had their sprites switched somehow (Personally, I like to imagine it happening like those old Reese's Peanut Butter Cups commercials). First, compare the appearances of Venonat and Butterfree: Butterfree shares Venonat's feet, hands, mouth, eyes, antennae, and body colour - especially notable considering the fact that Venonat is nothing more than a purple puffball with said features. Venomoth, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing in common with Venonat. Next, compare Venomoth to Caterpie and Metapod. Again, they have a suspicious amount in common. They have the same eyes, the same basic body structure, and the same forehead crest - compare Metapod's head to Venomoth's. Butterfree looks nothing like its evolutionary family. There's really no denying it - Nintendo made a mistake. It seems like they slipped up in the first generation of Pokemon games - rather than owning up to their blunder, they left it as it was.
 * Wouldn't they realize this obvious mistake on the test stage? I mean, it's not like they just program the game and send it to the stores, there's tons of tests to do, someone would have noticed that.
 * Because when you're constantly finding obvious mistakes, obvious starts to become a bit relative. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes to relaize the obvious mistake because you know something is supposed to happen that way and dismiss it, and then the guy you're impressing by testing the game points out that, yes, making the pokemon very weak makes it easier to catch like it's supposed to, but shouldn't knocking it out completely make it extremely easy to catch? Shouldn't the game just say no when you use a rare candy on a level 100 pokemon? And then you start searching for the minor bugs, so the fact j finially works overshadows the fact x is now half broken. Because after the 256th time playing through this part, you know you can do y to get to j faster or z to skip it entirely. And this is unrelated to Pokemon, but imagine the sorrow of a programmer with no tester. That 256 estimate listed above? More like 1024. Programmers in general are screwed, really (but, even as a programmer I must admit I feel sorry for the Pokemon graphics designers. Imagine how much they'll have to do in the 6th generation with 700 something pokemon in 3D, but probably still with all the darn 2d sprites, too).
 * Their Japenese names are derived from "butterfly" (Butterfree, which is its name in both languages) and "moth" (Morphon), and it's clear from the wing shape that Butterfree's sprite is supposed to be a butterfly and Venomoth's is supposed to be a moth's. Also, can you and everyone else quit saying "Nintendo" whenever you're talking about the people who design the games? You're not helping your case that the developers made a mistake when you can even remember who the actual developers are.
 * I'd say the name of the company has very little bearing on whether or not you're inclined to make mistakes. We also are explicitly talking about the sprites here, so the names have no bearing either.
 * Does that even matter? The point in case is: Venonat looks like it'd evolve into Butterfree, whoever the designers are(Gamefreak, I suppose?), that's the point. How does a gnat turn into a moth, anyway?
 * Are you forgetting a fish turning into a sea serpent?
 * Ah, that one is special. A Chinese myth says that a carp that swims up a certain (magical) waterfall will turn into a dragon when it reaches the top. That's probably the basis for Magicarp/Gyarados and later Feebas/Milotic.
 * Butterfrees look like butterflies. Venomoths look like moths. Unless if Game Freak did a messup with the heads of the sprites, I don't see any problem with the Venonat -> Butterfree not Venomoth "error." Then again, switching the heads of Butterfree and Venomoth... *shudders*
 * Not necessarily, have you ever seen pictures of pupae? Caterpillars look nothing like butterflies and some look * exactly* like a Metapod in the pupae stage. Also, moth caterpillars can be fuzzy. However, I will admit this logic can be applied the other way. Moths can look like Metapods in their pupae stage as well and butterfly caterpillars can be fuzzy. So really, the only thing that contributes to the argument is that Venonats and Butterfrees look similar (I will give you that the resemblances are uncanny). However if we go by nature - butterflys and moths going through the stages of caterpillar, pupae and adult - then Caterpies and Metapods make the most sense and Venonats have no right to be morphing into moths because where in nature does a fuzzy fat walking bug turn into a moth? If they were going to go about it logically, they should've done what they did with Eevee or Oddish: have Metapod able to evolve into either Butterfree or Venomoth; just for the simple fact that Venonat makes entirely no sense when compared to nature and I have no idea how they thought of it in the first place.
 * Not to mention Tropius and the Chikorita line.
 * Tropius and Chikorita are based upon the same creature(long necked dinosaurs), it's just normal that they look somewhat alike.
 * Well, yes... but they're also both Grass types. That's easily similar enough to be weird that they ain't part of the same line..
 * Um... both Wurmple and Caterpie are bugs, and both evolve into butterflies... and still they aren't of the same line. I think Chikorita is a "flowersaur", while Tropius is a "treesaur", so they just didn't find a really good motive for putting them into the same line.
 * Plus, you know, there's that thing about Tropius having gargantuan leaf-wings on his back, the dark-green and brown skin/armor, and the bananas/juicy, delicious fruit... -shrug-
 * Delicious fruit, you say?
 * Wurmple and Caterpie lines aren't as strange actually. There are LOTS of butterflies running around and Butterfree and Beautifly do look quite different to each other. All Tropius is missing is Vine Whip.
 * Sigh... and there were multiple kinds of sauropods, and they mostly looked alike(compare a brontosaur and a brachiosaur: almost twins). That, and Tropius is clearly a banana-tree-saur, and bananas don't have classical flowers, while Meganium clearly is a giant flower plant... look, let's just stop at the sixth bullet, ok?
 * You do realize that the Brontosaur was a mistaken conglomeration of skeletons from several sauropods including the Brachiosaur, hence it's similarity? It was removed as a species over 10 years ago, though not from the Flintstones.
 * ... I oughta punch you... but instead I'll just say: then substitute Brontosaur with your favourite sauropod that is not a Brachiosaur. Really, people, this is over-pettiness!
 * And yet, Banana trees with vines would not be the weirdest shit this series has tried to pull.
 * User:Pro-Mole calls coincidence. Something in the veins of "parallel evolution", the fenomena that created a marsupial version of many non-marsupial creatures in Australia (including the noiw extinct marsupial tiger, actually a stray dog). That, or the people at design didn't know how to make segmented eyes in a different fashion...
 * Or guessing by the fact that they're the same type of Pokemon with simular evolutionary lines, they may well be related species.
 * They don't actually look that much alike. (Pictures taken from the original sprites in each case: Red+ Green, Ruby and Gold.)
 * Dude! Venonats! Not Venomoths! Look at those eyes and mouth. And not just sprites, but the official art, too.
 * Well, if resemblance had to be a guide on evolution, Bellossoms shouldn't evolve from Glooms (do they? They changed so many things that I don't even know anymore), but from Roselias...
 * No wai. They look waay more like Oddish (which evolves into Gloom) than Roselia. Think features & coloration rather than overall shape.
 * By game rules, Ditto cannot breed with Ditto. So...where do baby Ditto come from?
 * I recall in Science class (no way!) our teacher telling us this: some creatures in real life can actually produce more of their species by having a part of their body removed from the rest (like starfish, for example). Who says that Ditto can't do this, as well?
 * Ditto being 1) asexual and 2) a shapeless blob in its natural form, one can assume they reproduce by fission, like slime molds and bacteria.
 * Pity there's no technique for that in the game. "Clone" or somesuch.
 * This is a recent problem, though. In the first game with breeding, Ditto could breed with another Ditto just fine, producing more Dittos until the cows came home. Nintendo took that out when they made the breeding more sophisticated, when Ditto started to have more effects on the offspring.
 * Really? Why?...
 * At the risk of turning this into an FAQ, Nintendo started having the parents of bred Pokemon have greater and greater influence on the abilities of the children. If Ditto could still breed with Ditto, the Elite Tweaker subset of the game audience would breed one or two Dittos that could produce offspring with absurd stats with the right personality (serious, just don't ask), and use those to produce absurd teams. Theoretically, this is all still possible, but this would require so much more work that most gamers don't bother. Breeding Ditto would greatly speed up the process.
 * And now most breeders just get a hacked ditto. There are also limits to what can be done to improve stats (+ 8 point on every stat, if I remember it right), so it's far from absurdly overpowered.
 * Size is fundamentally messed up in the Pokemon universe. But still, they could have avoided putting a freaking whale in the game (Wailord) who should be able to win fights just by being launched from a Pokeball and crushing his opponent to a pulp. As it is, you can defeat the thing with a suitably leveled Pikachu.
 * Don't forget Improbable Species Compatibility - any number of smaller Mons, such as Skitty, are in the same Egg Group as Wailord, the largest Pokemon in the series to date.
 * Well, we've seen Giant Pokemon before, so a Giant Skitty probably isn't too out there, evening things out a tad. Conversely, a Giant Wailord probably doesn't bear thinking about.
 * Not to forget miniatures of said Pokemons, or dwarfmons.
 * Not to mention how one of the largest Pokemon is such a sissy. Onyx is apparently made of ancient styrofoam or something.
 * You mean like this?
 * That wouldn't actually hurt that much, since Wailord appears to be roughly twice as dense as air (1.7 kg/m^3, using some very, very rough approximations).
 * How the heck can Pokemon fit inside Pokeballs? Not only that, how is it that just by catching them they are instantly brainwashed into obeying the trainer?
 * In the original games and manga, they're shrunk. In the anime and later games, they're turned into pure energy and stored away. As for the second question, according to the anime, at least, wild Pokemon that attack trainers actually want to be caught, but only by strong trainers, and they battle to see if they're worthy of training them.
 * Of course, a few of Ash's have skipped the battle part and gone staight to joining his team. Perhaps his previous actions in the same episode count as proof enough...
 * The truth is that Pokemon is a thinly-veiled metaphor for BDSM relationships. In theory, the dominant ("Pokemon Trainer") is the one in control of everything. But upon observation, the submissive ("trained Pokemon") is the one with all the actual power. Oh, wait, this isn't the Wild Mass Guessing page...
 * Wait, I thought they turned into data, and that's how they're stored on PC? Which also explains why Porygon can manifest in the real world - it's just the same process backwards.
 * In the manga, at least, badges literally brainwash pokemon (love and affection just make it More Than Mind Control).
 * However, in the games, it's noted that badges 'work' because they serve as proof of a trainer's skills, which in turns helps to convince their pokemon that said trainer is worthy of respect. The anime takes this in stride-- as Ash earns more badges and becomes more skilled as a trainer, he has an easier time befriending difficult pokemon.
 * The 'Two-type' limit aside, why aren't Charizard and Gyarados Dragon-types? They're Dragon enough for Clair and Lance, both Dragon trainers...
 * Probably because of competitive balance. (Seriously a starter with the over powered dragon type?)
 * Obviously Charizard isn't a dragon. He's a fire-breathing lizard...
 * Apparently in generation two we had the introduction of egg groups. Pokemon like Charizard, Tyranitar or Gyaridos could learn dragon type attacks because of the egg group. They were a part of the dragon egg group (along with the real dragon-types).
 * Semantics. Altaria's a Dragon-type and it's a fricking bird. So something that looks like a Dragon, acts like a Dragon and breathes fire like a dragon...
 * Flygon's a Dragon-type and it's a fricking antlion. Kingdra's a Dragon-type and it's a fricking seahorse. Dialga's a Dragon-type and it's a fricking giant metal horse. What's your point?
 * Time for a little history lesson! Why do the dragon trainers have Horseas, Seadra, and Kingdra? Why is Kingdra a dragon type? Well those of you who know the story of Fruits Basket (Why does the dragon turn into a sea horse when he's hugged?!) can probably answer that. If not, lemme explain - The Japanese saw the Sea Horse as a baby dragon.
 * Antlions, AKA "Sand Dragons."
 * Dialga's a Dragon-type and it's a fricking giant metal horse.? Oh, you make me laugh so.
 * Dialga a horse? It's based on a sauropod.
 * To be fair, The Other Wiki says that birds are descended from dinosaurs, so it makes a sort of sense to have Altaria be a Dragon-type...
 * Altaria has whiskers at least! This troper knows very little about Asian culture, but don't Asian ideas of dragons conventionally have whiskers? Weirdly, this made total sense to me...
 * Altaria doesn't have whiskers if I am not totally blind. I always thought of it as a dragon/lizard living in a cloud. There is probably a Japanese myth to this somewhere.
 * I think it's a Peng. It's a bird, but it has cloud like wings and depicted with a dragon's head.
 * While we're at it, why is Gyarados a flying type in the first place? He can't learn any flying moves, he has no wings and there's nothing particularly bird-like about him.
 * Some old legend about a fish swimming up a waterfall, going through something called the Dragon's Gate and getting turned into a "Flying Serpent". Yes, according to the Fan Dumb, there's a difference...
 * Lots of the pokemon in the game have some root in mythology. Dunsparce is a tsuchinoko, Castform is a teru teru bozu, Arcanine is a Shisa, and the Regis are all Golems.
 * Actually, Gyrados being Water/Flying is a clever bit of game design used to counter his Disc One Nuke nature. Because he's Water and Flying, he's doubly (well, not really in the math, but still) vulnerable to Electricity. That's how I see it, anyways.
 * ^ A tad pointless in a game where a x2 effective move can often be enough for a One-Shot-Kill; In those circumstances, a x4 weakness is overkill. It's not much of a Disc One Nuke if it can be OSK'd by a Pichu.
 * Water/Dragon is only weak to Dragon. In RBY, the ONLY Dragon attack did set damage (Dragon Rage). So back when Gyarados was introduced, well, that would mean that Gyarados would have had no weaknesses. Combine that with great stats, and, well, you have one lethal killing machine.
 * To the above troper; I think you're forgetting to put stats and items into consideration. No way in hell a Pichu is going to one-hit kill a Gyarados unless it's severely shifted in the rodent's favor.
 * Pichu's are legally able to learn Volt Tackle (an egg move). And even Thundershock will be absolute murder at x4 damage.
 * I just ran them through this calculator (let's assume Lv100, 31 IVs across the board, no EVs anywhere, neutral nature, no stat alterations, no items, Pichu x1.5 bonus with STAB, no critical hit). Volt Tackle; I'll concede you that for the most part (though Gyarados can still survive in some cases), but good luck trying to get that attack in with the rodent's paltry defenses. Thundershock; stop exaggerating. This isn't going to take off even half; you need Thunderbolt-level power to get a serious chance at a one-hit kill.
 * On top of that, getting a Pichu with Volt Tackle involves getting a Pikachu with a Light Ball, which is kind of a Disc One Nuke itself.
 * Because typing was seriously screwed up in the first game. Things like the number of Grass-types which are also Poison types, a ludicrous 33 poison types out of the 151 original Pokemon, and the complete lack of effective attacks against Psychic-types. Although it is interesting to note that in the first game Dragon and Ghost types are the only ones super-effective against themselves, each of them is only present on one evolutionary line consisting of 3 Pokemon, and neither has any substantive attack moves.
 * Well, there is one good move against Psychic-types: Pin Missile. Of course, only Beedrill (who's Poison-type anyway) and Jolteon know it, but it makes the latter one a fine addition to any team.
 * Mainly because they only had two identifiers at the time, and decided that Fire/Flying and Water/Flying needed to be emphasized over their Dragon-ness. Note that as soon as the whole Egg Groups thing came out, they got thrown right into the "Dragon" group.
 * There's also the fact that a Dragon-typed starter pokemon would be a little too imbalancing gamewise, even for the massively imbalanced Red/Blue Pokemon games.
 * Not so. While making Gyarados Water/Dragon would have been game breaking, making Charizard Fire/Dragon wouldn't have. He would have had weaknesses to Rock and Ground, two attacking still key today (granted, he still has those weakness, but Fire/ Dragon would have helped his tanking).
 * And that helped Blastoise kill it how? Ingame, it would offbalance the starter trio to much (Well, back then Ice would have been super effective because Fire didn't resist it back then, but it's the FIRE STARTER. How many are going to look at it and throw ICE at it?)
 * Gyarados isn't Dragon-type because a Water/Dragon Pokemon's only weakness is to Dragon moves. However, the only Dragon-type damaging move that existed in the first generation (Dragon Rage) always does 40 damage and ignores type advantages. So, essentially it wouldn't have had any weaknesses. (Note that now that proper Dragon-type attacks exist, there are two Water/Dragon Pokemon in Kingdra and Palkia).
 * Also, consider this: In Generation 1, the only dragon types were Dratini, Dragonair, and Dragonite. Maybe they intended for the Dratini line to be the only dragons?
