Not t say you don't have good points however 1. Saying teleportation makes books and the internet a non thing I feel is a bit of a reach as even with your teleport around and tell your story example human memory would still distort it as seen by places who had people who's job it was to memorize and tell stories 2. We can't say they can rely on teleportation when we have never seen these teleporting pokemon do more then teleport out of a cave with their trainer or more short distances 3. Your building examples fails due to that being shown via dynamax meaning it would only be at one area of the world making it not able to be used elsewhere. not to mention that stone is very much uncut and unrefined so great way to get stone but to pop up houses would be out of reach. Also outright saying that steel pokemon can summon steel beams is not found in any of the material as that is just a move name. 4. You cannot compare every pokemon to the likes of tyranitar, aggron, or machamp in their power 5. you did not address pokemon rarity or the fact that the pokemon may reject to being the house faucet or heater 6. As per your admission pokemon are quite intelligent especially abra and kadabra, and alakazam. No way in hell they would just sit there and do boring shit all day. However powerplants would totally be more pokemon focuses though I do wonder if pokemons increased intelligence would make them less willing to sit and once spot to heat up water, or follow a person around to be a light, not to mention them wanting to develop pokeballs more to help transport and carry these powerful beings. Because lets be real if the targaryen's could carry a mother trucking dragon in their pocket they would have funded them project to death. In short I think you have a good point but while it should have a greater impact I don't think it would have the same impact that you are talking about as for example having all the water pokemon generate the water at one spot and then charging people for it and then pumping it around would be very tempting, along with dealing with plumbing and not wanting to have a toilet squirtle.
also what do you do if your teleporter gets knocked out? just die I guess? Also saying there would be no currency an just barter makes me think of someone needing to go on a full chain gathering sidequest for a pair of pants. Like the guy who bought a car using a paperclip or the tumbler post about the guy making a necklace and fixing a bee keeper after doing a bunch of other small tasks
Hey! Long response incoming. Thanks so much for watching the video, and for taking the time to dissect and rebut a lot of my arguments. I'd like to respond to all of your points, but the major issue in my video that you correctly point out is this: I massively overestimated the power and prevalence of teleportation in the Pokémon world. I missed the mark on max distance, accessibility, scale, and a whole lot more. This is, inarguably, the biggest flaw with the video. A lot of your points are absolutely correct for this reason, but let's see if I can't shed some more light on them regardless. (1) Of the three "things" that are spread through travel - goods, people, and information - information is definitely the one which would benefit from teleportation the least. I think that, even imagining the world that I described - one in which teleportation is freely accessible and generally limitless - that we'd see a fair bit of development in this field. The printing press seems to be a pretty reasonable endpoint for this, since it would help for the standardization of information before teleportation would distribute it widely. Of course, for the Pokémon world, then we'd probably see even more, given the limitations of teleportation. You're completely correct here. (2) Mostly, the same. If we take the move "teleport" and establish its limitations as the rules of teleportation in the Pokémon world - which seems like a reasonably fair way to estimate without any other measures - then a Pokémon with the move is capable of traveling from anywhere in a region to a single designated spot. So, for example, someone could teleport from Mt. Stark in Sinnoh to Canalave City, also in Sinnoh. This is pretty far in the games, but it's obviously not a continental journey (for reference, you'd activate this in-game by visiting the Canalave City Pokémon Center, then not visiting another and using teleport from Mt. Stark). In this way, it kind of works like messenger birds do in real life; a Pokémon can always make its way back home. So, in order to be able to teleport to a location, one would have to either have already visited or have a Pokémon that has done so. Again, both of these are limits that I wrongly did not consider. (3) I'm willing to stand by this point, actually. I used footage of Dynamax because it was a very apt visual example of what I was talking about, but I think similar results could be obtained without it. Many Pokémon are capable of creating magma, summoning rocks from the ground, and generally manipulating the ground with relative ease, so I think that many, if not most buildings would be created of the earth or stone. Wooden buildings are also quite possible, since many Pokémon are very capable of growing trees almost instantaneously. I'm not trying to say that infrastructure would be as sophisticated as it is here, but that's sort of the point; that technological sophistication would be stumped by the prevalence of magic, making these creations easy and common enough that innovation would've been unnecessary and, likely, avoided. (4) 100% agree. I consistently ignored the strengths and weaknesses of specific Pokémon. No notes. (5 & 6) One of the biggest points I struggled with in this video was how, precisely, to consider Pokémon intelligence and sentience. I immediately ruled out claims made by the Pokédex as inaccurate, almost folklore-esque stories made by people that hadn't actually scientifically studied each Pokémon. Numbers for size, weight, temperature, IQ, age, and even power are consistently blown way out of the realm of possibility, to the point that they simply aren't compatible with, like, the laws of physics. This argument alone could be its own 45-minute video, but the Pokédex simple can't be accurate, so I routinely ignored it. Instead, I sort-of invented a class of intellect that lived in between the smartest of animals and the dimmest of humans. When I was editing the final chapter and began listing the rules for the Pokémon world that I would eventually create, I cut the first rule down. It originally read like this: "This world has to be one in which the fundamental aspects of the games remain constant. Specifically, the practices of catching Pokémon and battling other trainers must exist basically unchanged. That means that, as intelligent as Pokémon are, their sentience is objectively less, or less important, than that of humans." I don't know of a better way to handle this idea. If I assume their intelligence is any lower, then what they're