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The Lorekeepers' Club (An all-purpose thread for deep dives about how the Pokémon world works)

So while playing Crown Tundra, I noticed that the Pokémon world uses days and months of the Julian/Gregorian calendars. Do they also use anno Domini (AD) (Latin for "in the year of our Lord") and before Christ (BC) for their years, or do they use another system for years?
 
Just wanted to contribute that

New Pokémon Snap is yet another title that references an ancient disaster (in this case, a meteorite) that threatened the region before being halted by the local phenomenon. I've yet to complete the game so there may yet be further relevant detail, but at this point I'm not sure whether GameFreak now just considers 'ancient disaster from space' a story default or if there's something deliberately funky going on with all these cosmic monsters that seem to have it in for the Pokémon world.
 
Just wanted to contribute that

New Pokémon Snap is yet another title that references an ancient disaster (in this case, a meteorite) that threatened the region before being halted by the local phenomenon. I've yet to complete the game so there may yet be further relevant detail, but at this point I'm not sure whether GameFreak now just considers 'ancient disaster from space' a story default or if there's something deliberately funky going on with all these cosmic monsters that seem to have it in for the Pokémon world.

Isn't there a theory somewhere that Pokémon are from space? Maybe there was just a point in PokéHistory where meteors were just flying everywhere, connected or not connected to the space theory.
 
There's a YouTube channel called The Ruin Maniac Files that has an awesome series talking about how he thinks AZ is actually one of the heroes from the Unova legends and Ghetsis is a descendent of AZ's brother. He discusses Infinity Energy a lot and how much more closely the world is linked than it might seem. He thinks the war told about in Kalos from 3,000 years ago and the war between the brothers in Unova was actually one and the same. Bird Keeper Toby also recently did a video on the possible connections between the Lental and Hoenn regions.

I'm really hoping the Legends games deliver on lore because there's so many possibilities for intertwining lore.
 
So while playing Crown Tundra, I noticed that the Pokémon world uses days and months of the Julian/Gregorian calendars. Do they also use anno Domini (AD) (Latin for "in the year of our Lord") and before Christ (BC) for their years, or do they use another system for years?

It's sort of funny to see the games slowly phase this aspect of the real world back in. Technically, that calendar has been in use in the series since Gen 1, with the Cinnabar Mansion journals. But I think it largely disappeared from the series after that, presumably as a part of the growing separation between the Pokémon world and the trappings and history of the real world. That format partially reappeared in ORAS, where if you analyze a photograph in Shelly's room, you get this text:

> There is a picture of a boy with a shaved head, a girl with black hair, and a Pokémon with three notes attached to its head. "The 7th day of the –th month, –002. With Arc–e and –rachi." The letters at the edge of the picture are faded and hard to read…

I'll let Bulbapedia explain it from there: "Based on the description, the picture likely features young Archie and Shelly with Jirachi. The date described can possibly be the 7th of July, the date of Tanabata, the Japanese star festival which Jirachi is commonly associated with, while the year is likely 2002, the year when Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire were first released. In the Spanish version of the game, the date is slightly altered, showing the year number –003 instead of –002. This is a possible reference to Ruby and Sapphire being released outside of Japan in 2003."

Technically, many calendars besides the Julian/Gregorian ones could have a "7th day of a -th month," but the connections to Jirachi heavily imply that it's referencing Tanabata in July. Also note the intriguing detail of the year using four digits, like ours - although the first digit could hypothetically be anything from 2 to 9. (It can't be 1002, since the Kanto games - again with one of those early, incongruous real-world references - must take place after July 20, 1969, since that's when the space shuttle exhibit says men first landed on the moon. I mean, I guess Archie and Shelly could have met before then, but it would require them to both be preposterously old and to have had a camera a whole 967 years before the moon landing, which since this is a fantasy series is remotely possible, especially since they'd just met a literal wish-granter, but balance of probability says no.) Anyway, I might be wrong, but I think that's the first time we've been given even a vague indication as to what "year" the modern games might be set in. Contrast all of this with the extraordinarily useless caption at the start of the Delta Episode that reads, "XX:XX, the XXth day of the XXth month." Now that could be any calendar. (As I recall, some various journal entries in X & Y also used that "XXth day of the XXth month" filler.)

Part of me wonders if maybe it could be 3002, given the numerous events in Pokémon history that have been dated to "3,000 years ago." That seems to have been a very tumultuous and defining era in the Pokémon world. So maybe that is where the Pokémon calendar begins, as opposed to the BC/AD boundaries of the Julian/Gregorian calendars.