 * Or, more likely, the simply wanted to keep Dragon-type pokemon as rare as possible- in which they did, to some extend, succeed.
 * Actually, it's because they threw the whole dragon type in at the last minute. Only one move, only three pokemon. Dragon type was an afterthought. Someone (I think it was the person who runs Cave of Dragonflies) pulled some kind of list of type weaknesses and strengths etc out of the games, and discovered that it didn't include, say, "fire versus dragon" after all the other "fire versus X" listings, and then the whole dragon table was tacked on at the very end.
 * The link is here, if anyone's interested.
 * While it's nice to be free from random attacks, exactly why aren't there any Pokemon in the Sinnoh Underground? You'd at least expect a Diglett or two...
 * Wasn't the Underground made by man? I don't see why wild Pokemon would be too happy running around down there with all the drills and loud, obnoxious hikers that never seem to leave...
 * There are no native Digletts in Sinnoh. You'd expect a Gabite or two, and maybe a Larvitar if you have Diamond...
 * Diglett can be found on that desert route near the Resort Area along with Dugtrio.
 * 'Cause it'd be bloody annoying! That's why.
 * Nevermind that, why can't you ride your bike in the Underground?
 * The hikers ate all the Pokemon, obviously.
 * When you catch a Pokemon and your party is full, the Pokemon is automatically sent to whoever's PC. So why is it that when someone gives you a Pokemon, you need to make room for it in your party? Can't you just do whatever you do with a caught one?
 * Maybe it's not socially acceptable to do so; taking a gift from someone and then immediately storing it away in a PC somewhere, where it can be forgotten easily, just isn't polite.
 * Good point, but I think it's even less polite of the giver to make me go all the way to a Pokemon Center and back first.
 * They're giving you a pokemon that might well be able to shatter mountains someday, and your problem is a minor impoliteness in the method of giving?
 * What bugs ME is that we obviously needed to come up with a reason for that, right? Which means that there isn't really an in-game reason. So... what on earth is the programming reason? It seems like a simple "sendPokemonToPC" function call would wrap this up in a tidy little package.
 * Probably a project error. There must be two functions, "receivePKMN(id)" and "catchPKMN(id)". Understandable, yet not very bright...
 * I think I know what the problem with this is: with catching Pokémon, the game establishes the stats and everything when you fight the things. Sending a received Pokémon to the PC without allowing the game to "observe" its stats by putting it in your party would probably cause problems with the storage system - it'd be like trying to sort Schr Ã¶dinger's Cat as "alive" or "dead" without looking, turned Up to Eleven with all the variables that go into a single Mon.
 * Most likely not. I use a "all encountered Pokémon are shiny" cheat sometimes which interestingly only affects wild Pokémon. Trainers are unaffected and use normally colored Pokés. BUT: when I get a Pokémon or egg from someone, they still are shiny, meaning that the received Pokémon are treated the same as any other wild Pokés you encounter and so it should be no Problem to just shove them into the PC. The reason for getting them into your party is most likely the most simple one: the developers don't want you to forget about them. If you actually fight and catch a Pokémon you will be more likely to remember it than from just talking to someone and the mon then being transferred away.
 * They do do this in FRLG.
 * Hilarious side note - you said do do!
 * Why does Gengar weigh 89 pounds when it's a ghost. I mean, Ghastly and Haunter weigh almost nil, so why the change with the third evolution?
 * Maybe Gengar just likes staying solid more.
 * How do you put Gastly and Haunter on a scale? At least Gengar has legs. (No idea how anyone got Giratina on one, though. Maybe he did it as a favor to Newton?)
 * Ignoring the fact that the question was hammered between two others... you make them sit upon it, like a baloon. That, or they stay floating and causing a force field downwards, making the scale accuse a weight. Maybe that's why they weight so little, measurement error.
 * You think that's bad? Giratina, the legendary dragon/ghost type pokemon, weighs over 1600 pounds. Seriously, if it's solid enough to weigh over half a ton, then it should be solid enough to be affected by normal and fighting type attacks.
 * I liked the "inner black hole" theory someone proposed here before The Great Crash...
 * And, oh: think about this: one cubic decimeter of water weights 1 kilogram, roughly 2 pounds. It is "solid enough" to weigh all that, but still punching water will not cause it any damage. Just because something weights a lot, it doesn't mean it is solid.
 * Ok, maybe I'm not good at judging how much people weigh by looking at them, but how does Gardevoir, with its thin body and thinner legs weigh 106 lbs? Surely its head and "dress" doesn't weight that much.
 * For the record, Gardevoir is 5'3", which is pretty much the height of this underweight, short Asian troper, exactly. My weight? About 106 pounds.
 * If you put gas in a container, it can get onto a scale and you can get some readings on it. Really, the difference between gas and solid is that gas molecules are not attached to each other and solid's do. As to how they don't get damage from Normal or Fighting, maybe they just phase out or something.
 * Perhaps being a ghost type doesn't explicitly mean that they're made of gas. Maybe they can interact with physical objects like weight scales and fire/water/grass attacks, but not with things that have souls, i.e. normal type attacks and fighting attacks. Normal type projectiles like hyper beam can be explained as a pokemon firing its soul or life energy.
 * Oh, I know this one. You know how it becomes peoples shadows? When you put it on the weight screen, it becomes your weight. It's a shadow of you. Now, granted, shadows don't weigh anything, but that just makes having him follow you around, ready to kill you and take over your life at any minute all the more creepy.

"Golem used Splash. It's a one-hit KO!"
 * Cubone. Mother's skull. Breeding. Discuss.
 * You managed to break my brain in a mere 5 words. Props.
 * I'm gonna go with Gameplay and Story Segregation.
 * That was their Pokedex entry back in the Red/Blue games, when breeding didn't exist. Nuff said.
 * I'm sticking with the Pokédex is bollocks and we should've stopped listening to it after "IQ of 5,000."
 * Yeah, I supect that Cubone's "mother's skulls" are already present on them after they hatch.
 * It also brings up the question as to why they aren't extinct yet. If they all wear the skull of their mother, that means there is a 1-to-1 ratio of mothers to children. This means each generation should be half as populous as the last, since they are only replacing 1 half of the breeding pair.
 * Also, why is it that you can breed a Cubone and still have its mother? Where does the skull come from? Not to mention siblings.
 * I'm not familiar with breeding in the games, but is it possible to breed Cubones with each other, or only the evolved Marowak? Because if it's the Marowak, then it can be assumed (for the sake of this argument, at least) that the Marowak still has its skull from when it was a Cubone, and just passes that down.
 * Nope, you can breed two Cubone together, and have both the mother and the child in your party simultaneously. Also, you can breed a male Cubone with a Ditto and get a Cubone clone; the baby will still have its "mother's skull" even though its mother was an invertebrate.
 * It's actually simpler with Dittos: They are shape shifters, so they just transform into a Pokémon of the same type but oppositer. It then simply doesn't transform the skull back to goo after becoming a Cubone. Of course, it'd lose some mass from this.
 * Hey, if Ditto can turn into something that can crush most Pokemon by sitting on them, it can regenerate that mass.
 * I came up with my own theory about that: The skull isn't a skull. In fact, it's not even bone. It's a protective helmet that the mother Cubone/Marowak fashions for its offspring while waiting for the egg to hatch, by mixing its saliva into sand/mud/clay/pebbles/etc. (many real life animal species build their nests out of stuff like that) The mother then places the helmet on the infant's head the instant it comes out of its egg. The "mother's skull" thing was born out of hearsay and misunderstandings.
 * It would have made even more sense if Cubone's skull was like a turtle's shell and was in fact fused to it's face.
 * It would make perfect sense, for it to be some kind of exoskeleton.
 * I came up with the idea that Marowak has an exoskeletal structure around its skull that it sheds when giving birth.
 * Look at those little horns. The mother collects Charizard skulls, because Marowak is just that hardcore.
 * I always thought it was an Aerodactyl skull. So depending on your interpretation, Marowak takes down a fire-breathing dragon that can melt rocks or a stone sky demon with razor-sharp teeth.
 * Aerodactyl are extinct (okay, maybe not anymore, but they were until at least before Red's quest, and Marowak predate him). That would either make it impossible, or they simply dig up fossils, which is far less awesome.
 * My theory: the skull's shape is X gene linked; whatever shape the mother has (or the father's mother, in the Cubone(M)/Ditto case) is what the newborn has.
 * This Troper's personal theory is that the mothers skull helmet is like an exo-skeleton, which she detaches and places on her childs head after birth to protect it until the baby's own skull helmet grows in. After doing this the mother is vulnerable, since she can't protect her head, leading to a lot of dead Marowak, which is where the dead mother thing comes from. If you breed a Cubone, the Skull still comes in eventually, its just takes some time to grow.
 * To combine above theory... Cubone, at birth, get a "skull" made by the mother Marowak, by mixing different materials, because Cubone and Marowak have very soft skulls, which is why Marowak have the skulls. Later, when Cubone evolve, it takes off the first "skull," and grows a real exoskeleton. To sum it up, Cubone's skull is a "booster seat" of a sort, till they don't need it any more.
 * My theory: In the wild, Marowak females have multiple offspring before dying, and the babies compete for her bones. The strongest gets the skull, and the weaker ones have to make do with pelvises or ribcages or whatever. For captive breeding, uh... synthetic materials?
 * (* Cue overly long theorizing in 3...2...1...* ) Perhaps the behavior of Cubone wearing skull helmets was something that was developed and ingrained in members of the species, a couple Pokedex entries mentioned that Marowak used to make do without their bone clubs, so perhaps the skull helmet bit came well after Cubone as a species was present. As for the apparently rampant maternal mortality, uhh... Perhaps Cubone/Marowak make extremely protective mothers and don't feed or sleep as frequently as they should after laying their eggs like some animals in real life (you know, to defend them and keep them from becoming Ekans chow) and dramatically increase their likelihood of succumbing to malnutrition or disease, which would explain why your female Cubone/Marowak doesn't die in the day care (honestly, how long does it take to get an egg and hatch it in the games?). As for where the skulls come from for the offspring of surviving mothers or multiple offspring, erm... they are the skulls of other relatives exhumed from the Marowak graveyards, which would explain why most Cubone seem to suffer from chronic depression. As for captive Cubone, um... they have their skulls created by the poke balls they are stuffed in after hatching.
 * Here's my theory: Marowak mothers tend to die after laying their eggs in the wild, for whatever reason, which is why the cubone's always get the mother's skull. However, in a daycare, they're able to keep the mother from dying when it lays an egg. As for the skulls, maybe the male marowaks all gathered in one place when they died, in case the mother survived, which the mother would instintively be able to find? She could just dig up a skull from there before the egg hatches and put it on the baby's head when it's born.
 * Further complicating the matter: when a newborn Kangaskhan hatches from an egg, it already has a child in its pouch.
 * Pokémon don't grow, so it isn't actually a surprise for them to be adult when they rise from the egg. Still, I wonder why after three generations they still haven't made any "Kangaskhid" or something like that yet.
 * This Troper's theory is that they tried but Kangaskid was buggy, leading to 'M (which is why it evolves into Kangaskhan). With a bad taste in their mouth from the 'M bugs, Nintendo decided never to make a baby Kangaskhan.
 * Except for the fact that that's an urban legend that has been around since R/B/Y. Nice try though.
 * Well, Game Freak HAS alluded to growth within different evolutionary stages (e.g. Squirtle's Pokedex entries), they could resolve some of this issue by giving Kangaskhan multiple sprites, e.g. a baby sprite for levels 1-5, an adult sprite for levels >25 and two to four intermediary sprites for everything in between. It would be a neat gimmick and solve a lot of these headaches, but seeing as they couldn't be bothered to create a pre-evo with all of the reference materials they could ever want...
 * Since no pokemon seem able to reproduce asexually, the question is how a Pokémon managed to impregnate the Kangaskhan while it was in the egg. Presumably that thing is just a second head.
 * Problem with that theory: In Pokémon Stadium it crawls out of the pouch and sits on its mother's head during certain attacks.
 * And in Pokemon Ranger, when Kangaskhan uses its beam attack, the baby hides behind the mother.
 * It's probably an underdeveloped parasitic twin; Kangaskhan embryo are formed in pairs, the stronger becoming the 'parent' when it hatched, and the weaker twin becoming the 'baby'.
 * Also, newborn ghost-types: stillborn Pokémon?
 * More like "not alive in the first place".
 * Alternatively, they could be gaseous creatures that behave much like normal animals.
 * Gas-types seem more like it, hadn't it been for the walks-through-walls thing.
 * Maybe they're made of some kind of variable-density protoplasm, like Ghostfreak from Ben 10.
 * They're ghosts as a species, not as the spirit of a dead thing.
 * And Exeggcute (a group of eggs) hatching from eggs.
 * They are actually seeds.
 * Exeggutors have six heads as well, so are Exeggcutes just heads that have fallen off; and then grows into a new Exeggutor?
 * That's actual canon; it's mentioned in one of Exeggutor's Pokedex entries.
 * And we trust the Pokedex, considering many of the arguments above were started by it.
 * And what about Weezing, Dugtrio and Beldum/Metang? When they evolve, they fuse with other Pokémon of the same type. Is it to be assumed that you just find another one somewhere?
 * This is one thing about which I can safely say the Pokedex data is talking bollocks. There is no Fusion in Pokemon, anime or game. Whenever we've seen one of these Pokemon evolve, they just evolve into their higher form without another Pokemon being involved (and you can throw Magnemite into that list, by the by). Even Mantyke evolving to Mantine, which requires you to have a Remoraid in your party, doesn't consume the other Pokemon, despite Mantine's sprite for the first three generations clearly having a Remoraid attached (weirdly, it's Gen IV sprite doesn't have a Remoraid attached, confusing the matter further).
 * On the subject of Magnemite and Magneton, in Pokémon Snap there is an area where there are three Magnemite that you can have fuse together into a Magneton, which might make this even more confusing. (And I'm going with the belief that Snap counts as canon.)
 * Actually Pokemon Snap also shows legendary birds hatching from eggs, so is most likely not canon
 * Maybe it's possible that when they reach the level at which they evolve, they send out some kind of signal that summons other Magnemites/Koffings/Beldums to come and fuse with them.
 * I distinctly remember there being an episode in the anime where a few Magnemites touched together, started glowing, and became a Magneton. It was either in a Grimer-infested Power Plant or in the desert with a herd of Tauros. Both had Magnemites in them.
 * Perhaps they reproduce asexually, and the additional "heads" or whatnot are in fact present within the original Pokemon (in embryonic form) at the moment of evolution.
 * Maybe both work? If we all agree that Magneton > Magnemite anyway, maybe it makes sense for them to team up together and become some kind of... symbiotic robot gang thing?
 * And as usual, Slowpoke is late to this particular party...
 * Also related could be Pokémon that have objects as a part of their character design. This includes Kadabra/Alakazam's spoons, Hypno's penduleum, Farfetch'd's leek, Cubone/Marowak's bone and other "tools".
 * My theory for the combining Pokemon is that Beldum, Magnemite, Koffing, etc. can reproduce in two ways. Sexually, to mix up genes, and asexually, to prepare for evolution. Perhaps this process drains them, and they hide during it in the wild, leading to people to believe that they call others and fuse with them, when really they just don't have all the information. As for Slowpoke, it evolves by being either given a water stone or being traded while holding a Kings Rock. I'm sorry, but that isn't a Shellder. That's a cancerous growth
 * In Pokemon Snap you can see slowpoke evolve into slowbrow by catching shellder on their tails.
 * Maybe it's only wild Beldum, Magnemite, etc. that evolve via bonding. Like a weird social practice. In captivity these pokemon can evolve on their own, but within their own cultures there is a stigma attached to solo evolution. Completely baseless? Probably, but the games seem to be offering no explanation anytime soon.
 * Another breeding issue would be egg groups and who is or isn't in them. The most glaring example would probably be the Ralts family. They all look like they belong in the Humanshape breeding group, due to being very human-like, but instead, they're in the Indetermine egg group. Meaning that they breed with blobs and ghost Pokémon.
 * ...maybe they're all Nightmare Fetishists?
 * They may look humanlike, but they don't necessary reproduce like the Humanshapes. For all we know, they have acres of icky ghost tentacles under those skirts.