capable of is just impossible. If I assume it to be any higher, then capturing them, forcing them to fight, and storing them in perpetual digital purgatory is not far off from abusive. Similar to the last point, I ignored the intelligence of specific Pokémon in order to create this blanket assumption. This compromise, along with the Pokémon world's general utopic depiction, combine to create a world in which Pokémon are happy to do work of any kind, and the the humans treat them with respect and dignity in return. (untitled final paragraph) Something I did a bad job of explaining was how modern phenomena would be adapted into the Pokémon world. When I spoke about that, I wasn't imagining a world in which a toilet was literally the same object, but was just powered by a Poliwag instead of a pipe. No, I was in the same area as I was when discussing point (3): innovations would've been stymied because of the power of magic. There'd still likely be chamber pots and outhouses, and citywide running water would be powered by strong water creators that can pump water down large pipes for people to store in tubs and barrels in their home. Of course, all of this is speculation on unwritten fiction, so there's no way to know for sure. But I always tried to imagine Pokémon working with that respect and dignity, not compromising the core games. Plus, most Pokémon captured by trainers live in Pokéballs for their entire lives, doing nothing. Surely, a life of freedom and service is at least as tolerable as one of constant battling, damage, and healing. At least, I think so. I just want to thank you one more time for leaving your comment. You raise some seriously valid points, ones I will consider when I get around to the follow up/North & South project. I hope you were able to enjoy the video despite its flaws, and you've definitely earned your credit of "being neat" :)
@@volcaronite Thank you for the reply! I will admit I did forget about there being pokemon who could summon whole trees and that is my bad and I will admit I more hold the point that those abilitys would be used to supplement building rather then replace it if only due to the more crude nature. Also ya pinning down pokemon intelligence is basically impossible as all we know is that they are smart enough to pick up names and listen to commons to do more complex actions like battle. I would like to suggest in the pokemon world the prevalence of electric, and fire pokemon would encourage industrialization if only due to the fact that if you work with the pokemon can give them food or other care in return, not to mention pokemon like rotom. Also lets not forget that there are pokemon like chansey around that in every conceivable appearance can use their little egg like healing magic so that would stunt the medical field without a doubt. I would continue this to still suggest that currency would still come about if only because of the inherent problems with a pure barter system and the culture of the world being shaped around using small balls to capture these creatures and the need for more of them and even better versions to be made. I would also argue this. Why does the ability to cast fire balls suddenly make more automatic and clean ways of dealing with waste and delivering water and heat such a non starter? Given that in every form of media abra are still more rare (though ofc en mass breeding could fix this issue like humans breeding the horse) I would still think that a attempt to make things more clean and avoid disease and a bad smell would still push for these as the magic of the world cannot make what is in the chamber pot vanish, not to mention I bet it would attract muk. Last note: While I worked on wording my response that did not detract from my enjoyment of it as atleat someone was talking about the giant metal square elephant in the room, that is a piece of high grade construction equipment by itself. I mearly talk about these points if only because I find it fun to think about. Also side note some of the new pokemon made the food issues even less of one. the food is the least of your problems if you have pokemon.
@@volcaronite the slugma-powered house shows exactly what you are talking about. I suggest taking a look (they have it heat the house, heats the stove and the tubs and stuff). it even shows the spider pokemong giving a old lady the silk she needs to sew
wait this comment and replies are actually thought out and not attacking the person saying them?? this must be some sort of record or something for most respectful youtube comment/replies
I think the primary challenge to your hypothetical world is that it assumes no events in which people questioned the sustainability of relying on Pokémon for everything. What if bandits knock out the Pokémon keeping cities afloat? The world being similar to ours suggests that either Pokémon were not always available to help while these technologies were being invented, or that some events occurred that made them realize they needed to be less reliant on the magical creatures around them.
I think this isn’t just a Pokémon problem, but a problem with the entire urban fantasy genre. Unless it does one of two explanations: the magic is hidden from most of society, like in Harry Potter, or the magic suddenly comes into existence, or did exist in medieval times, was lost, and then came back. There’s quite a few works in this genre, some more illogical than others. This genre is made to be more accessible, since modern society is more relatable than a Medieval one, so ironically urban fantasy feels more realistic if you don’t think about things too hard. I guess people take our technology for granted, and don’t realize how it came to be in the first place.
Thank you so much for watching 😊 To your point: absolutely! Obviously, the modern fantasy, or urban fantasy, is not a genre exclusively occupied by the Pokémon games. I know there are some games in the Final Fantasy series that live here, for example. I chose to focus Pokémon for a number of reasons: timeliness and my own affection were, of course, among them. But, another reason is this: because it's got such powerful and accessible magic and, yet, the world remains the same, Pokémon might be the most egregiously incoherent world of the genre. I won't say that definitively, since I definitely haven't played every urban fantasy game ever, but it's still a powerful example. The way some series get around this problem is thought what I might describe as "magic through science." That is, the series' fantastical elements are all justified in-universe through fictional scientific advancement. Bioshock comes to mind as a game of this variety, though most superhero movies also fall into this camp. This sidestep has problems, too, but it ends up with a similar effect to the one you described about the force of magic itself ebbing and flowing: a world with magic, designed by a people without it. Thank you again for taking a chance on a video essay with a two-digit view count from little old me!