Of course, the recurrence of the "3,000 years ago" timeframe without any of those events being explicitly linked causes another part of me to think about how in Chinese, the phrase "10,000 years" can be used synonymously to mean "an indefinitely long time." Maybe in the Pokémon world, "3,000 years" is actually an expression meaning "an unknowably long time"? But I'm not sure why Game Freak would choose to reinvent that sort of idiomatic convention for their own setting, nor why they would choose the number 3,000. But hey, I figured it's at least worth mentioning the idea.
 
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Part of me wonders if maybe it could be 3002, given the numerous events in Pokémon history that have been dated to "3,000 years ago." That seems to have been a very tumultuous and defining era in the Pokémon world. So maybe that is where the Pokémon calendar begins, as opposed to the BC/AD boundaries of the Julian/Gregorian calendars.
That makes a lot of sense. 3,000 years ago seems to be a really important date in the Pokémon world. That was the year of both the ultimate weapon and the Darkest Day.
 
That makes a lot of sense. 3,000 years ago seems to be a really important date in the Pokémon world. That was the year of both the ultimate weapon and the Darkest Day.

Although I realize now on second pass that if we take the 1969 date from the Kanto games at face value, it'd mean the main setting of the games takes place roughly a thousand years after the moon landing! Which, again, fantasy series, so technically there's nothing impossible about that, but the progression of technology seems strange. (Although the progression of technology in Pokémon is all over the place anyway - literal time travel is achieved within the same timeframe that a mere radio/phone-watch catches on big with the public.)
 
Saw this thread and wanted to chime in with a few things - I've been stewing on stuff like this for a good long while!

1) Per the earlier discussion about human lifespan, it's quite possible that some (a rare subset at least) naturally live significantly longer than the IRL life expectancy. My argument for this is the following (also this ties into my major theory about how Pokemon started existing, which you can read in full here for more context/evidence):

-Mew are the genetic ancestor of all Pokemon, including Anorith and Omanyte - both of which, if we go by their real-world counterparts, lived between 300 and 500 million years ago (this is backed up by Kabuto's Dex entry). This means that somewhere in the slow development of new Pokemon species (we really need another word for that besides 'evolution'), Mew bred with something else to create those and several more Pokemon, imparting upon them a recessive 'Pokemon gene' that can then be combined with another 'Pokemon gene' carrier to produce a true Pokemon offspring from either a Pokemon and an animal or two Pokemon. My theory presumes that that 'something else' was the original animals in question - ammonites, Anomalocaris shrimp, and others. This essentially means that PokeEarth is an alternate Earth, complete with (mostly) the same history and development, which is how we get references to countries like China and America in G1 games and Pokemon based on bulldogs and dugongs, two examples of incredibly specific relations. The reason Pokemon don't overtake real-world animals in this world due to simple natural selection is because they develop from those animals. Even with species that have never been linked to a Pokemon before, like a poodle (an incredibly recent development at the genealogical scale, along with most other dogs!), two poodles with just the right genes could produce a brand-new Furfrou.

This then means that while a good percentage of animals remain just animals (I calculated the equilibrium amount after a few generations as something like 43%, the same as the number of Pokemon), all will have at least some Pokemon DNA inside them due to the sheer amount of time it's had to percolate in every form of life. This, very importantly, includes humans, which leads me into the next part of the theory.

-Mew, additionally, are reliant on their DNA to use 'every Pokemon technique', so it's not a stretch to presume they are similarly reliant on their own DNA to use Transform, much like Ditto. This would mean that Mew have control over their own DNA, basically flipping allele switches on and off to effect rapid changes on their own body (in the real world, if all your DNA were changed at once this would not be instant, but we'll chalk that up to some amazingly fast transcriptor enzymes in Mew's cells). The logical extension of this is that Mew are free to change their DNA as they please, possibly by using some aspect of their Psychic-type powers on it directly. And since they're the ancestor of all Pokemon (and even non-Pokemon like humans), it stands to reason that a small subset may have figured out that same ability and are able to use it through genealogical inheritance. Nothing major, mind you - I'm not saying humans can Transform or change Types (but we do know they can use telekinesis, telepathy, and other Psychic powers).

But they could alter their telomere length.

In most real-world organisms, age and the eventual breakdown because of it ('death by natural causes') is primarily a result of telomere shortening. Telomeres are genes attached to the end of chromosomes that are basically junk - they don't encode anything. Their purpose is solely to stave off an unfortunate side-effect of DNA splitting and replication that happens every time you make a new cell - your DNA gets slightly shorter each time. With a bunch of junk telomeres in the way, though, it's usually a good, long while before that actually starts cutting off important bits, causing your body to get weaker and closer to dying. But if Mew can affect their DNA basically at will, then they can just as easily 'top up' their own telomeres, effectively making them biologically immortal (side note: real-world animals do this, but eventually the energy cost of living becomes so great that they die anyway. It's not perfect.) So if they can do it, and humans are descended from them, why couldn't humans do it also?