 * The Humanshape group itself is very odd by including things that are Humanshaped, but not necessarily humanlike at all. Hot Cacturne On Illumise Action, anyone?
 * It kind of bothers me how dex entries in Gen III and IV talk about the personalities of certain Pokemon (Gyarados are "angry" for instance), since they now have actual natures. I have a Calm Gyarados and a Jolly Cubone.
 * The dex entries are talking about the species in general, not individual members.
 * How the hell does that make it any better? Describing the species in general (stereotyping species of Pokemon as having specific personalities) is exactly what the OP meant.
 * The worst part is the fact that the pokedex is often very mean. Rhydon is stupid, Croagunk is sneaky, I can't remember the actual entries off the top of my head, but they can be very scathing. Joan Rivers, Pokemon Prof, anyone?
 * Groagunk is described as sneaky for survival. Think of it like how some animals in real life are scavengers: They aren't doing it to be mean, they're doing it because it's their niche in the natural order. And gyarados being angry is much the same as alligators/crocodiles being angry: It's how their brains are developed. Calling a rhydon stupid is mean, though...
 * Well we tend to generalize animals with human traits as well. A Rhydon is 'stupid' in human terms so it get's generalized, but as it's own species, it's obviously well off.
 * I have a Calm Primeape. Also, I figure that, for example, a "Jolly" Cubone still wouldn't be the life of the party, but would be fairly Jolly for a Cubone. Like, a neutral level between upbeat and depressed.
 * What does the bottom half of Diglett look like?
 * A friend of this troper suggested Diglett's have a pointy bottom, whilst I assumed they were just flat. It's probably for the best that we don't know.
 * I always figured that it was something like this.
 * This Troper prefers this. Dugtrio, but the principle stands.
 * They have feet. That much is certain.
 * The 3D-Incarnations on occasion show that Diglett has no lower body and ends flat when they're subjected to attacks that launch them into the air.
 * The 3D-Incarnations also show Fish Pokémon flying, what I suppose they don't actually do. Anywhat, Digletts have a "Scratch" attack, and are described as "Mole", so they probably have a mole body, probably aligned to their tunnel entrance. Why the hell they never come out, or how Dugtrios come to be, that's probably some huge Gameplay and Story Segregation.
 * In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, if you enter a Monster House which includes Diglett or Dugtrio, they drop from the ceiling and you can clearly see that they have no feet. HA!
 * I assume they also have their usual dirt pile with them while falling, meaning that the spriters didn't bother to create separate sprites`?
 * In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, the nonviolent NPC Dugtrio refer(s) to having feet, to the surprise of their/his own child. (T)he(y) even say(s) "what do you take us for?!" when asked about it. Presumably, Digletts don't have feet, but Dugtrios do. God only knows how.
 * I'm not sure where you saw that, but a friendly diglett in the first game refers to its feet as well, surprising everyone who hears it. So, that just raises even more questions regarding that particular diglett...
 * This troper once read a fan-fic that proposed that, beneath their cute little heads, they had the vast bodies of an Eldritch Abomination...
 * You mean like this?
 * Extremely coincidental, isn't it, that we have one Pokemon (Diglett) that only shows its face, and another (Cubone) that never shows its face?
 * BOTH Ground-types, at that!
 * ...Has anyone ever seen them in the same room at the same time?
 * Yes. They were fighting.
 * You win, my good troper.
 * Water Pokémon in general. How can you fight with them in, for example, a desert (The fishier ones, not partially-land-dwelling ones like Buizel, Vaporeon, Bibarel, etc.)? And how can the smaller ones use Surf, when their trainer is so much bigger? And how can you use the ones you're Surfing on in battles on water?
 * The same logic that applies with small birds being used as transportation with Fly.
 * Which brings up the even more nonsensical fact that even bug/flying types that are bigger than the trainers (Yanmega, in particular) can't learn Fly at all.
 * Or using Golem while surfing.


 * In the anime you actually can't use many water Pokemon effectively without water present.
 * Simple: you don't necessarily actually ride on the Pokémon when Surfing. You Surf on a piece of driftwood or something and the Pokémon makes the thing stay upright on large waves, rather than forcing submersion into large waves as when it is used as an attack.
 * If you think that's strange, consider that you're still able to ride a Pokemon (via Surf or Fly) when they've fainted.
 * I may be wrong, but I think "fainted" is only what it's called in the English version. In the original Japanese it's just "unable to battle," which is also used in the English dub of the anime.
 * An interesting bit of Fanon gives the pokemon an invisible energy field that protects them from serious damage. When the pokemon's HP runs out, they remain conscious, but the field disappears, and it's illegal to force the pokemon to fight past that point.
 * Don't forget about running from battle by using a Pokemon with the 'Run Away' ability when you're in the middle of the ocean. And no, there exists no water Pokemon with this ability just in case you're rationalizing it that way. Unless Rapidash and Dodrio can run on water, this only serves to make your brain hurt.
 * They're using ninjutsu!
 * Does it bother anyone else at all that ALL water mons can be in any kind of water? Some species have been specifically shown to only appear in oceans or seas, and others in lakes and rivers. Just why don't Polywag shrivel up when in salt water?
 * Because that would be a horrible horrible end for a cute tadpole, and no one would want to see that.
 * On top of all that, you can encounter Entei and Raikou in HgSs... On water. Suicune, I can understand, and even Raikou may just swim instead, but Entei? And before you talk about the impact of the water causing the damage, then tell me how it uses Flamethrower, and how water attacks hurt it (bar Surf and Whirlpool as those have good excuses) when it can just dive under the water to avoid them?
 * This is somewhat explainable by the natural mystique of legendaries; Entei may float slightly above the water due to some unknown power. Also, it is extremely fast, possibly fast enough to run on top of water.
 * Entei also can Run away while asleep. Something like that shouldn't bother you.
 * I think that they're just fast enough to run on water. That's why you only get one shot at them before they get away -- they're running past you without stopping.
 * And what about Flying from on water? You leave your Pokemon there.
 * Drowzee and Hypno are both said to be able to NATURALLY eat dreams. They can only learn Dream Eater by TM. Do wild Drowzees/Hypnos find TMs in the wild or what?
 * This is more understandable in the anime, where TM's don't exist and therefore Dream Eater is learned naturally (the anime has pretty much abandoned the Level-up learnset, for that matter, or at least its order).
 * But wasn't there one episode where Ash fights a trainer who uses Persian and it uses Thunderbolt? Even Ash went WTF when he saw that. Try explaining that through the anime's logic.
 * Easy. In the games, Persian learns Thunderbolt by TM (except in Gen II, for some reason), so it's fair game for a Persian to learn it naturally in the anime. The same would apply to any Pokemon; if it learns something by TM in the games, it can learn it naturally in the anime.
 * TMs are sometimes treated like Move Tutors in the anime. The move isn't learnt naturally but can be taught to the Pokémon if the trainer takes the time to do so. The Persian with Thunderbolt is more likely to be this situation than something a Persian can normally obtain.
 * I've always thought of TMs as what they look like: CDs with clear instructions on the forces and muscle controls needed to learn the move. But then there's the problem with CD players...
 * Also, remember: Dream Eater, besides allowing a pokemon to eat dreams, also allows it to deal damage to its opponent. Maybe Hypno and Drowzee can naturally eat dreams without knowing Dream Eater, but don't hurt the pokemon they're feeding off of.
 * Maybe it has become really popular to teach them that move and the ability is getting into the wild populations via runaways and strays. * Shrugs*
 * In the anime, the equivalent of TMs is when stubborn trainers like Ash try to teach an attack to their pokemon that they didn't even know if it was going to work at the start, but worked. Like Pikachu's Iron Tail, or Grovyle's Bullet Seed.
 * Actually, IIRC, Pikachu learned Iron Tail after a lecture and some coaching from a guy who had a pokemon that knew it, which follows with the anime Move Tutors = TMs theory.
 * Two questions. Firstly, why is it that the "tuber" trainers (and possibly others, like bug catchers) are clearly younger than you, when you are supposedly 10 (the starting age)?
 * We've seen under-10's with Pokemon in the anime too. Maybe 10 is actually the age when someone can go on a journey?
 * From what This Troper knows, it's a generally-accepted theory that children under ten can own Pokemon, but one must be 10 or older to participate in Pokemon League-sanctioned events such as tournaments and Gym Leader battles.
 * Wait. What if by the time you are 10, you literaly have to go? I mean, I donÂ´t think there is a law, or something, but it could be something like "11 and living with his mother". IÂ´m pretty sure the anime has already Jossed me, though.
 * The Pokedex says that Zangoose and Seviper are mortal enemies. Why, then, can they breed?
 * Foe Yay.
 * You win.
 * Rape?
 * I personally think that it's a case of My Species Doth Protest Too Much. I mean, they can work together just fine in double battles...
 * When you raise a cat and a dog at the same time they get along pretty well, too. Since you and the daycare are raising your Pokémon, it is safe to assume that they can get along if they are raised to do so. Pokéball brainwashing may help.
 * How do the Jennys and Joys all look the same? Do they get surgery to make them look the same? Do they reproduce asexually? Are they all Ditto? Or do they kill their kids when they don't look exactly like them?
 * See WMG/Pokémon
 * Why, or better how, can there be male lopunny's and female machoke's? (amongst other pokemon) surely they breed with other pokemon. and surely they dont look like they could be different genders. it makes me hope for more drastic gender differences in the next games...
 * Yeeaah, that's one hell of a close-minded remark. You know, though some Pokemon are based on human society and culture (most on animals though, and you can't figure out the gender by looking at them either), it doesn't mean that they need to wear a ribbon or a cap in order for us to figure out a gender. And I assume you then thinks of it automaticly as male. Isn't it unfortunate that if it has male aspects you do accept it as female but if you're told it's male while having female aspects you don't? I suggest ot read this
 * Um... what? The OP was asking about male Lopunnies and female Machokes. Both are pokemon that look strongly like the opposite sex they actually have. They're both equally Squicky, where's the double standard?
 * The Double Standard here is: Male equals muscle and Woman Equals Hips. It can't be the other way around.
 * Odd. I swear you said "if it has male aspects you do accept it as female but if you're told it's male while having female aspects you don't", which only works in one direction(if it looks female, it can't be male, but it can look male and be female). But I must be mistaken.
 * Thus Double Standard.
 * You said that, but then you said it applies for both sexes. It's not a double standard if the problem is that both sexes should look like we expect them to. There's no double standard, only one standard.
 * Oh, actually User:Pro-Mole had set a question about Loppunies before The Great Crash. This is some huge mistake by the designers, really, but we can only suppose that, yeah, male Loppunies and female Machokes look exactly like their opposite sex. Urk.
 * I'm not sure if Machoke count as mammals, but censoring that would be too hard either way. I don't see how Loppunny doesn't look like it could be male. You can always hope there's a Gallade counterpart, though.
 * But... Machoke and Machamp all wear pants and no shirt... They might look weird with a belt and no pants, but... Well, at least in the official handbook the speedos are flat with no indiciation of the modeling pokemon's gender, but does anyone recall seeing Machoke in the anime?
 * Is there really any reason why a completely different (and fictional) species would share secondary sexual characteristics with humans?
 * No reason at all. Still, as they share the basic body shape with humans, they probably should.
 * I should point out that, regarding Lopunnies, those aren't breasts. The game art shows it with its arms folded. The round fluffy things are its HANDS. I don't see any secondary sex characteristics on this thing at all -- it's a triangle with a head.
 * Never seen breasts even in the official art, but you must admit that these are some killer hips out there...
 * I've been able to draw a masculine Lopunny without changing any anatomy. The thing is because of Gameplay and Story Segregation, The game obviously can't have unique Pokemon in a species so a generalised sprite of the entire species is used. It isn't hard to see male versions of feminine pokemon, especially since in the Pokemon universe, feminine traits are solely from a human perspective. To me, many bird species always look female even, confusingly, female birds with dull colours. Machoke are a bit harder, because of their human traits and notable clothing. But the belt,undergarments arguably have another use and these pokemon are similar to apes in terms of gender differences, but the sprite is censored in females. Even adjusting the size of the chest would cause some trouble.
 * How has nobody asked about female Mr. Mimes yet? I mean...would...would she be Mrs. Mr. Mime?
 * Sure, why not? We've got a Mrs. Pac-Man, after all.
 * Don't forget Gothorita with a 25% chance of being male.
 * Eggs. It bugs me that every, and I say every species of Pokémon, no matter if it's a bug, a reptile, a mammal, a plant or a frikking machine, it lays eggs. Any possible explanation?
 * To save on cart memory, presumably. In universe, it's probably a compatibility thing, to allow the various Pokemon types to interbreed.
 * I always thought of Pokemon as a unique species on their own, just with different variations. It's like how all dogs could interbreed, even though there are tons of different types of dogs.
 * Dude, you're including turtles, butterflies, palm trees, cows, goldfish, robots, jellyfish, pidgeons, beavers, cacti, stones, bagworms and whatnot in the same species... I know the concept of "species" and "variety" is subjective, but what kind of biologist in sane conscience would classify, say, a Chikorita and a Cyndaquil in the same species? Then again, the answer may be: "there are no biologists on Poké-Verse". Yeah, that'd answer pretty much...
 * The manga based on the anime says explicitly that all Pokemon are indeed one species, and that all of the different varieties (no matter how different they look) are sub-species. However, how canonical this is with anything else is unknown.
 * Yeah, if Pokemon are all one species, they are something way far away from normal biology. After all, the creator of the fucking UNIVERSE is a Pokemon!! And there's a whole subspecies (looking at you, Unown) comprised of Eldritch Abominations.
 * I think it's more along the lines of "this Pokemon looks like a turtle" than "this Pokemon is a turtle." I don't think Pokemon are even members of the animal kingdom -- they're some entirely different form of life. So it's natural for them to hatch from eggs and be able to breed across subspecies.
 * Now that you mention it, they do mate anyway. Still, cows laying eggs is just... weird.
 * Pokemon breed with each other to produce fertile offspring. They are a single species by definition.
 * Addendum: except for legendaries. Most of them don't produce offspring, and Manaphy produces unfertile offspring. Check WMG. ;)
 * Never confirmed. They always state that it is unknown where the eggs come from, and only assumed that the Pokemon laid them. So perhaps they don't actually lay the eggs so much as wish upon a Jirachi for a child, which is then brought by a Pelipper.
 * The uncertainty, at least, is confirmed in Diamond. One of the NPCs in Solaceon says that nobody has ever seen a Pokémon actually lay an egg, and that there is still no proof that they do. That just raises further questions, of course.
 * In HGSS, if you have a special Arceus you can trigger an in-game Event where you choose one of the DPPt Legends, and it creates a brand new egg for you, but only after a very...bizarre sequence including images of real-life things. Apparently it's canon that this is how EVERY egg comes to be.
 * ...or maybe that's only the case for that special egg coming from a deity, that will hatch into a deity? I'm sorry if I'm wrong, but I couldn't read the Japanese text... =/
 * That's almost definitely the case.
 * Think about how the protagonist is a relatively young child. Maybe they just don't want to go into details?
 * To confuse issues, there's quite a few Pokedex entries, even after breeding was introduced, that strongly imply mammalian-type births, or even exotic non-egg births. Seems even the creators treat it as just a gameplay mechanic simplification.
 * Could just be that in the wild, the process is hurried along for some species, leading to live births, while in captivity, they can afford the extra development time and lay an egg instead? Although in the end, what it really boils down to is G-Rated Sex
 * And BTW, what's with the plant Pokémon? I mean, there are no real animals, and there are Pokémon counterparts for them. So why do real plants co-exist with plant Pokémon? And while we're at it, what'd the deal with fish, too?
 * Someone answered this already; normal animals exist and are rarer.
 * Why would normal animals exist, though? Most of their niches and roles are already filled by Pokemon. And don't bring up the classifications; it's most likely a scientific name, common name, original name predating classification, or some other thing. I don't remember fish, either.
 * So, any actual(i.e., in-show/game) reason to why Pokémon can't be kept outside their Pokéballs? Strangely, to a show that works upon trust and friendship aesops, keeping your said friends in vacuum sealed receptacles several times smaller than themselves isn't the best example I've ever seen...