@@volcaronite Thanks for the feedback! Here are just some random thoughts I had. I guess the “technology so advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic” trope can help explain the discrepancy between magic and technology, by saying that they are the same. This wouldn’t work for Pokémon, as if Pokémon were all technologically based, then it would be called Digimon. A part of me wonders if this issue of the incompatibility between science and magic is something most writers are even aware of, or even care about. Sure, George RR Martian probably did, but I think the main reason for fantasy typically being in a Medieval setting is because back in Medieval times, people believed in the supernatural, so the worldview of the population doesn’t need to change much with the existence of actual supernatural things. And it calls back to legends made during medieval times that involved things like dragons. And the supernatural being hidden can be used to have your protagonist be just as unfamiliar with the supernatural as the audience, making exposition dumps make more sense. I guess it depends on the author. One explanation for why the world in Pokémon is similar to our own despite the existence of magical animals is because, well, they’re animals. You still gotta take care of them, feed them, etc. The games make it look easy, but that could just be gameplay and story segregation, as Pokémon is a rpg, not a pet simulator. And most trainers you fight only have one or two Pokémon, despite being able to have 6. Also, it’s also implied that Pokémon being more easily tamable is a recent thing; most animals in real life aren’t tamable, after all. Granted, raising animals is a lot easier than creating fire out of thin air, so it’s not really that good of an explanation. And plenty of Pokémon based on easy to raise animals have useful abilities. Eevee and it’s evolutions represent half of all the types, and is a friendly, easily raisable dog/cat/rabbit thing. So this isn’t a foolproof explanation. Pokémon is also quite a cheery and optimistic franchise, even with all the evil teams running around. Especially when compared to Game of thrones. So it’s overly optimistic view of the world may have affected its world building. Interestingly, a light novel made by the original writer for the Pokémon anime mentions that Pokémon just popped into existence, well after society industrialized. Real animals did exist, but went extinct due to Pokémon, besides humans. This explains some of the issues in the video, but raises more questions than it answers. Like, why did Pokémon just suddenly appear? Why do they superficially resemble real-world animals? What are fossil Pokémon then? How can mew be the ancestor of all Pokémon if Pokémon just appeared out of thin air? I can see why this concept is retconned in current lore. I guess Pokémon is a fundamentally flawed franchise, and is best enjoyed by not thinking about it too much. Although, I guess I’d rather have a creative new idea, rather than another fantasy rpg, even if one make more logical sense than the other. I guess you could do what you conceptualized, but good luck putting that on a gameboy.
This is why I think the setting of Fate/Stay Night Visual Novel is my favorite Urban Fantasy. In that world, during the ancient times physics as we know it simply did not exists and everything was very dependent on the mystics like powerful mages and gods. Than, due to some events, gods were gradually weakening, the art of using magic in more accessible and repeatable way was developed and the world was "rewritten" to work on physics. Moreover, the magic works on "mystery". Understanding magic makes it weaker. With this setup the magic gradually grew weaker and weaker while technology grew straonger and stronger. Magical communities became undercover, because widespread, widely understood magic will not have any mystery left and thus - it would stop working. Magic and widespread undesrstanding are directly at odds of each other with magic being able to function in the modern world purely because of the secrecy. There are more to that as the mechanisms governing that world are quite complex, but the gist of it is that in that world the set up exists because magic grows weaker and eventually disappears if the understanding of it is too much widespread among the poppulation.
maybe is be because in Japan's history industrialization came directly from the west, it just appeared suddenly, and they adopted it to a point were its ubicuous and utopic in the colective subconcious
I think its explicitly stated by multiple characters throughout the series that "Pokemon are not to be used as tools". Not to say we dont see pokemon using their abilities to make life more conviniant for humans, but I do think this is why we see a world that is self sufficient and more closely mirrors our own, dispite the accesability of such creatures. Its also worth noting that most wild pokemon are notibly dangerous and hostile, which is the whole reason people are advised to travel with partner pokemon, however not every person partakes in training or battling and may not even possess the skills to do so. This could probably explain why we don't see everyone in possession of a teleporting pokemon, which is actually a suprisingly small handful of pokemon in the first place.
Hey, thanks for watching and commenting! It really means a lot to me :) I think the single biggest flaw with this video was my overestimation of the power of teleportation in the world. I talked about this in several other comments, but teleportation is not the fix-all that I made it out to be in the video. You correctly point that out, and I just want to acknowledge that. As for the fact that "Pokémon are not to be used as tools"...why not? I mean, what is the in-universe answer to this question? And I mean the answer for why they shouldn't be tools, not why they shouldn't be abused as tools. I think that there's a lot of room for the responsible use of domesticated Pokémon that the world simply ignores, and that leaves huge problems for the history of the world and how magic was used by the first people who domesticated Pokémon. If Pokémon domestication is a recent phenomenon, then how did the rest of the technology develop in the first place. If it's not, then why aren't Pokémon used as beasts of burden? Thank you again for watching the video. I hope you were able to enjoy it despite its many flaws :)
@@volcaronite Thanks for the responce! I think the "pokemon are not tools" quote might have been less about not using them at all and more about not abusing them. I can recall multiple situations where mons were used as "beasts of burden" such as an electric generator powered by pikachus in the anime. In the games we see multiple instances of fighting types being used to build and move heavy loads, rock types being used to mine ore etc. I think the world u envisioned is already there in a way, just not taken to the extreme. Its a world that more or less chooses to live along side pokemon rather then using them to elevate themselves. We see this in places like Fortree City in Hoenn which is literally built in the forest canopys. In the end I think the world mirroring our own is what gives it its charm and makes it more relatable to us, especially due to the fact that the regions of the pokemon world are literal equalivants to our real world countries.
Agreed. I think a common mistake people make when judging the pokemon world is assuming that the main character is an average person. However, game explicitly states in essentially every level of the world building that you are player as an incredible super prodigy, capable of befriending and commanding any pokemon. The reason why you run across so many people who just have a handful of pathetic pokemon of the same species is because they just don't have the knack for pokemon training that you do.
True. Game mechanics make it look like it's easy to train pokemon. But far from everyone is a pokemon trainer. Though I would love to come home and show my family the wailord that's going to live with us from now on.