The last thing I'll bring up is that the idea that humans are genetically related to Pokemon and can even turn into them if certain conditions are met isn't so far-fetched - there are two well-hidden, but unsubtle references to the concept in the games themselves. The first is a good chunk of Kadabra's Pokedex energies, which mention that exposure to Psychic energies during study caused a young boy to wake up one day as a Kadabra. The second is one of the Sinnoh Myths in the Canalave library (specifically the third), which states that there once was a time where humans and Pokemon were not so easily distinguishable (the Japanese original actually states that there once was a time humans and Pokemon married, while the English/international replacement alters this to 'ate at the same table.')

Points against this theory:
-If Mew are the ancestor of all Pokemon, what does that say about Arceus and the other 'Elder Gods'?
-What about Deoxys and other Pokemon who didn't originate on Earth? Then again, what if Mew didn't originate on Earth?
-If humans have Pokemon ancestry, wouldn't that make them subject to the same rules as Pokemon (can be caught in Balls, stored in PC, etc.)

2) This relates to Infinity Energy (and Galar Particles!), but I have a theory for how Pokemon attacks work as well (warning: extensive discussion of nuclear physics and cosmology.)

-Pokemon attacks are well-known to produce energy and matter seemingly out of nothing. A good example is Hydro Pump, which isn't too hard to learn and results in a massive torrent of water, far more than can reasonably be compressed into any Pokemon's given volume. So where are they getting all that mass from?

My theory is that this mass comes from dark energy, and more specifically a possible explanation for dark energy known as 'black hole remnants'. Dark energy, as the name implies, is energy that clearly has an effect on the universe's expansion rate, but can't be detected or observed by other known means like regular matter, stars, or black holes can. About 68% of the universe's mass-energy total is calculated to be dark energy and 27% dark matter - far more than the 5% of 'normal' mass-energy that we're familiar with. Assuming this stuff is homogenous, there's quite a lot more of it floating around than regular matter we see and interact with.

One possible explanation for why we aren't being subjected to violent discombobulation by all this energy has to do with the ultimate fate of black holes. Stephen Hawking proposed (without current proof, but it's been accepted by the scientific community as 'probably true') that black holes emit radiation, and, in the absence of 'feedstock' like stars and planets, will evaporate to nothing. But this astronomic-scale explanation conflicts with a major tenet of quantum theory that all energy is quantized into discrete amounts (hence the name), and that a non-zero lower boundary energy (called the zero-point or ground state energy) must always exist for any given massive particle (of which black holes certainly are). So what happens when a black hole with, let's say 1.5x the ground-state energy tries to evaporate further? According to quantum theory, it can't just emit 0.5 quanta of energy, nor can it emit the full 1.5 quanta and be done with it. It also can't emit another 1.0 quanta of energy, as this would take it below the ground state energy, which is supposed to be impossible.

The theory then states that one possibility for the ultimate fate of a black hole is that it's simply stuck like this - an unstable equilibrium between cosmic and quantum-scale interactions - and floats around the universe as a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (or WIMP for short. The other explanation for dark energy is that it involves very compressed baryonic matter like quarks/atoms, and these are termed MACHOs. Physicists are a strange and unruly bunch). These WIMPs or 'black hole remnants' still have a mass, but it's tiny - between 23 and 46 micrograms each. Thus, they don't do much to ordinary matter even if they do manage to hit it, and that's strongly unlikely - these things are still black holes and are thus compressed far more than they have any right to be (for perspective, a WIMP compared to an atom in size is around the scale of a grain of sand being compared to our Sun).

So, basically, we have a bunch of absolutely miniscule subatomic particles that don't do much at a local scale, but at a cosmic scale their weight adds up enough to alter the expansion rate of the universe. What does this have to do with Pokemon? Well, in my theory, everything. See, individually these black holes are basically useless. But if you were to bring two of the earlier 1.5x ground-state-energy black holes together, suddenly you'd get a rapid emission of 3 bursts of gamma rays - free energy, assuming all the energy you put in was to accelerate them enough! In fact, if you took an average cross section of all of these micro black holes and pushed them all into attractive range, you'd find that you would always get between 100% and 200% of the mass-energy contained in the black holes themselves.

And that's a lot of mass-energy.