 * Let's see. They're designed to be comfortable. There's a definite advantage to being able to hold an injured Pokémon in a Pokéballs to reduce the amount of pain and risk of aggravating injuries, not to mention how it seems to counteract certain status ailments. Even outside of those circumstances, it seems that trainers spend a lot of time walking long distances, and not forcing smaller or slower creatures to keep up on foot if it isn't necessary is appealing. Your Fly-equipped Staraptor will be relieved to know that it won't have to carry your Steelix, and the same goes for any Surfers.
 * That said, there's a definite IJBM in the idea that Pokémon shouldn't be allowed to travel free, but I've seen very few trainers with that absolute mindset. And most Pokéball-wielding trainers on the show find opportunities to let their Pokémon run around freely. As with most of the training habits in the series, it really depends on the trainer's judgment, and there are times when it's good and times when it's bad.
 * This does not explain why Ash and friends thought it was a good idea to let their Pokémon run around as soon as they got to a desert. They were lucky that the worst consequence was hot squirrel inside hippo action.
 * And before I forget, it was only the fourth episode of the series when Ash was accused of neglecting his Metapod by not recalling it as soon as it was threatened by Beedrills. And the third episode where he was criticized for not letting his Pidgeotto rest after a battle.
 * Yellow has the Pikachu out of a ball until it's fainted. Heart Gold and Soul Silver will have some feature that lets the Pokémon be outside the balls. I think mainly it's just convenience.
 * Prinplup, a penguin with normal flippers, learns Metal Claw. Discuss.
 * Talon-feet and good enough balance to stand on one foot for a bit.
 * Perhaps it's just that mine is nicknamed SKIPPER, but kung fu moves. Hai-YA! (Kicks enemy in face with metal talons)
 * There's also those blades on the ends of its wings. Prinplup's Pokedex data seems to suggest that that's what it uses.
 * The above is the correct answer. Prinplup eventually evolves into Empoleon, who's an Emperor Penguin with freakin' steel blades for wings. As Prinplup gets older- and thus, closer to evolving- it learns how to handle and manipulate the already-growing metal ends. Thusly, Steel Claw.
 * Is there really any logic behind where pokemon live? There's ponytas in areas where it perpetually rains.
 * Some thought does seem to be put into Pokémon placement. (See the habitat section of the Pokédex in FireRed and LeafGreen.) As for that case, I assume this is just a gameplay limitation. It can't be raining there and perfect weather everywhere else all the time. Though why a Ponyta would be out in the rain...
 * The rain areas in D/P cycle to different routes every day, so it's not perputal rain like in R/S/E.
 * Aron a Pokemon with no tail can learn Iron Tail. How?
 * Vestigial tail, maybe? His evolutions do have tails...
 * Same way that Gen-I allowed you to teach a Nidorina Oversized Forehead Drill Horn Drill. (Nidoran female does have a horn, hence the ability. This went away when Horn Drill ceased to be a TM.)
 * Horn Drill doesn't alter the size of the horn, it just spins it. One of Misty's sisters had a Seaking use Horn Drill on Jessie's Arbok once. It stabbed Arbok with a spinning horn, but the attack failed to One-Hit KO.
 * While we're on that evolutionary line, how can Aggron use Aerial Ace? Aggron doesn't have wings, isn't Flying type, and oh yeah it weighs eight hundred pounds.
 * Apparently, it is actually based on a sword move that involves attacking like a bird in some way. So the Pokemon doesn't take off at all, but merely slashes, trying to imitate a bird
 * What bugs me is how obscure aerial ace is to me. The above makes it seem like an elaborate, quick slash which is what I assume, but how would the movement imitate a bird, would it circle around it's foe before attacking?
 * In the games, it is possible to breed the child with the parent, siblings with siblings, etc. You would think that this would cause degrading in the Pokemon stats or something, but its nature and stats are still random. On the other hand, this would explain why none of the Pokemon ever change in appearance and the relatively small number of species considering Pokemon make up the entirety of the Pokemon world's ecosystem aside from trees and humans. So why is it that people consider making animals fight each other for sport and 10 year olds leaving their homes without parental supervision the weirdest parts of Pokemon?
 * Actually, family in-breeding is one of the most used methods to create smaller breeds on dogs. So the Poodle Toy is the result of generations and generations of son-mother and brother-sister breeding of Poodle Standards. And I think I may never want to know how the hell the Dachshund got their atrophiated legs... And with this I mean that, actually, this isn't uncommon in Real Life either.
 * If it is possible to bring Pokemon back to life from fossils, doesn't this mean that they've gained a method for immortality? I hardly think that it is more difficult to bring back a pokemon from fossilized remains than it is to reanimate a newly deceased corpse.
 * We don't know that it's the same Poke, mentally speaking. It could easily be a clone. The reason nobody bothers with the recently deceased is that unless we're dealing with a particularly rare one, the result might not be the same being, and (if a clone) might actually have less personality than one of the same level caught in the wild.
 * And while we're at it, Pokemon do actually die? Mostly we see them "fainting", and I don't recall none of them actually dying in the anime or movies. At most, they convert in energy and fly away. As the whole "pokemon from fossil" stuff is game-only, we may conclude that, yes, they can revive the pokemon off-screen. Cool eh?
 * And yet there are Pokemon graveyards in two of the games. Seems like they do die, we just never get to see it.
 * Yes, they die. They just have very long lifespans, longer than that of a human. Darkrai mistook Alice for Alicia, who he met when she was a little girl, remember?
 * Absol only lives for 100 years, and that is considered long lived. A long lived human also lives for 100 years. This means, on average, that a Pokemon doesn't live as long as a human. Only ones whose life spans are described are Absol and Wartortle (Wartortle can apparently live for 10,000 years. Of course, even the Pokedex explains that this is legend). Darkrai, well, it would be believable that a ghostly dark type Pokemon could live for centuries. Anyways, don't forget that the character doesn't age, so why would we ever see a Pokemon die of old age? And if a Pokemon is badly hurt and can no longer battle, well then, what idiot would keep it out of its ball unless necessary (e.g. you're surfing and you don't want to drown due to being miles away from the nearest town with a Pokemon Center)?
 * See every cloning-gone-wrong story ever.
 * Be fair. Despite early difficulties, Mewtwo's feeling better now. Maybe it's for the best that he got his great insanity out of the way quickly.
 * It seems to be more same species than same individual, as the same fossil can give different stats and personalities.
 * Though I agree with the species-over-individual thing, I think that's just the result of Save Scumming, since fossils start as items, not pre-programmed eggs.
 * So if you died and they used a fossil machine to resurrect you, it would be closer to real-world cloning and produce a baby that was genetically similar but potentially very, very different in every other way.
 * I second the previous two commenters. It is more like cloning from remaining DNA than reanimating a corpse.
 * It is cloning, likely from the same project that created Mewtwo. You didn't think they were both on Cinnabar for nothing, of course? However, it is not an altered clone, and they've found some workaround for that problem that caused all clones to die before birth in the movie, at least for Pokémon.
 * Why is "Pokemon" pronounced "Poh-kay-mon"(long o like coke, long e like day) if it's short for Pocket Monsters? Surely that would be "Pohkeit Monsters"? And while I'm at it, why is "Charizard" pronounced "Char-ee-zahd" when it comes from the word "lizard"? Shouldn't it be "Char-iz-ad"?
 * On your first question: It doesn't sound like it's short for Pocket Monsters because it's not short for Pocket Monsters. It stands for Poketto Monsutaa, which I am fairly sure is what Pokemon is referred to in Japan. Also, I always pronounced Charizard like it sounded: "Char is zard."
 * Poketto Monsutaa is the Japanese attempt at saying Pocket Monsters, due to Japanese not really handling syllables that end in most consonants. Pocket Monsters would have been used, but apparently would have caused trademarking problems with Monster in My Pocket, so Nintendo settled on using the shortened version of the name which is also used in Japan, with the "Poké" coming from pocket and the "Mon" being derived from Monsters. The accent over the e there is what makes it pronounced the way it is. WHY they decided to put an accent there when coming up with the name? Thats a different question and one I don't know.
 * Viewers are Morons: without the accent it's "poke mon".
 * Sadly, the accent hasn't stopped people (even the voice actors in the dubs) from pronouncing it as "Pokeymon".
 * To the first: It's pronounced Poh-Keh-Mon, I believe. To the second: Rhymes with "hard", duh.
 * For Charizard: Japanese standard on pronuciation, I suppose?
 * It'd be for Pokémon, not for Charizard. Charizard's pronounciation relies more on Rule of Cool, as it sounds more like a monstrous and awesome name than in the "proper" way.
 * Doubtful: Charizard's Japanese name is different: Lizardon.
 * So do the different regions in Pokémon just not talk to each other? It seems funny how they're always "discovering" new Pokémon. "Is that a Bulbasaur? Good golly, Miss Molly, I've never seen one of those. I'm from Hoenn, you see. Why no, it never occurred to me to crack open a book. You see--dramatic chord--I can't read!"
 * R/S/E and R/B/Y/FR/LG all take place around the same time, why no one has documented Pokémon before is anyone's guess. Doubly so for G/S/C/HG/SS and D/P/P.
 * That's some weird point, indeed. User:Pro-Mole supposes that the many main character's task is exactly to help publish Pokemon studies, what leads to questions like "why the hemk didn't they simply write on books?!".
 * People in this world consider ten a good age to someone to quit school and leave their home. They clearly have a terrible educational system.
 * Or a very, very good education system.
 * What exactly the PokéDex does anyway? Apparently it already has all the info on Pokémon, and only requires you to capture them so, I don't know, it can have a picture to illustrate, but I know it can't be only that, so what?
 * A possibility is that it's a wireless-internet-accessing PDA, so it acquires information on the individual pokemon in question, adding it to a database and downloading the general information on the species. This would also explain continued education; Trainer's Leave is simply an indefinite state of handling one's education over the internet. The reason it's never shown being used for that is simply because homework is boring.
 * It already has the info??? From what I remember, it analyzed the Pokemon when captured to create the entry. Which doesn't explain why you can't just find one, analyze it, and run, but still...
 * Being it so, how does it produce all that information? How can it say, so accurately, that Raticate slows down when its whiskers are cut?
 * What makes you think it's accurate?
 * It would kill the point of capturing Pokémon to complete it completely. Why would the hero be catching Pokémon, sometimes risking his life (ever seen the size of Dialga? Or fighting sea dragons is a completely harmless sport now?) if the whole thing is utter bulshit?
 * The pokemon has to be analysed by the pokedex through the conduit of the pokeball, that is why you have to catch them and you can't just sneak up in the bushes and aim the pokedex at them. It obviously uses some kind of sub atomic analysis method only possible when the pokemon is de-materialised or de-atomised or whatever happens to them when they are put in a pokeball.
 * Now what makes you think the Player Character knows that?
 * In the anime, the creator of the pokedex admits to making much of it up.
 * Varies between the games, anime, and other media.
 * The PokéDex records data, shows stats as approximately as possible within the Pokeverse, sends the actual attacks through brainwaves or someother form of randomness (Bill made it, mmkay?), cancels evolution through the same way as commanding the Mons, records your collected trophies beasts, and finally, it acts as a license for the status of "Official Pokemon Trainer", since the term is interchange with "PokéDex Holder." Does that answer the question?
 * If the pokedex is as powerful as some of the media make it out to be (e.g. be able to analyze pokemon and record data such as their height, weight, habitat, act as a router to the PC system, exercise control over your Mons, etc.), then why on earth can't it run rudimentary apps such as a 10-digit calculator and coin flip program (seriously, you're losing in versatility to a freaking watch?), considering all of the programs people can run on considerably less impressive graphing calculators in real life?


 * While I do agree dragons, dinosaurs and stuff are bound to be rare Pokémon, I can't understand why some starters -- such as Squirtle, Cyndaquil and Torchic -- are supposed to be unique at all. I mean... the game already forces player interaction by having at least four Pokémon version-only in each generation, two in each version; and even massively strong Pokémon's baby forms -- Dratini, Larvitar, Bagon and Gabite -- are catchable, so why not letting the trainer find some starters at least after the end of the game?
 * They seem to be immensely rare pokemon, like Lapras. For some reason, stronger pokemon tend to be a lot rarer. Professor Oak says that they were just caught in the wild. By the next game, more people have found them, but evidently, they are incredibly uncommon. Presumably, they don't breed that well, and as such, if you killed all the ones you met in the wild they would quickly become extinct.
 * Are they rare? I just thought the fact that they didn't appear in the wild was a game mechanic.
 * Exactly. Why not? You've already captured/evolved/traded a hell lot of pokÃ©, just let the player get a starter or two, damn it!
 * Maybe their wild populations were decimated by over-catching by the resident humans, similar to what is happening to macaws in real life. When you live in a world where any animal can be caught by a softball-sized contraption that sells for the price of a higher-end soft drink, it seems logical that every 12-year old and his/her parents is going to gravitate towards catching the adorable, Fun Size mons that turn into among other things fire-breathing dragons, 8-foot tall bipedal alligators, and two flavors of flaming martial artists. As for why you can't find any in the wild anymore: all of the easy pickings are in someone's PC, what's left of the wild starter populations is concentrated in remote corners of the respective region you are in (i.e. all of the blank space outside of the accessible areas of the game map).
 * Apparently they come from special breeders. (You can encounter other people with starters in things like the Battle Tents and Frontier in Emerald, or simple random trainers in 4th generation. Tragically, you cannot steal any of these, and in the Tent/Frontier, they're not even logged in your Pokedex for some reason.) But yeah, there should be some point in (say) 5th generation where you can help out one of these breeder installations and be given a baby Bulbasaur or a Cyndaquil egg.
 * In HG/SS, after completing the game, you can get a 1st gen starter and a 3rd gen starter, so...
 * HG/SS also has the event Pokewalker course "Shopping" which allows you to catch wild Torchic, which seems to suggest that Game Freak are slowly working towards having more starters available.
 * This troper has the belief that the starters are imported from regions that haven't been seen in the games.
 * They are fairly common Pokemon, it's just that the game doesn't want you to get them all without trading.
 * So the Pokemon universe has clearly mastered the ability to transport both organic and inorganic matter across vast distances instantaneously. Why are there still cars? Why are there still transportation vehicles? Why aren't there teleporters everywhere? Outside of trainers who need to walk around looking for Pokemon and other people who work in nature. It can't be that hard to teleport things, it happens to countless Pokemon everyday.
 * Giovanni bought them all for one of his hideouts.
 * Maybe Pokemon aren't organic at all. Or maybe their configuration allows them to be teleported, while a human's don't. I, at least, don't remember humans being teleported by technological means in any moment.
 * Sabrina's Gym, Aqua Hideout, Liza and Tate's Gym, Silph Co...
 * Funny, in the games I don't think I've seen barely any cars at all... though you can still transport inanimate objects through computers all the time. Maybe teleporters for humans are expensive and rare, and Team Rocket/Galactic keeps stealing em.
 * There's that one truck that Mew is totally hiding under spawned the Mew rumors, and then the truck your character starts out in in Ruby/Sapphire.
 * Colosseum and XD also had some cars.
 * Maybe people just like the scenery. Sortof like in one Asimov short story, "It's Such A Beautiful Day," which involves a society that uses teleporters to go everywhere, until one day one breaks down and a boy has to actually walk to school, but then discovers he likes walking.
 * Maybe it's illegal to teleport humans as part of a government health initiative.
 * That sort of makes sense given that Bill's attempt to teleport himself accidentally turned him into a Pokemon. But then there are teleporters in gyms that you use...
 * Except that Gym teleporters are driven through the trainers psychic powers, at least in Sabrina's case. In other cases, it's possibly psychic pokemons.
 * Again, simply harness the power of psychics to teleport. We already have a teleport move that lets you travel any distance to a Pokemon-center.
 * Items and Pokémon both seem to be stored in balls when not in use. (You find the items in the balls already.) For humans to be teleported this way, they would also have to be put in Storage Balls. I assume that this did not make money, and the service was canceled. The banned episode with Porygon and the seizures dealt with another means of teleportation: direct portals to cyberspace. It turned out to be a bad idea, and cyberspace explosions gave people seizures. Team Rocket still technically has the Porygon Zero from that episode, although it was mostly forgotten; it was one of the three PokéBalls that floated away from them in the episode with the Farfetch'd, which happened before Jessie got Lickitung, despite the dubbers' attempts to cover it up as Lickitung.