Hissuian Snow is canon to Legends Arceus. The Implication of that is merely 10 years before the game they didn't have Pokeballs, and the only reason they have them is because of some time and space shenanigans that caused plans from the future to become available. It would seem the reason why modern technology exists is that the ability to tame Pokémon at Scale didn't exist until after the industrial revolution had started in some places.
Also the integration of the Pokeball occurred at different rates. Draden stated in Black and White that when he was a kid, Unova didn't have Pokeballs at all and any domestication of Pokemon required the same methods that we see in our world and Draden is in early 60s so in what would have been the equivalent of the 1950s in our world didn't have a reliable way to capture and train Pokemon in a way that didn't require a large amount of time and resources, meaning that there would be there would be more technologically advanced countries in the world by necessity as they couldn't rely on Pokemon.
@@declanmckenna6854 Legends Arceus may have retconed this but in the original game canon Pokeballs were only created in the 20th century. The discovery that started their development happened in 1925. So add time for development and distribution.
Magic is not anti-technology, magic does not make technology stagnate, magic *is* technology, and therefore people use the technology they have, and only pursue new solutions for problems they do not already have solutions for. It is just like how humans on earth do not bother with better solutions unless they have to.
there actually is a very strange and meta reason why the tech of the pokemon world dosnt match the existence of pokemon. you see in the 1990s aka the first 2 generations pokemon had a very different continuity, one where the setting was straight up just earth with an identical history to our own up until the 19hundreds where random species of pokemon started appearing out of nowhere replacing various animals although pokemon was retconed in 2002 to be a non-earth planet with it's own history.
@@SurrealKeenan I don't think that much thought was put into it, but the exact script talks about how normal animals started to disappear from the world and being replaced by pokemon, it could simply be that the fossil pokemon were cases of prehistoric animals becoming pokemon if you accept the theory that the reason why animals disappear around the same time pokemon appear is because the animals were evolving into pokemon Granted the fossil explanation is a theory but it's pretty much impossible to find a work of fiction that doesn't have at least 1 or 2 contradictions Ie in the Kalos games an npc tells you he's from a region that's not any of the previous regions and gives you an item called the strange souvenir and tells you that item comes from his home region and that his regions champion is something else In the Alola games it's stated the strange souvenir originated from Alola Problem of course is that Alola has no pokemon league or champion at the begining of the game as the player is alolas first ever champion which would contradict what the box in Kalos said, and you can't make a good argument for the Kalos games taking place after the Alola games because professor sycamores assistants appear in the Alola games and are visibility older and literally introduce mega evolution to the region so the Alola games are proven to take place after the Kalos games
Canonically, It's very explicitly mentioned that you can't drink the water summoned by water type pokemon. It's described as bitter and doesn't quench thirst. The implication here is - is that it's not 'real' water. It is indeed magic but it's not fully analog to the element it represents. It makes sense in hindsight, otherwise the world would flood several times over over eons. It was a great video regardless. Big subscribe.
I'd also say that the water disappears as easily as it is created, meaning that even if you could drink it without issue, you'll be massively dehydrated when it disappears.
The ideas of world building you mentioned in this video are infinitely more interesting than any cannon pokemon lore. I'm actually interested to explore a world like that in a game or story, compared to the standard boring pokemon worlds. An utopian world where humans live in a strange harmony with nature, utilizing magical creatures to fulfil every need. People riding on strange beasts, giant birds, and the few who can teleport. Giant creature conjure and mold trees and sand and earth into structures. Bugs filling the city with light at night. People heating up with beasts made of living flame, feeding with fruits conjured by giant turtles, drinking water brought by beasts, or by summoned rain. There is so much to be explored with the powers of pokemon, that is just ignored by the games
I've seen so many video essays that talk about the tropes of the openings for video essays, that I'm starting to expect the joke to go one layer deeper soon.
you seem to be forgetting that in the main series the player is always portrayed as a prodigy and that only the player and big name battlers really evolve their pokemon, the average person only raises like 3 at most and are unevolved so chances are any society that relies on pokemon for supplys or labor would likely be using unevolved pokemon. in pokemon teleportation can only carry person roughly a single region's length and requires the trainer or pokemon to be familiar with the location.