If we assume dark energy homogenously permeates all space (including the space I'm surrounded by, the space you're surrounded by and the space any given Pokemon is surrounded by, as well as the space inside us), 68% of that space by volume being devoted to a bunch of black hole remnants of 23 micrograms each (the minimum amount, for conservative calculations), there's a total of 8.8765 x 10^95 such black holes in a cube 5 millimeters to a side. That adds up to a total available mass of 2.0417 x 10^88 kilograms of available mass in any given 5mm cube of space, none of which interacts because it's simply too small. But a Pokemon like Mew might have figured out how to smash them together, and in the process unlocked infinite energy at their disposal, passing that same trick on to their descendants. Even if we assume the efficiency of this process was vanishingly small, like 10^-50% (that's a 0.0000....(fifty zeroes)1%), they'd still have as much mass as they could ever ask for. Some of it could even be put to work to turn the rest of it from gamma energy back into usable matter.

To make things better, there's strong suggestions in recent games that this is exactly the approach Game Freak is taking. Galar Particles came with Eternatus from outer space, and Eternatus can take them away from Pokemon, preventing them from attacking while in its Eternamax form. Additionally, Infinity Energy carries hints of similar concepts - thousands of Pokemon releasing as much of this energy as possible would certainly be enough to induce some heavy spacetime distortion, such as ripping the timeline in half when the Ultimate Weapon was fired.

Also, the reason we haven't tried this in real life is because we can't figure out a way to accelerate or otherwise move non-charged particles, as we always end up using heavy electric or magnetic fields. I'm assuming some remnant of Mew's Psychic-type telekinesis is used by all Pokemon to attract the necessary particles to power their attacks with.

3) And lastly, per the calendar dates and use thereof:

I'm sure you've probably seen the deleted Pokemon timeline tweet posted by Junichi Masuda a while back when Black 2 and White 2 were coming out. If you haven't, it goes a little something like this:

T=0 years: G1 and G3 (Events of Kanto/Hoenn games)
T=3 years: G2 and G4 (Events of Johto/Sinnoh games)
T=13 years: G5a (Events of Black/White)
T=15 years: G5b, G6 (Events of Black 2/White 2, X, Y)

Despite being deleted, a bunch of evidence still supports this in the games themselves. Johto games openly state Rocket was disbanded three years ago, and Platinum opens with a special TV announcement about a red Gyarados sighted at the Lake of Rage in Johto (the same one the Johto character catches in their games, making them concurrent). In Unova, you can find a strange-speaking Rocket Grunt who moved back here after the whole shindig, and has a son who wishes to start his own Pokemon journey soon (therefore making him close to, but not quite 10 years old). In concept art for B2/W2, Grimmsley is noted to be 2 years older.

What I found out was that this roughly correlates to the earliest release date of each of these groups, like this:

Red/Blue/Green: 1996
Gold/Silver/Crystal: 2000
Black/White: 2010
Black 2/White 2: 2012

Which then means we can extend this logic to get the full timeline, like this:

G1/G3: 1996
G2/G4: 2000
G5a: 2010
G5b/G6: 2012
G7: 2016
G8: 2019

This also lines up somewhat with progression of technology - back in 1996, pocket computers were expensive and had to be custom-made. By 2019, smartphones are ubiquitous and Pokedexes are merely one app of many. Clunky PC's for item storage were replaced by sleeker, much slimmer versions or even portable variants. (Of course, turning items and Pokemon into data reversibly doesn't quite fit there, but the analogy isn't always true.)

...Whoops. Textwalled again. Can you tell I'm passionate about this sort of thing?
 
So this might be worth bringing up

At least in the case of Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald's universe, Groudon/Kyogre never had *the fight* in the past, it's all just made up.








As someone who has always been skeptical of the god-like status that people confer upon Legendaries, this doesn't surprise me at all. It's exactly in line with Cynthia's hypothesis about the Sinnoh dragons in Platinum - ancient people witnessed creatures with seemingly magical powers, and then made up stories to explain those creatures and their relation to the world around them. Then, over time, those stories became increasingly more blurred and exaggerated, because that's how mythology works. (Hell, in real life, you don't even need the creatures to have actual powers - there's plenty of myths and stories about actual animals that claim they can do things that they're not actually able to do.) The question isn't "What is a god Pokémon like?" but rather, "What kind of Pokémon might people believe is a god?"

That's not to say that the Pokémon world is a world of pure, hard science and realism, because obviously there's a spiritual aspect to it with things like ghosts and psychics and soothsayers, as well as all of the real-world science that Pokémon themselves casually defy on a daily basis. But I think with Legendary Pokémon, the game-makers have always been more interested in the human element - what is the relationship between people, the world, and this specific Pokémon that forms the foundation of the stories people tell? What aspects of this Pokémon were most notable and meaningful to people back then? Masuda commented on this once in an interview:

> Game Informer: In our Pokémon's Burning Questions interview in 2012, you said "Humans are definitely separate from Pokémon. The way you think about it is different than how we think about animals in relation to humans on Earth." But then in Pokémon X&Y a character says, "They say that in the ancient days, man and Pokémon were the same." I'm curious if you and the team changed your mind on this topic.