 * Pikachu's electric attack was responsible for the seizures; that could very well have happened in any other episode. The idea of human transport was never brought up again, presumably for the same reason Porygon wasn't, which still escapes this troper. Not to mention, all of Dr. Akihabara's (the creator of the project) work was destroyed at the end of the episode, and it would probably take years to do it all over. Judging by the ages of the characters, time just plain doesn't pass in the anime, but then again...
 * Not quite true. It's stated directly when Ash gets back to Viridian something along the lines of "Wow, I can't believe it's already been a year since I was in Viridian last time..." ...Then again. He is, also canonically, still ten years old. ...So Yeah.
 * Possibly, teleporters are too short-ranged/must be directly connected via wires to be efficient other than as a gym puzzle or for navigation through a large building.
 * In the RBY (and Fire Red/Leaf Green I suppose) games, you encounter Gary in Silph Co., literally one room away from Giovanni. You needed to have a Card Key to get that far, so why didn't he go and whack the Pokecrap out of Giovanni himself? He even mentions Giovanni after you beat him, so it wasn't like he simply didn't know (unless he's blind and didn't notice the hundreds of Grunts and whimpering employees). Same goes for when you're in Pokemon Tower along with the possessed nuns and Rockets. Does he simply not care?
 * Considering his general attitude (stuck-up and all), yeah, he probably doesn't.
 * The jackass...
 * WHY has no one mentioned the Magic Ledge of No-Passing? Somehow you can own an incredibly big and strong Pokemon (such as Onix or a legendary) but still can't climb up a ledge that you can easily bike down. If you can bike down the ledge, it can't be more than one floor high, or else you'd get hurt. Somehow, the more-than-five-story-tall "big" Pokemon in the game can't just lift you up and push you onto the top of the ledge. That would save you a ton of time throughout the whole game. Why can't you pass over a small ledge when you possess towering Pokemon more than 15 feet tall?
 * Sigh... this is one of the most know Acceptable Breaks From Reality in games, though I couldn't find the trope by name. By that logic, Rock Climb should never be necessary, either, if you have three Onix in your party.
 * You're looking for Insurmountable Waist High Fence.
 * Or for a less 'game mechanic' reason, it could be because they know how strong Pokemon are and therefore have built the walls out of some random, magical material sturdy enough to withstand pokemon.
 * Keep in mind that you can also ride a bicycle full speed into a wall or another person without anyone getting harmed, also. Hell, your bike is so magical it will just ride in place if you try to ride straight into the water.
 * This has always bugged me about the Pokemon universe: Pokemon evolve. Some can evolve just from experience, but others need rare items, conditions, or actions to initiate the change--for example, being traded. My question is, how do some Pokemon evolve in the wild like this, as you encounter them in random encounters? You honestly can't tell me that they just stumble across the item they need. While I can't think of any particular example in the main series, it's pretty blatantly a problem in Mystery Dungeon, which even requires that Pokemon go to a special place in order to initiate the change... you can't tell me that all the Pokemon in the world who ever evolved went there!
 * Hm, this one's gotta be divided in topics. But before that, PMD is another world entirely, where humans don't exist. In the "normal" games, they simply evolve anywhere.
 * 1) Level up: trivial, here just for the sake it;
 * 2) Item: Magbys, Elekids and Happinys(and I believe the rest, too) actually carry the item they need to evolve(5 or 50% chance, I heard), so it is possible that, yes, they simply stumble upon them. And while we're at it...
 * 3) Evolution stone: These rocks must come from somewhere, and D/P says you can mine them, so the answer is simple: Pokémon sometimes dig those up and touch them, and thus evolve. See also the Cleafairy episode in the anime's first season.
 * 4) Condition: If it's happiness, it's even simpler in the wild. If it's with a move... mostly the move is learned naturally by the Pokémon, so they jsut gotta learn it through leveling up(i.e., growing) and then level up once more.
 * 5) Trade: Well... okay, this one got me, too. Not even Pokémon Special addresses this properly so... anyone got a hint?
 * In general, you can't fight Pokemon only available by trade in the wild. The only exception is Steelix in DP. So um...Steelix are special? I dunno.
 * Gengar, too, even though it's Dual-Slot(on D/P, that is). Steelix could be a special case of "holding item evolution", and I think in the series a Slowpoke evolved into a Slowking just by touching a King's Rock. That still doesn't solve the problem for "just trade" Pokémon.
 * They could have escaped after a trade, or worse. Or the 'Link Cables' from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon could be out there... somewhere...
 * Why does trading Pokemon to evolve it make sense in the first place? It's not like anyone in the anime even HAS a Nintendo hand-held (the idea that that's how it works for in-cart transfers is silly enough).
 * Not much thing in Pokémon doesn't make sense, eh?... Nonetheless, the Pokémon Special manga does address the issue(Green's Machoke evolves after he and Red accidentally end up with each other's pokÃ©balls); I just said "not properly", because there are way too many Gengars for all of them be traded.
 * The mysteries of trade-based evolution occuring in the wild just might be answered by in-game Pokedex entries and biological information from other sources, which often give the "canon" info on how they would evolve like that in the wild. Such as, in the wild, Onix evolve into Steelix after living over a hundred years and the pressure of life underground hardening its body to diamond-like metal. And that Slowpoke evolve to Slowking if the Shellder they normally fish for to fusion-evolve into Slowbro happens to clamp onto its head instead of its tail. I presume that these Pokemon actually have several ways of evolving into the same resulting form, the first a "natural", time-consuming biological process you never actually see in the games (only read about in the Pokedex) because it's what's been happening with those wild Pokemon before you ever encounter them face-to-face, and the second a far quicker man-made instant evolution process that man had discovered for themselves apparently by tinkering with the official trading process in regards to specific hold items...
 * Could be that radiation from the trading machine is just enough to stimulate the Pokemon being traded into evolving.
 * Possibly, pure trade evolutions normally occur naturally, but the game just wants you to trade, or, as previously stated, the effects of trading simply trigger this evolution anyway. As for item-related trades, I assume the Pokemon just needs the item to evolve, like a stone, with the trading there just to provide an easy trigger for it gameplay-wise. It's the same way happiness and location evolutions require a level-up to be triggered.
 * Of all oddities regarding Pokémon species and biology(of non-legendaries, bear in mind), Porygon sure hits the borderline. It's apparently a software Pokémon, and yet you can find it roaming a garden in D/P. Not only that, in Pokémon Snap, they appeared in the wild, and not less than three fot them! I can easily disregard Snap as non-canon, bit for the other case... how?!
 * The entire Pokémon world is a simulation that came into existence the moment Red woke up.
 * That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!
 * Okay, now User:Pro-Mole is utterly confused... O_o
 * It's possible they simply bio-emerged.
 * They're not there naturally. Mr. Backlot's butler places them there to cover up for his lies about the pokemon in his garden.
 * It's simple, when Porygon was upgraded to Proygon-2 in G/S, two things happened. First, a bug entered the system causing Porygon to begin to emulate biological lifeforms. Second, Proygon passed the technology inteligence threshold, essentially becoming smart enough to creat something smarter than itself. This allowed Porygon-2 to alter its own structure. Since Proygon-2 now had the drive to emulate biological life, its altered itself to allow mating. This alteration was spread throughout the web, which Porygon use as a semi hive mind, allowing other Porygon-2 to alter themselves as well. These Porygon-2 began breeding like other Pokemon, resluting in wild Porygon, which Porygon-2 still considers its base form, that also posses some of the alterations done to Porygon-2, which also allows them to breed. Porygon-Z was created when an attempted fix to this problem reacted badly and altered the evolution inhibitor, which prevented Porygon-2 from altering its own structure too drastically. (i.e. creating a new evolution) The result was Porygon-Z. There, simple
 * Porygon can enter the real world by the same method Pokemon are transferred out of PCs and Pokeballs - they just start off as data rather than starting off as real.
 * Possibly, several Porygons were released into the wild to study how they react to the wild and how the wild reacts to their presence. Or, possibly, to "complete" the create-a-lifelike-Pokemon goal by making them as close to a naturally-occuring Pokemon as they can.
 * It's highly implied that the owner of that garden is a liar. It's also highly implied that his butler covers up for these lies. Notice how Porygon will only appear in the garden after he claims there to be Porygons inhabiting it.
 * A meta-Just Bugs Me: have we reached the "Bugging Horizon" for Pokémon already? Haven't seen a new question pop up'for weeksm now. And the last two were one mine and one about the production of the show. Come on, people!
 * Wait for the next generation of games to be released or Dawn to be Put on a Bus, there'll be enough buggery to keep you going then.
 * It'll take... what? Three years? Nah, I'm going on myself. On the top, I think my theory of "People are lazy" fits like a glove.


 * Why would Pokémon, in universe, call out their own "names"? Thats like calling a cat a Meow and an elephant a BRRRRRIIIIIII because of the sounds they make. The above IJBM offers one explanation, but then you come along to some Pokémon who actually DO roar! Why were they called Rhydon and Charizard?!
 * That's actually Truth in Television. In Japan there is a species of cicada called "Tsuru Tsuru Boushi". The sound it makes sounds like "tsuru tsuru boushi". There are probably more examples.
 * Pokémon just happen to have cries that sound like relevant portmanteaus?
 * Every Pokémon that can learn TMs can learn Toxic. Even Pokémon who wouldn't learn any other poison move. Why?
 * Guess the game makers just really liked that move. And it's not that bizarre that non-poison types can learn it. Hitmochan can learn Fire, Ice and Lightning Punch, but it can't learn any other Fire, Ice or Lightning moves.
 * In that case, they are punch moves, it makes sense for Hitmonchan(even though it'd make even more sense if he was called Hitmontyson...). I can't imagine a Pikachu throwing a highly toxic glob of poison in its enemies...
 * I was always under the impression that pikachu WAS a highly toxic glob of poison.
 * I think the high distribution of Grass Knot and Shock Wave is stranger.
 * Toxic could come from the Pokemon's diet, and they're actually spitting Stomach acid. Grass Knot to me sounds like it's a general term that involves using an object to trip someone. You got me with shock wave though. Maybe seismic or sound waves that stuns?
 * This came up in discussion with a few friends. Aren't all the characters in the games ten years old? And yet every single time, when you tell your mother you're leaving, she's fine with it? This is even worse when you're a girl character if you think about it...
 * Why is it specifically worse for a girl? Well at any rate, it's not just the main character, ten years old is apparently considered the legal age for leaving home in the Pokémon world. Presumably, they just have a more efficient education system and don't need to stay in school as long.
 * Worse for girls due to the fact that girls are...and I say this at the risk of being called a sexist, physically weaker than males, and if someone wanted to kidnap/rape/other such things them, they'd have an easy time with it.
 * Except there still isn't much of a noticeable strength difference at that age.
 * Plus you know, girls hit puberty earlier and are actually larger then boys until they go though it. Setting aside which, the worlds strongest ten year old won't be able to do jack against even a fairly weak adult, making the distinction meaningless.
 * Ah, Pokemon - the great equalizer. If someone wants to rape them, they'd first need stronger Pokemon; try to rape someone with a fire breathing medieval dragon,a mini-godzilla,a fire breathing chinese dragon,bruce lee,a hadoken chucking metal werewolf,and destroyah in conviently place balls on their waist. It will NOT end well. And if they do have stronger Pokemon, being a boy isn't going to help you resist being raped.
 * Raping someone with a Charizard? I'm almost certain there's a fanfic along those lines.
 * This troper's seen it more than once. By accident of course...
 * If you don't know why girls were specified, take a good look at the official art for all the girls. See a pattern? None of them wear pants or skirts going beyond mid-thigh. It's practically rape-bait.
 * Even without the skimpy outfits, aren't females more often targeted for violent crime anyway?
 * I cannot think of any females in the games who wear pants. The best I can come up with is shorts for bikers and the G/S/C heroine and the catsuit-type-thing Ace has going on. Not sure about the P/D Rangers, but I'm pretty sure they have shorts, too. Every single other female human appearing in the games apparently wears skirts.
 * This troper approves.
 * This troper is outraged, outraged I say, that the above troper could forget about Flannery.
 * Are you kidding? They like skirts because they're delightfully comfy and easy to wear!
 * How do you know that they're not wearing shorts underneath?
 * In a recent episode, the gang recieved a package of what was revealed to be snow-weather clothing. Guess what Dawn is still wearing? A FREAKIN' MINI-SKIRT. There's fanservice, but that's just taking one for the team.
 * They often are wearing shorts. Hip Japaneses kids love to layer, have you learned nothing from Gwen Stefani?
 * Um, Misty, Sabrina, Kris, Kotone, Whitney, Clair, Karen, Janine, May, Flannery, Winona, Liza, Lucy, Anabel, Greta, Shelly, Gardenia, Maylene, Cynthia, Argenta, Dahlia, Mira, AND Jupiter all wear some kind of pants. I'm not sure how you managed to miss over half the major female characters in this series, but you did.
 * Jupiter? Kotone? What they wear does not count as pants! Where I come from 'pants' implies covering all leg above the knee, at least. 'Pants' and 'short shorts' are very different things.
 * Shorts are "some kind of pants". And you specficially mentioned shorts.
 * I think it's a Japanese culture kind of thing. Japan, from what I've heard, is behind the West in feminism.
 * Uh, did it ever occur to you all that 1) Pokémon is based more on Japan's culture and 2) maybe they LIKE to wear skirts? I know plenty of girls that love wearing skirts.


 * Why do the Legendary Pokemon get stronger and stronger every new game? First series had a genetically engineeried monstrosity and it's original source, a Pokemon that can learn EVERY MOVE EVER, second series had a Pokemon that travels through time, third series has not only golems and two Pokemon that shape the Earth, but a Pokemon that is DNA, and in the forth one, we have GOD. What next, Sentient armadas of spaceships? Pokemon that disguise themselves as buildings? A living STAR?!?
 * "Pokemon! More than meets the eye! Pokemon! Monsters in disguise!"
 * Let's hope so.
 * For the last, it already happened. Okay, it's not an actual giant ball of gas burning millions of miles away, but you get the picture.
 * They'll probably retcon Arceus into something lesser than a god, or make some lesser Legandary that's just so cool that nobody cares about how it's a step down. However, I have a particularly disturbing thought about catching legendaries. Isn't it kind of irresponsible of the trainer to catch Pokémon like the Lake Trio, Dialga/Palkia, the Birds, and especially Arceus? Does nobody stop to think that maybe it's a bad idea to put those Pokémon in the balls or on the computer when they have very important work to do, such as keeping spacetime, emotions, and the elements under control?
 * ..."Millions of miles away"?
 * About 93 million miles away! That's why it looks so small!
 * Yeah, but there's only one star that close. The next closest is 2.4 * 10 ^ 13 (93 is 9.3* 10^7). Since "star" is generally used to refer to the ones outside our solar system, we can take that as a minimum. More likely, it is even farther out than that.
 * Technically, that's still millions. It's just a whole lot of them.
 * I find it rather depressing that no one has considered local pantheism as a simple explanation for why this can work. Consider: in D/P/Pt the events of the Spear Pillar incident are seen throughout Sinnoh. And nowhere else. In R/S/E the Sootopolis fiasco's repercussions are felt, if I recall correctly, throughout Hoenn. Nowhere else. The only legendaries who show up in multiple regions all have distinct excuses (Kanto being right next door to Johto in the case of Entei, Raikou and Suicune in Fire Red/Leaf Green, Sinnoh being presumably within flying distance in the case of Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres in Platinum). Or does the entirety of the fandom honestly believe that Sinnoh Is The Center Of The Universe?
 * Groudon and Kyogre created the land and the sea, but only in Hoenn? Dialga and Palkia created time and space, but only in Sinnoh? We're talking about concepts that exist worldwide, and the only real way to justify local pantheism in Real Life is to claim that other religions are wrong. Unless the Teams of each game found out that their legendaries of choice were incapable of doing the things they wanted...
 * Maybe it's a case of misleading pantheism due to the fact that they're so-called legendaries(and they look fucking awesome). As far as I know(no, never been to Hoenn, indeed), the Teams never succeeded, so they didn't actually find out that they are indeed, incapable of the things they're accounted to do. After all, My Dialga can't stop time and crush the enemy team to a pulp while time is stopped... okay, jokes aside, the Pokédex says that the back of Shedinja's shell will suck one's soul into it. When the Pokémon fights with its back directly towards you. Get my picture? Simply putting, local pantheism is still a valid alternative.