First off, thank you so much for watching and engaging with the video! Your comments have stuck in my head for the past couple of days, as I've been wondering why your very legitimate points missed my attention while researching this video. So, let me take a swing at addressing them (and I'll be answering both of your comments here): -I actually didn't know that the Pokémon world had ever been considered to be a low fantasy rendition of our world, never mind that it had been retconned out. In the asterisk towards the beginning of Chapter 1, I briefly mentioned an interview that Junichi Masuda, one of the primary creators of the Pokémon games, gave with Game Informer back in 2012. In it, he explicitly states that the designers of the games consider the Pokémon world to be wholly separate from the real world. One of the greater failures of this video (along with its bloated length) is that I didn't properly site my sources for things like this interview. It's one of the many things that I'll have to improve on as I continue creating video essays in this style. -Another point that I missed out on is the extent to which the magic of the Pokémon world was "game-ified" in the actual main-series games. By that, I mean how the canon of the video games must modify the magical capabilities of certain moves and monsters in order to facilitate the kind of gameplay that is being developed. This is kind of a ludicrous thing to think about, I know. Given that the Pokémon games were the first medium in the Pokémon franchise to be developed, one could very reasonably believe that they represent the purest form of the world; that the way things appear to be in the games is likely the way that things are in this world. There's truth to this idea, but there's also some holes. For example, I'm reasonably certain that most would consider the turn-based RPG combat system of Pokémon to be only a strategic representation of what Pokémon battles might "actually" look like. Speed checks aren't really looking through multiplicative stat buffs and rolling checks against other Pokémon: they're seeing which Pokémon can get its attack off first, before the other strikes back. I think the same logic can be applied to the capabilities of the protagonist in comparison to the other trainers around the regions. The protagonist is always going to be the best trainer in the region because that's the way that the game was designed. Most other trainers pose little challenge to the protagonist in order to highlight this growth, as well as to make those official matches against Pokémon League employees feel more impactful to players. The protagonist is always going to catch the legendary Pokémon because that's the way the story was paced. The player character isn't doing anything different than anyone else; Pokémarts across all regions sell Ultra Balls, and every Shroomish and Kricketune can learn a sleep move and False Swipe, so there's nothing stopping others from gathering the tools to take on the legendary beasts of the regions. It's all about the way that the stories of these games are written to revolve around the protagonist in order to give the player a fun, memorable experience. I'm not going to say that this is the right answer, or that there aren't problems with this answer at all. But, to me, it seems that the reason the protagonist seems so gifted is so that the stories of the games feel almost as if they were destined to revolve around them. -Your comment about teleportation is the hardest for me to justify. Indeed, I still don't really have a great answer for it. The best I can come up with are half-arguments about the inconsistency of the sizes of regions and the limitations of the games preventing cross-regional teleportation. How far away are the Sevii Islands from mainland Kanto? How big is Sinnoh? How do secret-base warp panels work? Why don't Pokéballs work on lifeforms that aren't Pokémon? But, as is certainly obvious, these questions are mostly distractions from the fact that yes, teleportation has only ever appeared to move a single person and their immediate belongings across the length of up to two regions. Indeed, this is another limitation that could be explicitly placed onto teleportation in the games (and one I'll consider as I create my own story considering the magic of Pokémon more seriously). Missing this point definitely weakens the arguments of this video as a whole in a not-insignificant way. I'm actually a bit disappointed in myself for missing this, but I do thank you for bringing it to my attention. Hopefully, I'll be able to do more thorough research for future projects. Once again, thank you for watching the video. I hope you were able to enjoy it despite it's problems. And thank you again for engaging with me and giving me the opportunity to respond with a comment almost as rambling as the original video!
Hey, thanks so much for watching and commenting! Let me see if I can't address your points. 1) I'll partly accept this, but enough people are capable enough of capturing and training Pokémon that it seems like they should have a larger labor role in sustaining the village. They do play a small role, as we can see with the few in the farm and the Mr. Mime at the gate, but they should be doing much more. Their domestication is a big deal, just like domestication of animals was in our world, and the fact that they aren't being utilized is problematic. 2) The time travel aspect of PLA (and Pokémon in general) is something that I have a hard time coming to grips with, simply because of my own personal belief, as a fiction writer, that time travel to the past is fundamentally paradoxical and could never exist. Even suspending my disbelief, though, with time travel being as prevalent and widespread as it is in PLA, it's impossible to believe that there hasn't been some wider spreading of information and mechanics on how catching and training Pokémon works. This is another instance of the implications of powerful magic not being considered in the worldbuilding. 3) Something I left out of the video that I'm beginning to regret is the discussion on what a Pokéball even is. I wrote about it in another comment, but I came to the conclusion that, due to it's mostly unchanged depiction in PLA, a game that takes place some hundreds of years ago, the Pokéball has to be magically powered. It couldn't do everything it needs to do with the simple mechanics of the world in PLA without magic. I actually never entertained the idea that it was the Pokémon themselves that could shrink and live inside the Pokéballs; why would they do that willingly? But maybe the magic of the Pokéball is one of comfort and convenience, and the process of 'capturing' a Pokémon is simply convincing it to stay? I don't know, I'll have to think about it some more. Thanks for bringing it up. Where did that information come from?
Counter point: in the games, teleportation can only take you to the last pokemon center visited. Also with pokemon being as intelligent, or more than people, they could just refuse to do things and what is the person going to do about it? Hit the pokemon? As you pointed out, these are creatures with borderline apocalyptic potential. So, at some point, people realized this potential for failure of the entire system, and invented technology as a backup, and eventually it was adopted as the mainstream. Also we don't know what the limitations of teleport would be. Sabrina's father in the anime only managed to get Ash out of the Gym. He couldn't take him to Lavender town to get a ghost pokemon, he had to walk. He is a fairly powerful psychic. Though not on Sabrina's level. How much stronger is an Abra? Probably not that much if it is at all. Evolving them takes time and effort. Not everyone can, or will.
I watch a lot of Pokémon videos and this deep cultural analysis of mankind in a darn Pokémon video is way ahead of what it even needs to be or almost all of the time is. Super dope
Funnily enough, "pokemon were shoehorned into the real world" was the initial canon, according to channels like Did You Know Gaming that went into early Japanese material. They just started being discovered in the world. Of course, that didn't stick.
After watching your TOTK video, it's clear that your videos, while there aren't many, are EXCEPTIONALLY detailed and well produced. Definitely gonna stay tuned for future content.
i listen to a lot of video essays while playing video games or drawing, but i spent most of this video glued to the screen with my game paused. you definitely deserve more views, cant wait to see you grow in the future
My theory is that the ability to tame every Pokémon via Poke Balls is a recent development, less than 300 years old. Before that, Pokémon were dangerous creatures that humans largely feared. Only a few Pokémon partnered with humans on their own, such as the ones based off of domesticated animals like Growlithe, Gogoat and Ponyta or "magically created" ones, like Golurk, Sigilyph and Baltoy.
Perchance technology could still exist in a magical world as an enhancement of magic itself? Heck, what if the two being considered distinct at all was considered Disallowed for some fantasy stories?