> Junichi Masuda: This is simply showing a different way of thinking from a past era. In ancient times, like in the myths and legends we put in the Diamond and Pearl games, it was said that Pokémon were the same as humans. However, I like to think of Pokémon as mysterious creatures – they're closer to humans than dogs or cats that people might keep as pets.

Ultimately it's just meant to illustrate the past of the world, and how our understanding of the world changes over time. In that Twitter thread, someone posts a screenshot from LGPE of the Pewter Museum, in which there's a display up on the wall charting the birth and growth of the universe, and it's literally just the same kind of Big Bang model that we use today. In ancient history, some people believed that a Pokémon created the universe. In modern times, scientists probe for evidence and create theoretical frameworks like the Big Bang. Honestly, I don't think the point is even to say whether one or the other is right or wrong - the goal is more to create a sense of verisimilitude with the real world that still keeps the fiction of the Pokémon narrative in context. Even today there are countless people with their own belief systems about the world. There's also plenty who try to reconcile their religion's teachings with scientific evidence. Meanwhile, other people stand entirely by scientific evidence. All of that's fine, and it stands to reason that the same kind of range of values could exist within the Pokémon world.

Now, since Pokémon is a fictional setting, for all we know there very well could be something to the mythic claims about all the various Legendaries, or hell, even the smaller myths that don't involve Legendary Pokémon (which the fandom always seems to put less stock in, or at least that's the sense I get). Or it could all just be made up. The truth here doesn't particularly matter, because that's not the point of why these elements are included in the games. It's just about illustrating a certain dimension of the human/Pokémon relationship.
 
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Saw this thread and wanted to chime in with a few things - I've been stewing on stuff like this for a good long while!

1) Per the earlier discussion about human lifespan, it's quite possible that some (a rare subset at least) naturally live significantly longer than the IRL life expectancy. My argument for this is the following (also this ties into my major theory about how Pokemon started existing, which you can read in full here for more context/evidence):

-Mew are the genetic ancestor of all Pokemon, including Anorith and Omanyte - both of which, if we go by their real-world counterparts, lived between 300 and 500 million years ago (this is backed up by Kabuto's Dex entry). This means that somewhere in the slow development of new Pokemon species (we really need another word for that besides 'evolution'), Mew bred with something else to create those and several more Pokemon, imparting upon them a recessive 'Pokemon gene' that can then be combined with another 'Pokemon gene' carrier to produce a true Pokemon offspring from either a Pokemon and an animal or two Pokemon. My theory presumes that that 'something else' was the original animals in question - ammonites, Anomalocaris shrimp, and others. This essentially means that PokeEarth is an alternate Earth, complete with (mostly) the same history and development, which is how we get references to countries like China and America in G1 games and Pokemon based on bulldogs and dugongs, two examples of incredibly specific relations. The reason Pokemon don't overtake real-world animals in this world due to simple natural selection is because they develop from those animals. Even with species that have never been linked to a Pokemon before, like a poodle (an incredibly recent development at the genealogical scale, along with most other dogs!), two poodles with just the right genes could produce a brand-new Furfrou.

This then means that while a good percentage of animals remain just animals (I calculated the equilibrium amount after a few generations as something like 43%, the same as the number of Pokemon), all will have at least some Pokemon DNA inside them due to the sheer amount of time it's had to percolate in every form of life. This, very importantly, includes humans, which leads me into the next part of the theory.

-Mew, additionally, are reliant on their DNA to use 'every Pokemon technique', so it's not a stretch to presume they are similarly reliant on their own DNA to use Transform, much like Ditto. This would mean that Mew have control over their own DNA, basically flipping allele switches on and off to effect rapid changes on their own body (in the real world, if all your DNA were changed at once this would not be instant, but we'll chalk that up to some amazingly fast transcriptor enzymes in Mew's cells). The logical extension of this is that Mew are free to change their DNA as they please, possibly by using some aspect of their Psychic-type powers on it directly. And since they're the ancestor of all Pokemon (and even non-Pokemon like humans), it stands to reason that a small subset may have figured out that same ability and are able to use it through genealogical inheritance. Nothing major, mind you - I'm not saying humans can Transform or change Types (but we do know they can use telekinesis, telepathy, and other Psychic powers).

But they could alter their telomere length.