 * This troper vaguely remembers reading somewhere that containing Pokemon in Pokeballs (Or at least the legendary Sinnoh trio) limits how much of their power is used. That's why Cyrus was so intent on using the Red Chain to control them.
 * They haven't really gotten stronger and stronger. Mewtwo has been sitting pretty on his 'strongest pokemon in the game' throne for about a decade; the only pokemon that came close to threatening him was Deoxys. Oddly enough, Arceus has the power to trump him, but then Arceus can trump anyone with the right item. So Game Freak doesn't mind making legendaries that aren't QUITE as strong as the current king of the hill.
 * Something to consider is whether or not the legendary pokemon actually ARE as strong as the legends imply. In Platinum, after beating the Elite Four, you can go back to the cave in Celestic City and talk to Cynthia again. There, she mentions the possibility that the ancient people who wrote those myths only believed Dialga and Palkia to be rulers of time and space because they saw them using their signature attacks. In other words, the legends quite possibly blow the apparent power levels of the pokemon out of proportion.
 * Keep in mind a freshly-evolved Kingler is capable of destroying any of these "gods" in one hit if he lands it, or a properly-bred and item'd Rattata can annihilate nearly anything at level five. In the anime, sure, they seem to actually possess these obscene powers; note people don't tend to actually catch or defeat them there either . In the games though, one assumes whoever wrote the Pokedex listened to a few too many urban legends.
 * In the games, the Pokedex guy is.
 * If you put all the Pokedex entries together you can kind-of sort-of put together a single mythology (Arceus showed up, made Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina and Reshiram, Zekrom, and Kyurem, then the Hoenn trio, Regigigas and the golems, Landlos and Shaymin, etc., blah blah blah) but it's complicated as hell and you run into problems like having three thunder "gods" running around--Raikou, Zapdos, and Voltolos. So a) local pantheism, b) the legendaries are being vastly overestimated, c) Gamefreak just didn't care.
 * Why is nobody bothered by the casinos? I mean, ignoring that the first one was run by a criminal syndicate, they all allow 10-year olds to gamble. Now, I'm willing to accept that 10-year-olds can go on long journeys, they travel in groups and have monsters to protect them. We never see the kids drinking, even in the anime, so there's clearly laws regarding sale of alcohol to minors, or else Brock would be a lush and would be hanging out in bars. So why are there no laws regarding forbidding minors to gamble? As young persons whose brains are not yet fully developed, they cannot make completely rational decisions, which, while helpful in dramatic battles where thinking outside the box with regards to magic monsters is a plus, this lack of rationality is much less helpful with regards to gambling away life savings, which I'm sure all of us players have done at some point in the poke-casino.
 * Gambling away life savings? Try raising and spending almost $1,000,000 to buy a Gorgeus Royal ribbon for your pokemon. Granted, I suppose similar items are available in real life, but I assume they'd typically be a little more hesitant to let a 10 year old buy them.
 * It's possible that the other casinos, while not run by Team Rocket, are equally as corrupt and ask no questions when it comes to customers. As for why the police don't shut them down, they're probably too busy focusing on bringing down Team Rocket/Magma/Aqua/Galactic.
 * One requires a Casino Token Pouch (or whatever the chips are called) to gamble, and you can only get the pouch from another person outside the casino. Perhaps they assume anyone with a game token pouch is over the legal age, or has passed a gambling adddiction psychological test, and they aren't allowed to comment on your apparent age so as not to offend and be fired. (Personally, what bugs me about the casinos is that you can buy pokemon. You gamble to get chips with which you buy sentient beings for pit fights. Stick an E rating on that.)
 * Actually, Pokemon tends to get a mention of 'gambling references' on its label in PAL territories.
 * If it means anything, one of the Celadon City characters groans that the casino gives the city a bad image. Though I suppose people like her get told to keep quiet.
 * Values Dissonance. Japan has a history of circumventing gambling laws with machines that take and accept 'tokens' that can be bought with money and exchanged for prizes, I've heard Shigeru Miyamoto himself often plays these machines. Seems Japan has much less of an issue with gambling than the rest of the world.
 * Arcades in the backs of bowling alleys, anyone?
 * Evidently Nintendo of Europe has noticed this, as the European Platinum release disabled using the machines in the game corner. Coins are now found daily on the machines by talking to them. The EU's regulations may or may not be involved.
 * /em takes another look at the local Suck E. Cheese's. I don't think it's really true values dissonance, just the sort of thing poeple tend to get upset about, even if they don't mind the real version.
 * Ironically you can still BUY coins in the casino at the price 1000 Poké for 50 coins...
 * Maybe the gambling laws are less strict in the Pokemon World? After all, slot machines are a lot more child-friendly than other casino games, where you can bet and lose a lot of money all at once. Slots only accept small amounts of money, pay off fairly frequently regardless of your choices, and would be very hard to lose your life savings on.
 * Keep in mind that some of us don't have a gambling addiction, and even if we tried, we would just lose interest and move on.
 * How does Cresselia manage to be Darkrai's foil? She's Psychic. It's Dark. Psychic moves do nothing to Dark types, and she doesn't have Miracle Eye. In fact, she only has two moves that can hurt it. It would be fine if her purpose was limited to counteracting its nightmares, but in both PMD 2 and the anime, she's out to fight it directly.
 * She does have access to Signal Beam, and one of Darkrai's signature abilities (the one that puts both combatants to sleep) backfires as she also has access to Snore. Of course, that's kind of grasping at straws, as Darkrai's dark moves would be super-effective, but she does have options.
 * Problem is, she's his foil as a wild Pokémon. As much as I'd like to see legendaries exchanging shards at a Move Tutor, we can only assume that she is limited to her natural movelist. (Well, maybe not. Mewtwo had Shadow Ball in the movie, after all...)
 * Move Tutor moves are implied to be natural moves that the legendary forgot upon leveling up, so Cresselia learned Signal Beam somewhere along the road as she leveled to 40. If she was serious about fighting Darkrai, she'd use Signal Beam (and maybe Snore). By the time you catch her, she doesn't seem to be actively fighting him, (she's chilling on Full Moon Island while a kid is being menaced by Darkrai Brand Nightmares) so she probably dropped the move somewhere along the way. As for Mewtwo cheatery, he probably just gave himself a TM. He's more than smart enough.
 * This troper considers the four-move limit a definite Gameplay and Story Segregation that doesn't necessarily apply plotwise, and would honestly be very surprised if the Move Tutors or TM shops have never been visited / raided / held up at Hyper-Beam-point by legendaries before.
 * I will concede my use of the anime as support, as it clearly shows that Cresselia's method has nothing to do with battling, save a few seconds of Air Jousting. As for PMD 2, it may be a very good reason for her to seek the assistance of the main characters.
 * What bugs this Troper is that they could've given her a special legendary ability (like Teravolt or Turboblaze) that works like Miracle Eye--only instead of just removing immunity to Dark-types, it makes Dark-types weak to her Psychic attacks. That way, they'd be on an equal footing. But no, her ability is Levitate. That's useful. I know they probably want to avoid having the hackers stick it on their Alakazam or whatever, but...
 * It would even make sense symbolically. Even beyond any dream-related roles, she is the representation of a light that illuminates the darkness.
 * In the first generation games, why does everyone now there to be 150 Pokémon in the region, when both Mew and Mewtwo are almost complete unknowns? This is especially strange in the manga, especially around chapter 17, where Mew is a total unknown, Mewtwo hasn't been created yet, and Red still says there's 150.
 * It doesn't help that the 150 also includes five "extinct" Pokémon and a species that lists its males and females separately.
 * Don't forget, there's actually 151 in the first generation. 150 gets thrown around a lot because Mew was super secret upon the original Japanese release; I've heard that Satoshi actually snuck it into the game without Nintendo's knowledge, but I don't know if that's actually true. Of course, that's just Mew as an actual programmed entity; Mew is of course referenced all over the burned mansion. So in the games it's inexplicable that it's 150 instead of 149 or 151: knowledge of Mew and Mewtwo is kind of a package deal. As for the anime or manga, that's not my area of expertise, although I've heard that there was a Mewtwo icon on Bill's door several episodes before Mewtwo was actually created in that continuity...
 * The manga is really weird in this regard. In a conversation in chapter 17, Red says there's 150 Pokémon, and Blue refers to Mew as the 151st, but Mewtwo is only about half-done at the time. You'd think they'd say 149 and 150.
 * If you don't consider the manga a continuity, that could just be roundup. It's easier to say 150 than 149.
 * The end of the original games really bugs me. After all of your trials and successes, and making it past the Elite Four, you run into your rival again to find that he has accomplished the same tasks. You battle him one more time and win. Then his grandfather shows up and chastises him for being a disgrace to Pokémon training. Um... what? Oak's opinion of his methods aside (we don't get to see everything he did, and the player's methods of training Pokémon are never analyzed), he just beat the Elite Four. His Pokémon are loyal and well-trained. Most people would call what he did a success. Sure, he's arrogant, but he deserves some Insufferable Genius insurance after coming so far. Was it because he didn't bring down a criminal organization along the way? Does Oak believe that "second place is the first loser"?
 * Maybe he overheard the rival whining about how it was unfair that he lost and simply explains that treating Pokémon right is what tipped the scales in your favour.
 * In FireRed and LeafGreen, at least, he doesn't call him a disgrace to Pokemon or whatever. He just says that the player won because the player cared for his/her Pokemon more.
 * And yet I'm the one who's constantly changing my team and releasing Pokémon without a moment's thought while my rival (sans Raticate) kept his original team throughout the game...But back to the original point, Oak's behaviour bugs me too. After all, didn't Oak originally send the player and the rival out to Catch Them All instead of sending them to fight the Elite 4? One would think the Rival did a pretty damn good job considering he caught about 40 by the time the player meets him on the S.S. Anne...
 * OK, what was Gary's starter? I don't remember that ever being directly answered in the anime. Was it that Eevee? If so, what the heck happened to Oak's Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander, and why do we never see their trainers?
 * As far as I recall, both Ash's Bulbasaur and Charmander were abandoned by their trainers, that being the reason Ash ended up with them -- also, that's why Bulbasaur didn't trust humans, IIRC. Thus, they can be Oak's starters, given the little amount of time between the gievaway and Ash's finding them. But, then again, that's just a theory...
 * Wasn't he shown to have a Blastoise at one point? If so, there's a good chance he went with Squirtle (it's not Charmander, since we saw its original trainer in the episode we met it).
 * Squirtle is definitely Gary's starter, it was confirmed. Eevee, he picked up elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Charmander and Bulbasaur Ash acquired are never hinted to be the same ones given to the other two Pallet town trainers. Remember that we meet Charmander's original trainer Damien? If he was from Pallet, Ash would likely have recognised him, it's a small town after all. The two Pallet trainers were stated to have given up training, it was never said that they abandoned Bulbasaur and Charmander.
 * According to Bulbapedia, Squirtle was given to Gary, Bulbasaur to a boy named Gilbert. Charmander is yet to be confirmed.
 * Aren't the final forms of the starters shown with their trainers in the original intro? Anyway, what is Gary doing with a starter that is weak vs. the protagonist's?
 * He didn't know that Oak had a spare Pikachu and just assumed Ash wouldn't get a Pokémon since the others were taken?
 * In the manga, how does Lance's Dragonair know Hyper Beam? The absolute lowest level that Dragonair has ever been able to learn Hyper Beam at is 55, which is the level at which it evolves to Dragonite. I wouldn't peg Lance as the kind of guy to stop evolution on his Pokémon, so... what?
 * In the games, the Dratini family is one of the few families that can learn the Hyper Beam TM at any evolutionary stage (most families have to wait until their fully evolved form).
 * Not actually an answer, but Lance has a history of totally fucking cheating in the games with his movesets and his squad of underleveled Dragonites, so maybe it's just tradition.
 * The absolute lowest level that a Dragonair would be able to know Hyper Beam is level 50. Then again, that doesn't help, since it would require that Dragonair to have been kept as a Dratini from 30-50...
 * Have Dragonair hold back for one level to learn the move, then Lance either lets it evolve normally, or use a conveniently saved Rare Candy.
 * Except for the fact that in the manga, you need to have a Pokédex to stop evolution.
 * That could be true for the manga only. Though if it's true in all cases (and Lance's dragonair uses Hyper Beam in the manga), then yeah, Lance is a cheating bastard.
 * If that's the case, Lance can communicate with Pokemon in the manga, just like Yellow, and is a far more skilled trainer. He must have found a way.
 * You can also use Everstone.
 * That Dragonair was bred, and its father knew Hyper beam. End of discussion. (Yes, you can get L5/L1 Dratinis with Hyper beam by breeding because they learn it by level)
 * OK, something just occurred to me. In the 1st Generation saga of the manga, the Elite Four are trying to get each of the gym badges in order to power the device. Why don't they each have a set already? Don't you need all 8 badges to reach the Elite Four in the first place?
 * You need the badges to fight the Elite Four, but is it ever stated you need the badges to join them?
 * Well, how else would you join them, outside of of a "prove your worth" battle?
 * Somehow I doubt someone could be considered "elite" if they didn't have a measly eight gym badges. And since the elite four are explicitly harder to defeat than the gym leaders, we can assume that one has to have defeated at least one region's gym leaders to be considered a candidate for the elite four.
 * Even if you don't need them, what stops them from going out and winning the darn things for themselves?
 * If I recall, they needed special ones. The ones given to trainers were copies, and they needed the 'master set', so to speak
 * If you're talking about the Pokemon Special/Pokemon Adventures manga, I'm pretty sure the first gen elite 4 was a terrorist organization in that, so there's no reason for them to be expected to have the badges.
 * This one's kinda lame and doesn't really bug me, but it's fun to point out. The early battles in Pokemon Puzzle League suggest that Giovanni may be the Puzzle Master Ash needs to defeat to win the competition. After you beat him, Ritchie explains that not only is Giovanni not the Puzzle Master, but Giovanni has never even met him. Here's the problem. The Puzzle Master is later revealed to be Mewtwo. Isn't Giovanni one of the few people who has met him? (And to counter the obvious response, the game was released in the US before Mewtwo Returns was released in Japan.)
 * What does Ritchie know about Mewtwo's origins or his relationship with Giovanni?
 * Probably nothing. He probably doesn't know who the Puzzle Master is, either. So, when Giovanni's deception was revealed, he jumped to conclusions.
 * Why do people keep mixing up the names of the manga characters Green and Blue? The Rival is Green and the girl is Blue, right?
 * A hop over to Bulbapedia tells me that the English translation switches their names, giving The Rival the name Blue and the girl Green, probably to fit with the name switch of the original generation games.
 * I strongly believe that The Rival should be called Blue and the girl Green. It's "The M. Bison syndrome" You don't see anyone calling M.Bison, Vega, and Balrug by their original Japanese pre-nameswitch names.
 * But calling The Rival Green makes sense, as Red and Green were the first Pokémon games to be released, with Blue as an Updated Rerelease. So we're introduced to Red and Green as opposite numbers, and then we get Blue a while later.
 * Except that in America, Green wasn't even released. Fact is, most people outside Japan were raised on Red and Blue, so they can hardly be faulted for referring to The Rival in Red and Blue as...Blue. When switching to the manga, it's understandable for translators to retain consistency with the games.
 * It's mentioned in the games that Sabrina dislikes battling. Why then is she a Gym Leader?
 * She really wants to train humans. Her belief that people can also learn to use psychic abilities is established in the games. Unfortunately, since everything in the world is related to Pokémon, if she wanted a gym, she would have to train Pokémon in there. Not a big deal, since she gets to work with natural psychics and improve them as well.


 * I know that this hasn't been brought up since the GS era (but it hasn't been subject to Retcon, so it's still a legit annoyance), but seriously. Bicycle. One Million in Pokemon currency. No wonder Misty was so pissed at Ash over it getting burned to a crisp. Heck, this ridiculous price implies massive hyperinflation in the Pokemon economy. And to top it off, they can just casually give it away if you have a voucher (and if someone had such a valuable item, why would they give it away to you?)