I actually kind of love that idea - the idea that technology and magic are actually the same thing? I have no idea how one might incorporate that idea into a story, but the idea of tech being used to enhance magic itself, as opposed to animals and humans in our world, is an interesting one. The tech would still be radically different from the way it appears in both our world and the Pokémon world, so that fantasy world would still feel quite fantastical. But it's something I'll think about as I continue to write fiction.
@@volcaronite If you view magic and technology as both products of science, it becomes easier to incorporate. In today's world we conflate science with technology, but they are not the same thing at all. Science is defined as "the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained." Science is strictly scholarly and academic in nature. Technology is industrial application of knowledge. A farmer using a tractor-mounted harvester to collect crops is not using science, they are using technology created by industry. The use of magic can be viewed in the same dynamic. No matter how complex, powerful, or unwieldy the magic of the world is, it is part of the world. For that world -even if it didn't exist but suddenly does- magic is as natural a force as electromagnetism, gravity, thermodynamics and quantum physics. All are unseen, powerful forces that shape our world and with the right circumstances could be immensely destructive. They are also impossible for man to manipulate consciously. These forces power our bodies but we can't stop our toes from feeling cold because we can't consciously control our internal thermodynamic forces. But we can make socks! A few fantasy worlds play on this by claiming that magic is a 'life-force' flowing through all things, and through a 'systematic study of the structure and behavior of the magical 'life-force' through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained' a select few can manipulate this life force. All fantasies treat magic as a form of energy or force, to power things and perform work. When I turn on a light, I am using a technological infrastructure designed to manipulate electromagnetic forces to manipulate thermodynamic forces to make metal glow. When a wizard uses a fire spell to light a torch, he is using a magical ritual designed to manipulate magical energy to manipulate thermodynamic forces to make cloth combust through chemical forces to produce light. Magic IS technology and the spells ARE the tech. At the quantum level, physicists in OUR WORLD, the REAL WORLD, have observed short range teleportation of particles and particles existing in multiple places simultaneously. (quantum superpositioning)They have observed particles going through barriers without stopping, just phasing through the material. (Quantum tunneling) Both of these properties are used to operate computers today. Teleportation IS REAL, we just haven't figured out how to manipulate quantum forces properly to teleport anything larger than a few subatomic particles.But our society is utilizing subatomic teleportation right now, and we are clever. One day, we will be able to manipulate atomic teleportation, then molecular, then macro. We just have to refuse to stop trying. TL;DR: Science is the study of things and magic is a thing to study. What we call technology is using matter to manipulate matter and energy. What we call magic is using energy to manipulate matter and energy. They are different disciplines of the same system. A urban magical world would have iSpells and Android talismans to protect your smartphone screen from cracking.
The one leniency that I want to give the world building is on the teleportation basis. The main teleporters I think of are abra and ralts, both of which are extremely timid pokemon, to the point where abra are notorious for being extremely difficult to catch in-game as they'll use teleport immediately, so I believe domestication efforts of them would be difficult when your main tools are snares, group tactics, and other pokemon (you could certainly have an arena trap, shadow tag, or mean look to keep them in place, but you'd need that to be maintained across the entire domestication process Legends Arceus also suggests many of these pokemon are initially aggressive and thus it could be dangerous to try and domesticate the creatures unaided. Having said that, I would basically see technology progressing either as normal, or with the explicit intent of domesticating pokemon up until the pokeball is created. Which then means that I wouldn't be expecting things to progress much further than feudal japan, and thus likely medieval times worldwide. If we got to the point of the modern pokeball rather than the apricorn pokeball, well then I can see technology progressing for the sake of itself, but I don't know how the tech tree would progress from Legends to the mainline titles
18:16 You actually make a good point about how it's easier to worldbuild magic in a medieval fantasy setting. While some consider it overused, I really like medieval fantasy, especially the costuming and weaponry of the late medieval and early renaissance periods, though I don't often see that explored in most currently popular fantasy settings. I'm working on a fantasy comic set at the end of the medieval period (14th and 15th centuries) that's inspired by 80's rpgs and explores the sudden appearance of magic and alchemy on a low tech, medieval world. In my world, magic was uncommon until 50 years prior to the story, when the demon king's defeat suddenly made it accessible to everyone. Now, people are starting to take advantage of stuff like indoor plumbing, improved health care, abundant food and faster travel to trade with nearby kingdoms in order to become extremely wealthy. However, they are also creating new weapons that use magic, biological diseases and deadly chimeras that threaten to plunge the world into darkness once more.
I think your analysis on the purpose of technology is flawed in that it assumes that people who live without technology in nature don't have reason to improve their lives. Technology was invented and continues to be improved upon because people aren't satisfied with dying because of the circumstances of their environment. People invented medicine so they'd stop dying of diseases. They invented food preservation tech to make their excess food last longer into their famine times. They invented shelter to prevent death by exposure. Honestly, it's only fairly recently that tech has been advancing specifically to make the lives of rich people easier and even still it doesn't outweigh the amount of tech that comes out to extend human life
I have to disagree with you for two reasons, one lore based, and one on a more meta-level. In terms of lore, we know that Pokéballs weren't always a thing. Depending on the region they were as little as less than a century old. The bigger issue in my opinion is that what we see from the Pokémon world isn't neutral, it's the perspective of a young prodigy who cares way too much about battling. When NPCs in Legends Arceus fear Pokémon, when NPCs have trouble taming and domesticating Pokémon, when NPCs claim that the protagonist is "special" - this is worldbuilding too! But all we ever see is the perspective of a prodigy who has an innate ability to bond with Pokémon unlike anyone else, who is not burdened, like an NPC, with keeping six pet-friends entertained at the same time. To relate this back to your video: Many humans simply can't utilize the powers of Pokémon to teleport, to build, to survive, etc. the same way the player can. An additional bit of lore is also the fact that most humans can't reward Pokémon. What do they have from cooperating with humans (that aren't the protagonist)? In the world of Pokémon, humans rely on Pokémon for food, transportation, and power. But Pokémon never needed humans. Those animals that humans could domesticate (because yes, even real life animals aren't always domesticable) benefitted from this by getting better, more, and more consistent food, by getting shelter, etc.