In most real-world organisms, age and the eventual breakdown because of it ('death by natural causes') is primarily a result of telomere shortening. Telomeres are genes attached to the end of chromosomes that are basically junk - they don't encode anything. Their purpose is solely to stave off an unfortunate side-effect of DNA splitting and replication that happens every time you make a new cell - your DNA gets slightly shorter each time. With a bunch of junk telomeres in the way, though, it's usually a good, long while before that actually starts cutting off important bits, causing your body to get weaker and closer to dying. But if Mew can affect their DNA basically at will, then they can just as easily 'top up' their own telomeres, effectively making them biologically immortal (side note: real-world animals do this, but eventually the energy cost of living becomes so great that they die anyway. It's not perfect.) So if they can do it, and humans are descended from them, why couldn't humans do it also?

The last thing I'll bring up is that the idea that humans are genetically related to Pokemon and can even turn into them if certain conditions are met isn't so far-fetched - there are two well-hidden, but unsubtle references to the concept in the games themselves. The first is a good chunk of Kadabra's Pokedex energies, which mention that exposure to Psychic energies during study caused a young boy to wake up one day as a Kadabra. The second is one of the Sinnoh Myths in the Canalave library (specifically the third), which states that there once was a time where humans and Pokemon were not so easily distinguishable (the Japanese original actually states that there once was a time humans and Pokemon married, while the English/international replacement alters this to 'ate at the same table.')

Points against this theory:
-If Mew are the ancestor of all Pokemon, what does that say about Arceus and the other 'Elder Gods'?
-What about Deoxys and other Pokemon who didn't originate on Earth? Then again, what if Mew didn't originate on Earth?
-If humans have Pokemon ancestry, wouldn't that make them subject to the same rules as Pokemon (can be caught in Balls, stored in PC, etc.)

2) This relates to Infinity Energy (and Galar Particles!), but I have a theory for how Pokemon attacks work as well (warning: extensive discussion of nuclear physics and cosmology.)

-Pokemon attacks are well-known to produce energy and matter seemingly out of nothing. A good example is Hydro Pump, which isn't too hard to learn and results in a massive torrent of water, far more than can reasonably be compressed into any Pokemon's given volume. So where are they getting all that mass from?

My theory is that this mass comes from dark energy, and more specifically a possible explanation for dark energy known as 'black hole remnants'. Dark energy, as the name implies, is energy that clearly has an effect on the universe's expansion rate, but can't be detected or observed by other known means like regular matter, stars, or black holes can. About 68% of the universe's mass-energy total is calculated to be dark energy and 27% dark matter - far more than the 5% of 'normal' mass-energy that we're familiar with. Assuming this stuff is homogenous, there's quite a lot more of it floating around than regular matter we see and interact with.

One possible explanation for why we aren't being subjected to violent discombobulation by all this energy has to do with the ultimate fate of black holes. Stephen Hawking proposed (without current proof, but it's been accepted by the scientific community as 'probably true') that black holes emit radiation, and, in the absence of 'feedstock' like stars and planets, will evaporate to nothing. But this astronomic-scale explanation conflicts with a major tenet of quantum theory that all energy is quantized into discrete amounts (hence the name), and that a non-zero lower boundary energy (called the zero-point or ground state energy) must always exist for any given massive particle (of which black holes certainly are). So what happens when a black hole with, let's say 1.5x the ground-state energy tries to evaporate further? According to quantum theory, it can't just emit 0.5 quanta of energy, nor can it emit the full 1.5 quanta and be done with it. It also can't emit another 1.0 quanta of energy, as this would take it below the ground state energy, which is supposed to be impossible.

The theory then states that one possibility for the ultimate fate of a black hole is that it's simply stuck like this - an unstable equilibrium between cosmic and quantum-scale interactions - and floats around the universe as a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (or WIMP for short. The other explanation for dark energy is that it involves very compressed baryonic matter like quarks/atoms, and these are termed MACHOs. Physicists are a strange and unruly bunch). These WIMPs or 'black hole remnants' still have a mass, but it's tiny - between 23 and 46 micrograms each. Thus, they don't do much to ordinary matter even if they do manage to hit it, and that's strongly unlikely - these things are still black holes and are thus compressed far more than they have any right to be (for perspective, a WIMP compared to an atom in size is around the scale of a grain of sand being compared to our Sun).

So, basically, we have a bunch of absolutely miniscule subatomic particles that don't do much at a local scale, but at a cosmic scale their weight adds up enough to alter the expansion rate of the universe. What does this have to do with Pokemon? Well, in my theory, everything. See, individually these black holes are basically useless. But if you were to bring two of the earlier 1.5x ground-state-energy black holes together, suddenly you'd get a rapid emission of 3 bursts of gamma rays - free energy, assuming all the energy you put in was to accelerate them enough! In fact, if you took an average cross section of all of these micro black holes and pushed them all into attractive range, you'd find that you would always get between 100% and 200% of the mass-energy contained in the black holes themselves.