 * The Pokemon currency seems to be based on Yen rather than Dollars, and a single Yen seems to be more equivalent to a single Cent, so divide the prices by 100. And the particular bike the salesman is trying to sell you was probably the most expensive model he had. Nobody ever said he was a good salesman. (see also: the Slowpoketail salesman)
 * I remember when we were kids that everyone was saying how rich everyone was in the world considering trainers give you like $20 for losing to you and potions cost like two hundred dollars. If you actually assume it's based off of the Yen, it actually makes more sense for what kind of stuff people woudl have laying around in their pockets. (ie, potions costing $2.) And even in canada, the numbers sound reasonable.
 * Have you noticed that there is only one bicycle shop per region? Clearly, the salesman can get away with such barbarous prices due to the lack of competition. Remember kids, monopolies are bad for the consumer!
 * Even though there was one in Goldenrod city and apparently there was never any.
 * Aren't they going to run out of animals to model Pokemon on soon? I know (and like) that they use a lot of obscure animals and will continue to do so, but even that can only last so long.
 * Two factors will keep them running: first, is that they don't use just animals(or plants). Gulpin seems to be a stomach, Geodude is (obviously) a rock, and just look at Unown, would you please? Second, they repeat them. Look at Squirtle, Torkoal and Turtwig. Meowth and Skitty. Caterpie, Weedle and Wurmple. They'll never run out of inspiration Pokémon...
 * Pretty much. They materialized a Pokemon that is essentially a mass of vines with shoes. It's been confirmed since the first generation that even if all the ideas for animals ran out, Game Freak will still have quite a while before their supply of inspiration becomes insufficient.
 * There are billions of different species of animals on Earth. And those are just the ones that exist today. Heck, a lot of Pokemon are already based on obscure animals not often seen in pop culture. The fans themselves can think of hundreds of fan-Pokemon, Game Freak will never run out of ideas to use.
 * Not to mention that they still didn't explore much flora, minerals, and fauna. There are still ants, cockroaches, random gemstones, Brazil woods, and friggin' platypii waiting to see a Pokemon counterpart.
 * Psyduck is a platypus. And you forgot to mention the mythological creatures they've only partially touched on. I'd love to see a pokemon based on Charybdis.
 * WTF? Psyduck is a duck. It's right there in the name.
 * Psyduck could go either way but golduck is definately a platypus.
 * Wrong. Golduck is a Kappa.
 * It clearly has front paws. Definitely platypus. "Duck" is because it has a duck bill.
 * Both are called the "Duck Pokemon," not the "Platypus Pokemon." Plus, bees don't have spikes for hands, do they?
 * And Sandshrew and Sandslash are called the "Mouse Pokemon", what's your point?
 * Yeah, but a lot of them are too similar to each other to count. I mean, come on, is there really a big enough difference between african elephants and indian elephants to justify making a different pokemon based on each? Or all the different species of ants? But then again, as stated above, they can use non animals or just repeat themselves to keep themselves going until Pokemon ceases to be profitable.
 * For proof that Game Freak has quite a ways to go, just look at the thriving fakemon community. If, for some reason, Game Freak decides "Okay, that's enough. We're out of ideas", it'll be once there are so many species that pokemon fans will start crying in unison "Please, that's enough! We already have way too many to keep track of!".
 * There's also James Turner, He designed the Baibanira and Goruugo families, didn't he?
 * We haven't gotten centipedes, earthworms/sandworms, wiwaxias, squids, albatrosses, traditional dolphins, panthers, archer fish, newts, pistol shrimp, or coconuts yet, to name a few. Come to think of it, "Wiwaxola" would make a good Corsola evolution, would it not?
 * Coconuts? Exeggutor would like to see you in his office.
 * While we're at that... Venonat doesn't look like a Gnat at all. For starters, it doesn't have wings... why is it considered so?
 * Wild Caterpie learns tackle and string shot. But wild Metapod only know Harden. But surely wild Metapod evolve from wild Caterpie? So do Metapod automatically forget all their moves as soon as they evolve, unless they're in the possession of a trainer?
 * Well, trained pokemon will be better than untrained ones at the same level. So, trainers help the pokemon get more skilled, as well as more powerful. So, the wild Metapod aren't skilled enough to use moves from inside a cocoon, but with a trainer's help it is.
 * Then how come the Metapod/Kakuna of NPC trainers can only use Harden?
 * They're probably bad trainers. That's why it's okay to beat them up to a pulp. =D
 * It's quite possible that they caught theirs wild. As to why they don't have any attackers, well, that's because they're morons.

''How can it use Bite and still have teeth left? Geodude is a fucking rock!''
 * Has anyone noticed how completely fucked some of the moves are? For example, this troper was playing Pearl when her Luxio was fighting a Geodude. Luxio used Bite, and won.
 * I think it's pretty much consensus that trying to apply logic to Pokémon fights just won't work, except maybe in the anime.
 * Logic does have implications in the manga. Break Sharpedo's teeth -> cut hole in glass -> drain water. Sound familiar?
 * In the original Japanese, dragon type is written ???? (doragon) which usually refers to western-style dragons, but all dragon type Pokemon are more like eastern-style dragons and Charizard, the Pokemon who most resembles a western-style dragon, isn't a dragon type. What gives?
 * Charizard couldn't be a dragon type. They gave him wings, so that's flying, and he was a fire type all along, so he had to be fire. Pokemon can only be two types.
 * Also, Charizard can't be part-Dragon because otherwise he'd be overpowered compared to the other two starters.
 * This was also mentioned earlier.
 * A Fridge Logic, Mammalian-based Pokemon can somehow lay Egg. WTF?
 * Pokemon aren't identical to real-life animals. And Pokemon consistently lay eggs if they have the capability. I'm not seeing the problem.
 * That, and mammals can lay eggs. Not many of our Real Life mammals do -- actually, only two species --, but they could...
 * The whole fainting thing always bothered me. I mean, there's flame throwers, some hot enough to melt rock, burning their flesh. Hyperbeams, solar beams, poisons, and some of them even blow themselves up. And they never die, only faint. Huh?
 * It's the result of Satoshi Tajiri attempting to avert Death Is Cheap in a game about battling monsters. An admirable, if nonsensical attempt, if I do say so myself.
 * Maybe they do die, and the balls keep them in data form so they can be resurrected. That would explain why you can't capture an unconscious Pokemon.
 * I always thought the "only unconscious" thing in Pokemon could be explained in two parts. 1) The Pokemon are extraordinarily resilient. If I can accept that fictional monsters breathe fire and attack each other with psionic blasts, I can accept that they're resilient enough to survive attacks like that. The same way superheroes can get punched by other superheroes without their heads caving in. 2) Trainers are shown to have a special bond with their Pokemon, right? I always assumed that a Pokemon could die if exposed to attacks for too long, but trainers have the sense to switch out before that happens.
 * We're talking a setting where a ten pound mouse can get headbutted by a thirteen-hundred pound walking tank, then beat the snot out of said walking tank without requiring so much as a band-aid. And where humans are regularly and seriously electrocuted or sent flying hundreds of feet through the air, with no lasting damage (beyond Ash's probable brain damage). Superhuman stamina and resilience is a given. These things are amazingly difficult to kill.
 * 150 Pokemon in the first generation just bugs me. Shouldn't it be 151, or 149? How the hell does the list say 150? Seriously, in their world, how can anybody possibly know about Mewtwo without knowing Mew? On that matter, why is Mew listed after Mewtwo? It's in the name, Mew Two, why is Mew's clone listed first, and why wasn't Mew in the game at all?
 * This one was addressed further up on the page.
 * Could someone please explain to me what a Doduo or Dodrio using Fly is supposed to look like?
 * Joust with additional heads.
 * But at least ostriches have wings, if small ones. Doduo/Dodrio would have to just levitate or something.
 * They jump hella high.
 * I figure they spin their heads or legs really fast like a helicopter rotor.
 * The Japanese name can be translated as "Sky Jump", and the Dodrio line is known for their prowess at leaping.
 * A related question: how can Doduo and Dodrio learn Fly, yet Pokemon like Golbat, and in R/B, Charizard, can't.
 * The real question is not which Pokemon can fly, but rather which ones can support a trainer while doing so. Crobat received full Fly permissions, but had the extra wings to help. (Before DPP relented and offered it to Zubat and Golbat as well.) As for Charizard, considering how quickly they changed their minds...
 * How do you use dig while surfing? For that matter, how on earth is dive supposed to work while on land?
 * Revealed in the manga: Pokemon actually using Dive, as opposed to simply swimming underwater, create an air bubble around themselves.
 * More to the point: Say I Surf on my Azumarill (many, many trainer comments support the interpretation that the Azumarill is literally carrying me). Say I then order it to use Rollout. ???
 * Hold on tight.
 * Splash. It does nothing. Since the beginning, and for every game afterward, Splash. Does. NOTHING. Why? They don't have to make it do much (I kinda envisioned it slightly raising evasiveness, and hitting the opposing pokemon for minimum damage if used right before evading said pokemon's attack, or something), but at least let it do something.
 * It has become an inner joke, something of a Joke Character in move form. If Splash did something, it would lost the humor value, and Magikarp would no more be useless.
 * Depends how they did it and how things are calculated. For example, if splash did 1 damage before defense was applied, and could be reduced to zero (as far as I know damage math always produces at least a one). Then it would be useless by the time you got the old rod, but at the endgame would be useful. Besides with the contests in RSE splash stopped doing nothing, it was a decent coordinate move for the "Beauty" set. There were better moves, but splash is the tackle of Contests.
 * Another thing about Magikarp. Why does there have to be at least one, though usually more, trainer in the game who brags about how awesome his team is, only to then reveal that he has six Magikarp, usually below level ten? Is it supposed to teach kids about how lame Magikarp is? Or is it just an Overused Running Gag? I mean I know Nintendo isn't big on innovation but come on, every game?
 * Splash is a decent move in Pokemon Contests, so it's not completely useless.
 * This troper came to this conclusion: They wanted to make Magikarp (apparently) useless, but they couldn't simply give him no moves whatsoever. The solution: a move that does nothing.
 * Generation 3 and 4 Pokemon have nifty animations and multitonal cries. G1 and G2 Pokemon get updated sprites...but stick with the same 2-tone midi cries they had from the original games?! What? Why would the designers be lazy like that? Better yet, why aren't they using the power of the DS to do what they did with Pokemon Yellow and give all the Pokemon their anime cries?
 * Tradition is one reason. Another is that making sounds may not be as easy as making sprites. And I, for one, would find annoying to have anime cries. Really.
 * Pikachu only had the "Pika!" cry in yellow (and only the starter Pikachu at that) as a tie-in to the anime, which Yellow was largely based on. The pokemon themselves, when you can actually speak to one, tend to say something that sounds more animalistic. The old cries are probably only kept for consistency, even if they do sound outdated.
 * The strange thing is, they already made higher-quality cries for the Stadium games, yet don't use them even in the later console games, let alone in the handheld series. Despite the fact that they love reusing the 3D models from the Stadium games.
 * Why is there not a Pokemon type that's weak to Normal type? Is it supposed to be representative of the "everyman" Pokemon? I know there are moves that make Ghost-type Pokemon vulnerable to Normal-type attacks, but thus far, there is not a Normal-Type attack that can be Super Effective. Why not?
 * Normal seems to be designed for being "not too special". It has one immunity and one weakness, and two on "not very effective", while other types normally have at least five types among "weak" and "not very effective against". It's normal, but not scrappy.
 * You obviously haven't tried foresight(or the other moves) against ghost type, have you? Foresight is a move that turns offensive Normal moves against Ghost pokemon from ineffective to super-effective. Works even against Spiritomb. Everybody just overlooked this move because it's too situational to be useful.
 * Incorrect, actually: Foresight makes Noraml and Fighting-type moves simply effective. You if you were getting any "Super Effective" results, then that was you using a Fighting-type move against a Dark/Ice and Ghost Pokemon. Normal, no matter what the case, always remains super effective against nothing. But, like the above troper said, it has few weaknesses and even contains a resistance, so...
 * What would Normal be particularly good against?
 * Magikarp?
 * I'm surprised no one has mentioned what, in my opinion, is the most significant IJBM in all of Pokemon. The fact that I can't catch Pokemon after they faint is never explained. Characters always say "Weakened Pokemon are easier to catch." Logically that should mean the fainted ones are easiest to catch, right? This one is particularly annoying, if I'm trying to capture a rare Pokemon, and I take extra care to get its health into the red zone, but accidentally score a critical hit.
 * For gameplay reasons, I'd assume. There'd be very little challenge in catching them if you could.
 * Yeah, gameplay. They catch fainted Pokemon all the time on the show.
 * Yeah, but they're usually still conscious IIRC.
 * ...it's kind of hard to be fainted and conscious at the same time.
 * In XD it says they flee the battle when you injure them too much. It may not technically be canon, but it's better than "it passed out, so you just left its unconscious body laying in the grass at the mercy of whatever may come around next".
 * Why has no one pointed out all of the terrible things Ash and others have done to Team Rocket?.
 * We have. It's right there in the article. As for the show… nobody in the cast likes JJ&M enough to care.
 * It's pretty simple. If you don't want to be electrocuted, don't stalk 10 year olds. You honestly think they don't bring it on themselves?
 * Side note: Best Space Whale Aesop ever right there.
 * Of course, taking in consideration that stalking 10 years olds will always end badly…
 * Well, seeing as how Ash uses more acts of violence against them then they do him, Ash really is being pretty mean. All attacking Team Rocket does is hurt them more, so you have to admit, the only reason he blasts them off is to cause pain, which is certainly not heroic.
 * Attacking Team Rocket accomplishes one other thing: it guarantees Ash and his friends at least a few hours of Team Rocket-free time (while TR makes their way back to the Twerps). To a kid who's been stalked every day for his whole journey, that's probably a blessed relief.
 * And he couldn't just stun them, handcuff them, and give them to the police and accomplish the same thing at least somewhat more permanently?
 * Shovels. Tunnels. Escape. I don't think "permanent" means what you think it means in this context.
 * We're talking about Ash "Friggin' Dumb" Ketchum, he doesn't have time to spend thinking on anything besides training, do you really think he'd come up with an arresting plan for these three?
 * Maybe he lets them for his own amusement. Imagine how monotonous life would be if it was the same Pokémon training routine over and over. It's not implausible that he just developed a weird sense of humor and finds it funny. Plus, he and Pikachu could use the experience(points). Can't let yourself get dull and rusty.
 * Besides, if they did finally get arrested, there'd be no more comic relief, especially.
 * Ash and Team Rocket have an "understanding." They try to steal Pikachu, he blasts them off. They don't try to kill him, he doesn't try to have them arrested. He saves their bacon if they bite off more than they can chew, they occasionally return the favor. It's a weird sort of relationship, but they're all comfortable with it - who are we to judge?
 * A whole page and no one has brought up why Ash or any other trainer has the ability to become a trainer while skipping school!?
 * You just did. Anyway, it's a plot requirement, as school being required would seriously impede Ash's travel plans.
 * In the manga based on the TV series, there's mention of "Pokemon Trainer's Leave".
 * OK, but I direct you to the above entry about the passage of time, just how long is "Trainer's Leave"?
 * 1 year off school, according to the Electric Tale of Pikachu. Or one term. Either way, see the above [JustBugsMe]s on Ash's age.
 * Whenever we do see schoolchildren, they're invariably younger than Ash, while anyone around Ash's age is almost certainly a trainer. It explains why Dexter speaks - it's necessary for this world's shockingly high illiteracy rate.
 * Don't forget, though, that a ten-year-old schoolkid in Japan is probably equivalent to a fifteen-year-old schoolkid in the States, education-wise, given the schools in both countries. And I'd say Ash is on the lower end of the bell curve as far as "knowledge absorbed in school" goes (he probably squeaked through graduation with a low C avg); Misty, Brock and Tracey are probably a better example of the average trainer's education level, and they don't seem so bad off.
 * 1) It is possible that in addition to teleporters, they also have advanced education technology and 2) considering that almost all jobs revolve around Pokémon, the journey could be seen as a "vocational" path.