One way I can think about the Pokemon world working is if the technology required to create pokeballs is complicated enough to necessitate technological advancement. And of course that the more fantastical pokemon require pokeballs to domesticate unlike the ones that are similar to real animals. Another solution would be that the fire or water or other elements used by pokemon are distinct from natural elements, in that for example it isn't real water/fire and it dissipates shortly after an attack and lacks the same properties of real fire/water. Like in Skyrim where fire magic doesn't actually spread or do the damage that one would expect from real fire. One thing is for sure though, pokeballs should be far far more expensive for good world-building. Like imagine a pokemon setting where you really have to choose which pokemon to catch and can't just spam pokeballs due to the cost. A pokemon world where even one regular pokeball is valuable. This would then legitimize why its so hard to be a pokemon master or the business model of Team Rocket or why it really isn't that easy to catch certain pokemon.
long comment incoming: But an easy way around magic vs technology could be that much like the real world humans developed alongside pokemon before they co-existed- we kind of see that happening in Husui snow a spin off series following a man named Alex who works in medicine and how he basically developed the known medics hippocratic oath of treating indiscriminately when people of Jubilife village would keep to themselves and let pokemon essentially die Legends arceus also explores a somewhat timeline of when pokemon became part of the pokemon world- like gen 4 being based of an actual place, legends the same but different place is the same and even shares a general timeline alongside it's real life counterpart (not the best for this, but I seen a video detailing the time) and concluded that it's been less than 100 or so years since the pokemon and humans began work together (Abra the world building destroyer even plays a role in Husui snow as being one of the ones to join near the end + with it's teleportation makes it harder to catch plus it's somewhat rare status means it doesn't completely destroy world building as only the skilled owns one in the beginning of societal development) And another answer as to why the modern pokemon worlds have modern amenities could easily be explained as people taking inspiration from pokemon to craft their own transportation to stay somewhat self sufficient and or not use pokemon more than they have to. Pokemon are seen as friends and or pets so some like to spoil and let them live comfortable as seen with Delcatty who is known as the prim pokemon. The rich could've put people to work on technology so their precious insert name here could rest easy despite it's exploitable nature- as all it takes for innovation is the eccentric as if I lived in the pokemon world and had the brains I could've been a commoner and tried hard to innovate to ease pokemons burdens In conclusion: I love the video and even agree, but there is always an answer for everything. Exploring it in pokemon probably won't happen but it's fun to imagine as I too love world building- And I also have a love-hate relationship with modern pokemon for HM's and friendship mechanics, BDSP lost stakes with the hardest champ for it (I mean it was still hard but RNG is always on my side since my luck IRL sucks xD)
Thanks for watching, and we love a long comment here on this channel xD so forgive me for my long comment response. I mentioned this in another comment, but definitely think I overestimated the power of teleportation in the Pokémon world while constructing the arguments for this video. Teleportation has never been shown to span anything more than a small surrounding area the length of a region, and Pokémon capable of teleportation are notoriously tricky to capture; even in the mainline games, the mechanics of the move Teleport make them a bit tricky to capture. My misunderstanding of teleportation was, probably, a fundamental mistake from the video, which you've correctly pointed out. As for people using Pokémon as inspiration for technologies: I'm not sure. I think it's certainly possible in some cases. People can see a Rolycoly burning some strange black rock and sliding around without legs, and so may be able to find that similar black rock and realize the invention of the wheel. That does conflict with the real world pretty substantially, since most human invention took place very slowly over the course of two hundred thousand years. But nature works very differently in the Pokémon world, so it's possible that the modern human creature has existed for far less time in the Pokémon world; maybe as little as a few thousand years, given the oldest age of human-created artifacts we se in the games. They would've diverged not from apes, since typical apes probably don't exist, but from near-neighbor Pokémon. Pokémon could've acted as inspirational catalysts to fuel a very early industrial revolution, rocketing humanity up the tech tree. In fact, this could also be why there's so few people in the Pokémon world; they've just not been around that long. In a certain light, this all makes a lot of sense. But the idea that humans would choose not to use the useful capabilities of Pokémon simply because they're too intelligent and friendly is fundamentally inconsistent with human nature. Humans, after all, did capture and domesticate Pokémon for a long time before modern technologies existed; Pokémon Legends Arceus takes place 500 years ago, and that society has at least a few people who can domesticate Pokémon. And humans are, as I talked about in the video, almost universally incapable of exerting more long-term energy than is minimally required. With Pokémon that can instantly summon and create things like water and energy, it seems like humans would be hard-pressed to go out of their way to replace these sources. And I think it's this dichotomy between the real world and the Pokémon world that struck me enough to go about making this video. I think that, carefully considered, there definitely is a way to keep the friendly and positive world of exploitative intact (that is, not abusing, inhumanely farming, or otherwise exploiting Pokémon) while keeping the real power of Pokémon in mind. If Pokémon are willing and happy to battle each other then, certainly, they'd be just as happy to work with their trainers in other venues. I'm drawn to the Oreburgh Mine in Sinnoh as an example here; people are working as coal miners, and their personal Pokémon help out. They work hard, together, as equals. Or in Pokémon Ranger, where you go through the mission in the Fall City sewers to clear out the contaminated water. You work together, with local Pokémon, to clean the sewers and purify the water. It seems to me like this kind of relationship would be a natural, almost universal staple of the world, and would have from the very beginning of domestication. Now, to be sure, all of this is hugely speculative. I'm not an expert on, well, anything, really. So, it's very likely that I'm misunderstanding other aspects of both the Pokémon world and your response here, so I do apologize for that. But I'm still trying very hard to workshop these ideas as I work on my North & South follow-up project, so I wholeheartedly welcome any critique or ideas. Thank you again for watching and enjoying the video :D
Thanks for watching and I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic! I'll be doing a bit of follow-up to this video as a part of my North & South project, so any criticism would be welcome! My arguments are far from perfect, to be sure, so anything you can provide would be greatly appreciated 😊
Thank you for this video, while I have some points that lead me to disagree I never would have thought this deeply on the pokemon worlds development if not for this video. And since some of my points are already covered by others comments, I will simply thank you once more for helping me to think more on something I love.