And that's a lot of mass-energy.

If we assume dark energy homogenously permeates all space (including the space I'm surrounded by, the space you're surrounded by and the space any given Pokemon is surrounded by, as well as the space inside us), 68% of that space by volume being devoted to a bunch of black hole remnants of 23 micrograms each (the minimum amount, for conservative calculations), there's a total of 8.8765 x 10^95 such black holes in a cube 5 millimeters to a side. That adds up to a total available mass of 2.0417 x 10^88 kilograms of available mass in any given 5mm cube of space, none of which interacts because it's simply too small. But a Pokemon like Mew might have figured out how to smash them together, and in the process unlocked infinite energy at their disposal, passing that same trick on to their descendants. Even if we assume the efficiency of this process was vanishingly small, like 10^-50% (that's a 0.0000....(fifty zeroes)1%), they'd still have as much mass as they could ever ask for. Some of it could even be put to work to turn the rest of it from gamma energy back into usable matter.

To make things better, there's strong suggestions in recent games that this is exactly the approach Game Freak is taking. Galar Particles came with Eternatus from outer space, and Eternatus can take them away from Pokemon, preventing them from attacking while in its Eternamax form. Additionally, Infinity Energy carries hints of similar concepts - thousands of Pokemon releasing as much of this energy as possible would certainly be enough to induce some heavy spacetime distortion, such as ripping the timeline in half when the Ultimate Weapon was fired.

Also, the reason we haven't tried this in real life is because we can't figure out a way to accelerate or otherwise move non-charged particles, as we always end up using heavy electric or magnetic fields. I'm assuming some remnant of Mew's Psychic-type telekinesis is used by all Pokemon to attract the necessary particles to power their attacks with.

3) And lastly, per the calendar dates and use thereof:

I'm sure you've probably seen the deleted Pokemon timeline tweet posted by Junichi Masuda a while back when Black 2 and White 2 were coming out. If you haven't, it goes a little something like this:

T=0 years: G1 and G3 (Events of Kanto/Hoenn games)
T=3 years: G2 and G4 (Events of Johto/Sinnoh games)
T=13 years: G5a (Events of Black/White)
T=15 years: G5b, G6 (Events of Black 2/White 2, X, Y)

Despite being deleted, a bunch of evidence still supports this in the games themselves. Johto games openly state Rocket was disbanded three years ago, and Platinum opens with a special TV announcement about a red Gyarados sighted at the Lake of Rage in Johto (the same one the Johto character catches in their games, making them concurrent). In Unova, you can find a strange-speaking Rocket Grunt who moved back here after the whole shindig, and has a son who wishes to start his own Pokemon journey soon (therefore making him close to, but not quite 10 years old). In concept art for B2/W2, Grimmsley is noted to be 2 years older.

What I found out was that this roughly correlates to the earliest release date of each of these groups, like this:

Red/Blue/Green: 1996
Gold/Silver/Crystal: 2000
Black/White: 2010
Black 2/White 2: 2012

Which then means we can extend this logic to get the full timeline, like this:

G1/G3: 1996
G2/G4: 2000
G5a: 2010
G5b/G6: 2012
G7: 2016
G8: 2019

This also lines up somewhat with progression of technology - back in 1996, pocket computers were expensive and had to be custom-made. By 2019, smartphones are ubiquitous and Pokedexes are merely one app of many. Clunky PC's for item storage were replaced by sleeker, much slimmer versions or even portable variants. (Of course, turning items and Pokemon into data reversibly doesn't quite fit there, but the analogy isn't always true.)

...Whoops. Textwalled again. Can you tell I'm passionate about this sort of thing?

I 100% agree with your assessment of the timeline-- I absolutely think the intention is that those are the years the games are supposed to take place on this planet that is an alternate universe to our own. For instance, the war that Surge refers to is the Pokemon version of the Gulf War, as that is the most recent war an American would have fought in in 1996. Every once in a while I'll try to map the games' in-universe Nintendo systems to create a more specific timeline (for instance, LGPE taking place in 2018 instead of RG's 1996), but it always proves fruitless and seems to be an arbitrary easter egg after all.

I do have some input on your first point though:

I've found this blog entry on Pocket Monsters Zukan to be incredibly informative and useful in assessing how the Pokemon world was originally conceived (and therefore determining how later worldbuilding may have shifted this). For instance, right at the top it mentions a lost detail about those Kadabra entries-- at least at the time of Red/Green's release, the actual intention was that it was a quote from the Pokemon world's version of Kafka's Metamorphosis-- no boy woke up as a Kadabra necessarily, as it was a well-known in-universe book. Now, perhaps that's no longer case in the current worldview, but it ought to at least be considered, I think.