 * Actually, this troper has a fair idea of how this is possible from reading, of all things, Hikaru no Go. In Japan, no level of school is "required," and people can become pro athletes/players of any sport/game at theoretically any age, especially things like Go, Shogi, Chess, etc.; in this regard, Pokemon Training may qualify just as such - and considering how potentially lucrative being a trainer can be, if you're good at it, an education may not be necessary to do well in life (though Oak and many other influential once-trainers apparently have gone forward in their educations, as well). There is, too, the idea that, in the games, everything the player does is all within the course of a few months - each game could theoretically take place over the course of Summer Vacation for the character, especially considering that NONE of the characters apparently PLAN on being Pokemon trainers directly (the Professor always wrangles them into it).
 * I always saw it as similar to high fashion modelling, of all things. A lot of supermodels started at the age of thirteen or fourteen so have very little in the way of formal education, too. I guess they pick up the practical stuff, though, through all that traveling. Just like Pokémon trainers. Yay?
 * Chances are optional online classes are available as well. One expects the majority of ten-year-olds given a chance to bail on school in lieu of an adventure wouldn't exactly bother—but then there are people like Max who would probably not only jump at the chance, but burn through it faster on their own than in public school.
 * It bugs me that in the animé, Pokemon are repeatedly shown to be as intelligent as humans, yet they are still treated like, well, animals. They have no rights, people are legally allowed to own them, and no one, not even the Pokemon themselves, have the slightest problem with this.
 * Well, not every Pokemon has IQ on par with humans, plus I think that the Pokemon are fine with being "pets" of humans since most of them do treat them with love and care. While some Pokémon may be smart as humans, they lack effective communication.
 * Meowth tends to think of himself as the master, to some extent (not that he can override Jessie's sheer aggression).
 * Well, he is a cat…
 * There was of course Mewtwo who did take offense at the idea of both people owning Pokemon, and the Pokemon being actually okay with this. Also, not only is he probably smarter than any human or Pokemon (consider the fact that he was able to reconstruct and refine a highly complex cloning machine practically from scratch with most of the research data destroyed, and can telepathically communicate in a manner understandable to humans) but he does actually try to initiate social change, albeit through the rather extreme method of committing genocide against the human and Pokemon races and replace them with a race of cloned, mutated super Pokemon (presumably, he would have harvested genetic material from the corpses).
 * There's a trope for that…
 * Yet, in the game you can capture and train the same Mewtwo…
 * Two notes: a) Many Pokémon aren't quite "sentient". They seem to run the gamut from rat intelligence to dog intelligence to ape to near or past human. And b) I always thought of it as the Pokémon not being "owned", but they have a system of respect, of sorts. If you're good enough to catch them, they give you the respect you deserve, and realize you are the master. Incidentally, this is why traded Pokemon don't listen. They don't know if you deserve their respect.
 * Also, why is Ash so mad at Paul in the anime for releasing (setting them free to be happy i always thought) his weaker Pokemon, when he has done it a few times himself, and has no reason to be mad at any "injustice" to Pokemon (i say this because i can recall a time when he sent his Charizard against a Chikorita. That was already really weak.)
 * Paul doesn't think of Pokemon as living beings, discarding them the way you or I would discard a food wrapper. As for Ash's own crimes, he hasn't done something like that in a long while.
 * It's a crime to train and release Pokémon? They haven't displayed any "domesticated creatures can't live in the wild" issues, the act of training Pokemon frequently improves them, and not all Pokémon desire to spend their entire lives fighting in tournaments. In this universe, it's not a completely invalid viewpoint that Ash's benign release of his Pokemon could be the ideal way to handle them.
 * This is the same Ash who had a breakdown when it seemed Pikachu wanted to live with other Pikachu. He's simply egomaniacal - he can't stand the thought that there's beings who don't want to spend all their time on his belt. Or in a computer.
 * I would assume that it is less egomania, and more a reaction to someone whom you thought of as your closest friend saying "I don't want to be around you anymore".
 * There's also the fact that "Pikachu's Goodbye" was quite early on in the first season. Ash has grown up a lot since then.
 * But he's still 10.
 * It's definitely not an ego thing. Ash was able to let Butterfree go without a breakdown several episodes earlier.
 * Egomaniacal?! Ash was willing to let his best friend go - no, to INSIST that his best friend (and strongest Pokemon) leave him forever - because he was convinced that Pikachu would ultimately be happier living with its own kind. His "emotional breakdown" was merely grief at the loss of his friend and oldest companion. It was the most selfless act imaginable for a ten-year-old boy dedicated to the goal of becoming a Pokemon Master. This, then, is the reason Paul and Ash couldn't be more different… Paul releases Pokemon for his own convenience, despite the Pokemon's wishes, whereas Ash releases Pokemon for THEIR benefit - because they wish to go, or he thinks they would be happier.
 * Still… you'd think that, regardless of the circumstances, Ash would be happy the Pokemon being released are able to get away from Paul.
 * Because he knows that Pokemon have feelings, and are able to understand what "rejection" is…? Three of Ash's first six Pokemon were starters that were abandoned by their trainers, and who'd developed bad attitudes to varying degrees. And Chimchar, at least, showed all the pain you'd expect when Paul was tossing it aside like garbage…
 * Which really makes Paul's Pokémon seem like domestic abuse victims sticking up for the guy who treats them like garbage on a regular basis. Which, I'll grant you, happens in real life. But an outsider who realizes what's going on, like Ash, should be happy that the poor things are able to get away from the abusive jerk and have a shot at a decent life, even if they do have to have some rejection pains in the process.
 * The real issue here is…Paul does what any of us do when we play Pokémon. If we get a Pokémon we don't like, we usually release it. The issue isn't really what Paul's doing, but HOW he's doing it.
 * I know I would rethink the way I play Pokémon if they were actual, living beings.
 * This troper has never released a Pokémon. EVER. She would feel too guilty about it, for reasons unknown.
 * Seconded. It's painful enough realizing that most of them will never get out of the box after reaching their last stage.
 * Paul doesn't care about Pokemon except for how strong they are. He has no love or understanding for the Pokemon he catches, to him they are tools to be used and discarded when they aren't up to his very high expectations. Ash dislikes Paul for that, not for the fact that he releases Pokemon.
 * There was an episode in the anime that centered in a rehabilitation center that helped released Pokemon work their way back into the wild. So no, it isn't without cost. Paul is abandoning his Pokemon to a desperate life, and he's pushing overly aggressive abuse victims on the world.
 * I know the page lists it as You Can't Thwart Stage One, but there was what I consider a bit of Bad Writing around the Snowpoint Gym. OK, so we've got this cool story going where Team Galactic had kidnapped Azelf and Mesprit, and they've headed up to Lake Acuity to grab Uxie. We're moving forward. You've braved the Grim Up North. You've come a long way. Finally, this game is truly averting Excuse Plot. You get to a fork in the road, and... NOPE! There's a Rock Climb section between you and Lake Acuity, and you can't use Rock Climb outside of battle until you get the Badge from Snowpoint Gym. Commence Level Grinding against anything and everything for as long as it takes until you can beat Candice . It was a Broken Bridge that deflated the plot's momentum, something it wouldn't get back until you start Storming the Castle in Veilstone. That isn't good, Game Freak. Such a Broken Bridge when your story is weak and underdeveloped, or when you've got a crap Excuse Plot that was already outdated for handheld role-playing games when Generation 2 came out? Fine. But when you're talking about a tale that's just getting really good, in a game that has finally emerged from the Excuse Plot... Well, I'm starting to think the Badges and League story are The Artifact and should be modified in accordance with the ever-increasing focus on Legendaries. It's too bad that this game had this one flaw, too: aside from such a momentum-breaker, it's great.
 * From the same guy: after the climax. You know how I said that the League thing is The Artifact? Well, aside from that spot with Uxie, I feel that the best indicator of that is the feeling I (at least) got after beating Cyrus and catching Giratina (in Platinum). So I've traveled through the Distortion World, whooped Cyrus, captured Giratina... What's next? Oh, right. Another Badge, and the Elite Four. Yeah, just doesn't compare with catching a being that, according to its Pokédex entry, was "banished for its violence" and now lives in a world of its own making just like Satan. I appreciate Platinum adding a little more postgame content with Charon and Heatran, which may not compare to Cyrus and Giratina but doesn't really have to due to the break, but you still gotta grind your fucking ass off to get there. The Elite Four in general and Cynthia in particular are really strong and tough to beat without having 100 Revives and twice that many each of Full Restores, Full Heals, and Max Potions on hand. Yes, even if you're carrying Giratina around with you. Thank Arceus for the Vs. Seeker, or that shit would have been impossible. In short: best Pokémon yet, but it's still got some nasty Pacing Problems courtesy of The Artifact.
 * As others have said, if you're having trouble with battles and need to level grind, something's wrong. (Oh, and besides being incredibly fast, Infernape has a very good type combination and stat distribution, in addition to a wide movepool.) This troper has never had to level grind in Platinum any time besides before the E4, and if you can take Cynthia and her optimized Garchomp down you're more than ready for the Battle Zone.
 * Story's your issue? Whoa whoa whoa whoa, my friend, slow down. Pokémon has always had an Excuse Plot. That...hasn't really changed even for Black and White. The Galactic thing is a fun distraction, as are most stories behind Pokémon (remember Mewtwo. Yeah...okay). Pokémon is a game about training little animals for battle. The league is definitely not The Artifact. Your goal is To Be a Master. Embrace this. EMBRACE IT LIKE A CHILD, OKAY, PLEASE? And I think you're exaggerating on the Elite Four and Post-Game content a little there. If you're having that much trouble, methinks you're not the best trainer. I managed to get through there without using the VS Seeker once. And if you didn't get Chimchar, you probably should've had a Ponyta a while ago for beating Gardenia, and there's the Riolu you got from Riley if you didn't. Candice's Pokémon really aren't even that much higher up from Byron, and you've had the whole mountain thing and Routes 216-217 to help you level up. Oh, and Pro-Tip: You can obtain an Old Rod as early as Jubilife and you don't get Surf until four gym leaders later. AND there's the Day Care right before Veilstone if training Magikarp is too hard. The Day Care levels Pokémon up really fast for low leveled Pokémon. Magikarp levels up at level 20, and Crasher Wake's (the guy you beat to get Surf) Pokémon are 33, 34, and 37 so most of your Pokémon ought to be way above Magikarp's leveling point by then.
 * Not the OP: First up: you're saying that an event that could trigger a civilization- (if not universe-)ending crisis is Gamefreak's idea of a distraction? Team Rocket's antics, back in the day, could qualify as a "distraction", but their problem is that they're literally in your way of your goal. Apart from their guards blocking up the paths to at least two gyms, the Player Character, by all rights, should be allowed to just shrug and say "Not my problem, I just want To Be a Master." At which point, it should be the writers' responsibility to make the player care about the problem. But the player is never given the choice. Of course, when two titans clash over populated areas threatening the destruction of those areas, only the worst Jerkass or Coward wouldn't try to find some way of intervening. But, at that point, it becomes everybody's problem. Yet, it's All Up to You and you alone.
 * Which brings me to my second point. "Your goal is To Be a Master." A master of what? Warfare? What if I wanted to be a master of Performance Art (Contests & Musicals)? Or athletic training not involving direct combat (Pokeathalons)? Or of breeding for any of the above 3 purposes? Or a master of research by collecting all species of Pokemon (or all variants of a particular Pokemon) without having to usurp the present power structure? But, no; the first two ultimately do not matter, and the third can only be done after you battle the Elites and the Criminal de jour. "Embrace it like a child?" What if a child doesn't want to battle their mons in order to do everything? What sort of morals does that teach our children? In Sum: Let Us See The Credits When We Win All 5 Master-Level Contests or All 10 Events on the highest difficulty or any other Star-Gaining achievement! But, no... Gamefreak and Nintendo hang on to outdated videogame dogma which perpetuates the social and economic stratification between NPCs! If there's ever going to be any progress...
 * First off...holy cow. Second, Pokémon is about training Pokémon the fight. That's what it always has been since Gen I. Taking it off of the back of the box, it says, "Catch, train, and battle your favorite Pokémon and discover ancient, mythical Pokémon in this exciting new adventure!" That's literally all it says about the story. Also, they didn't even have anything about contests until Gen III and a lot of people totally hated that. If you want to do Contests, Musicals, Pokétlon, whatever, fine, great, but that's not the main point of the game. Yes, Team Galactic is still a distraction. A super huge fun dangerous distraction, but a distraction none the less. And why the hell are you looking for morals in Pokémon? It's a video game, calm the heck down.
 * This troper is torn. On the one hand, sure, the franchise is about catching and training creatures to battle and To Be a Master. The point is, Gen IV was the first Gen to get more than an Excuse Plot by Game Freak. They added more motivation. DPPt, though being far from perfect, had a logical storyline with only a few obvious Broken Bridges, an interesting antagonist team, better-developed NPCs and were - with the exception of some momentum breakers - pretty well-paced. Game Freak conciously tried to give us more than before and apparently continues to do so in Gen V. So even if Gen I-III set a certain standard of how a Pokémon game has to be, there is no reason this can't gradually change. With such a Cash Cow Franchise, we can expect more installments and, following the development in Gen IV and V, maybe even more plot, more characters, more motivation and maybe better pacing without losing the "catch Pokémon, grind your butt off, beat the league" premise that made it famous. (And as for DPPt... Yeah, beating the league after beating the Omnicidal Maniac and saving the world was pretty anti-climatic, Excuse Plot or not.)
 * But you have to get to the lake too late to stop Uxie from being captured. That said, some of us like that the plot is something your character just kind of gets caught up in. It's cool that it's incidental to your goals, and you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
 * You really shouldn't have any problems finding a Surfer, and every fight is easily beatable no matter which starter you pick. I've beaten Platinum 5 times now, using each starter (Torterra and Infernape twice) and I've had very little problem. I also make sure I never use the same pokemon twice in a run through (except Torterra and Infernape on their second runs), and I've still been fire. For Candice, any Fire, Fighting, or Steel pokemon is great. I've used Magmortar, Heracross, Magnezone, Flareon, and Lucario, and you can even make due just with a pokemon with Flamethrower (the TM is really easy to get). As for Surfers, I've used Gastrodon, Dewgong, Floatzel, and Tentacruel (though Tentacruel got very little use, he was really only good for setting up Toxic Spikes for me). And you don't exactly have to level grind for the Elite Four, I've beaten them with Pokemon in the medium 40s and low 50s. You just have to get a good spread of types (the first time I reach them, I can almost always beat the first two, and I just keep fighting them for experience until my guys get good enough to beat the last two and the champion).
 * You want to become the champion? Think about the other champions: what do Blue/Lance/Steven/Wallace/Cynthia get to do with their day? They sit around waiting for you to come and fight them. No-one else even bothers with the gyms except your rival, and (s)he tends to give up before challenging the league, so essentially you would get abosolutely nothing out of being the champion. That's why you don't get to hang around - because you're the only person who ever challenges the champion. Pokemon isn't about sitting around waiting, it's about exploring and catching a hell of a lot of Pokemon. If that's not what you want, don't play the game. Simple.
 * I strongly suspect that this falls into the same Gameplay and Story Segregation trap as Mega Man and the question of why its Robot Masters are considered such a threat to the populace when all they do is wait behind a sliding door for Mega Man to fight them. Champions get a bit more interesting in other media, doing things such as to get involved in the main story's conflict (wait, don't Lance and Cynthia already do that?), study unusual archaeological discoveries, sponsor large-scale contests, and the like. The games just aren't the best place for characterization.
 * I just thought it was that the Championship was what you had been working towards since the beginning of the game. Sure you saved the world, but why wouldn't you keep working toward your goal afterwards? It's kinda like police or soldiers: saving lives one day, paperwork the next. Shit happens. Life goes on.
 * Is Nintendo ever going to release the Azure Flute? Seriously, it's been two years.
 * Probably not. You'll have to make do with trading or hacking.
 * I don't even particularly want an Arceus. It just bothers me that Game Freak created a unique item and location for the express purpose of being able to catch a particular Legendary Pokemon via event and then Nintendo never held that event. If they weren't going to do it, then why even bother making them event-only?
 * Well, they did release Arceus as an event a while back.
 * That's exactly my point. Rather than release the Azure Flute and allow player legitimate access to the Hall of Origin, they released an Arceus that required no actual work to obtain. Why not just release the Flute in the first place?