We know that early depictions of the games' (and anime's) world were of a world where non-monster animals existed in some capacity, and we know that at some point that seems to have become quietly retconned away. This is described at length throughout the above blogpost and some of it backs up your work quite a bit! The book explains that the fossil record seems to indicate that Pokemon appeared suddenly 2 million years ago (the earliest Pokemon fossil being the Kabutops skeleton from the Pewter Museum), and Oak specifically switched from general biology to monster-specific studies because he was intrigued by the mystery of these creatures that existed outside of the human/animal evolutionary tree.

And (note the following applies to the world of the early anime and not necessarily the games' world) Takeshi Shudo, who was in charge of the anime in the early days, intended to eventually get into the idea that regular animals were becoming more and more rare, seemingly being driven to extinction. He was famously unable to accomplish a lot of what he intended (making Lugia female, including real-world dinosaur skeletons, ending Ash's story entirely) and later died, but his view of the Pokemon world is still interesting and informative. Clearly later creative forces quietly retconned away any references to real-world animals in the anime, as happened in the games.

Likewise, it's clear now that Pokemon have been around a lot longer than 2 million years and real world animals never existed in the world of the games-- at least the world post-Gameboy. I do think it's useful to consider Tajiri's games as separate and notably different universes to Masuda/Ohmori's games. So much wasn't codified until the GBA at the earliest and Masuda really built a new world around the bones that Tajiri had left him.
 
Now that you mention it, I looked Kabuto up, and the first games to say that it lived 300 million years ago were Ruby and Sapphire.
 
Now that you mention it, I looked Kabuto up, and the first games to say that it lived 300 million years ago were Ruby and Sapphire.

I actually just checked myself and Bulbapedia says that Crystal is actually the first game with that Dex entry— still fits, as Crystal was Masuda’s first game as director/the first game with Tajiri taking the backseat.

But while I was searching, I also found this:

The Bulbapedia article on the Fossil expansion, one of the earliest TCG expansions! Released in 1997 in Japan/1999 in English-speaking territories. Here’s the advertising blurb:

“Two million years ago, the first known Pokémon™® walked the earth. Scientists thought many were extinct like the dinosaurs because only fossils had been found—until now. A remote island has been discovered in the south seas, an island where the Pokémon fossils have come to life!”

Which lines up with what we know of how the Pokémon world was supposed to operate at the time.

Granted, in light of the above discussion on the historical accuracy of myths, we should maybe take dex entries (300 million years) with a grain of salt. Would be neat if the two million years thing still held true because it is fascinating— but I do think it’s more likely that that concept no longer applies to the games’ world.
 
we should maybe take dex entries (300 million years) with a grain of salt.
I’d like to note that horseshoe crabs, which I believe Kabuto is partially based upon, appeared around 244 million years ago at least according to Wikipedia. So 300 million years for Kabuto doesn’t seem that farfetched, at least.

Edit: But I agree with the overall sentiment here.
 
Well yeah— I assume that’s the idea: in the new idea of the Pokémon world where the only animals that have ever existed are Pokémon, Kabuto takes the place of the horseshoe crab and has been around that long.

I suppose I could tinfoil hat it and consider that the two million years thing applies and they are mistaking horseshoe crab fossils for Kabuto fossils to arrive at that 300 million number, buuuut I know I’m reaching.

Though of course there is the perennial supposition of “kids are writing all these dex entries/making stuff up,” but still.
 
Likewise, it's clear now that Pokemon have been around a lot longer than 2 million years and real world animals never existed in the world of the games-- at least the world post-Gameboy.

I would note here that at least one of these mentions persist in the Pokedex for a while after GBA - Raichu's Sun dex entry repeats the Indian elephant reference:


It unleashes electric shocks that can reach 100,000 volts. When agitated, it can knock out even an Indian elephant.

Lickitung and Gastly, meanwhile, have removed mention of chameleons and Indian elephants respectively after their GBA entries, so that's accurate.

Personally... I wonder if the reason we never see animals in the games is simply because Pokemon as house partners are objectively superior? A pet that actually listens to you and is smart enough to figure out where the bathroom is would be a lot better to keep around than those that aren't...

Plus, there are plenty of post-GBA allusions to real-world animals, even if they aren't overt and could be misconstrued as referring to Pokemon in a few cases. (Of course, that very same linked page mentions Takeshi Shudo's interpretation where real-world animals did go extinct and those seen in the anime are just the animators' fault for not paying attention, but I'm more focused on the core games' canon anyway.)
 
Please note: The thread is from 2 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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