In a game setting, the best examples of fantasy/magic combining with technology are (in MY opinion): Arc the Lad 1, 2, 3 and Twilight of the Spirits. Especially #4; magic is exclusive to animals/monsters/Deimos, while special attacks are exclusive to humans. BUT they both require Spirit Stones - the mineral stones of nature - as fuel. The game(s) even allude to the fact that both societies would collapse without them, and is one of several points of major conflict. If this interests you, I highly recommend trying these games. Or at least the 4th game, as it doesn't require you to have played the earlier 3 - although doing so makes the experience that more fulfilling! Honorable mentions: - The Horizon games by Guerrilla Games
Commenting prior to actually watching the video to point out how based your choice in pokemon avatar is. Volcarona is one of my favorites! Alright time to listen to this on my drive to work
Honestly thought you were going to go over the challenge that I usually run into: Why would people be ok with pokemon battling? It's technically animal cruelty. It's something that got brought up in black and white, but was basically glossed over because the writers realized they couldn't answer it favorably for the pokemon franchise. As for teleportation, I think you're over-estimating how effectively it can be controlled. Without human guidance, teleportation greater than short distances (within sight) is generally pretty random. With human guidance, teleportation can only be conducted to places that both the pokemon and trainer have traveled to themselves. Meaning transportation is still neccessary for those that don't have access to a limited pool of psychic types that can only really transport to one place each. Basically, it's less "teleport" and more "Mark/Recall" which is actually still quite useful. That being said, flying types still raise similar issues. Especially given pokeball technology can allow people to minimize items as well. Effectively meaning anyone with a backpack and a pidgeyotto can ferry an industrial level of goods from one location to another in pretty quick times.
i just discovered your channel and honest to god question before even watching any of your videos or even finishing this one would mega volcarona even be good? it takes 50% from stealth rock just saying also 150th subscriber i think
I just stumbled across this video and it raises some really interesting and good points, though now it's making me think in over drive about a lot of things and I do have some counter-points for you to consider- given this is such a long video I'm trying to write down my thoughts in response as I have them, so forgive me if this comment is disjointed! The first thing that really stood out to me was the discussion about why we have technology in the real world as we do. I don't know anything about your background in learning about science and technology and stuff, but from my own understandings I think attributing even the majority of technological advancement to the rich wanting things easier maybe comes at it from the wrong angle. I actually thought you'd say 'war' or 'conflict' or something like that, which I think would be closer to the truth. But in general I think it's more that rich people take advantage of the advancements of people to make their lives easier and increase their power. New technologies that could take things even further have been worked on but not gone anywhere because the rich and/or powerful couldn't profit from them, and with those people in control of the market, developments coming from the "lower classes" struggle to gain traction due to lack of funding. And when you consider that there seems to be an ongoing pattern of evil organizations/corporations being dismantled by children (the player), who as you mention becomes the most powerful trainer in the region, then at least then it would seem like that choke hold on the markets might not be as strong. (And as a side note, people absolutely do innovate for the hell of it- just something to think on, but it's much the same for some people as it is for gamers that spend time working out niche strategies for a game they enjoy. There's not a pressing need to dig into specific data and run numbers to know exactly how to do the perfect sequence of actions to finish a run 3 seconds faster, but people do it anyways. Just 'cause, tbh. It's enriching, it's satisfying, and it gives a sense of fulfillment. That happens with real world stuff too.) From there when it comes to the argument of the choice of magic over technology, I don't think you're wrong on that, but I do think there's something you overlooked. I think it comes down to the thing you mentioned where everything is based around Pokemon battling. Pokemon need healing, rest, can get sick, and while it's not a mechanic you really deal with explicitly in the games, they presumably need to eat and get other stuff to stay alive. Without all of that, Pokemon battling as it is couldn't ever happen, and a lot of the technology is geared towards that, something which a lot of the Pokemon themselves couldn't really do on the large scale it happens on. Additionally, being able to use Pokemon for any purpose that technology would normally be used for assumes that humans and Pokemon coexist perfectly all the time. As we see in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, until the player comes along, a lot of people have barely connected with Pokemon at all, something which only truly even happens once they have the technology- the Pokeball- to control them. Which brings me to another point; as you mentioned, the majority of people can't use a form of magic, and we know that people have been really scared of them in the past. Without doing a heap of digging for specific examples, from memory a lot of technology development either increases the human's control over Pokemon, or gives them some kind of benefit that allows them to stand on more equal ground. When it comes to the use of Pokemon and their abilities for labor- it seems to me like you missed a lot of examples where they *are* participating in different fields. We've seen Pokemon in, at least, mining, construction, and transportation. But the extent to which Pokemon could fill those roles in society depends on a lot of assumptions I don't think we can fully confirm. Rarity of different species would determine the access to different abilities, and from the NPCs of the world, we can work out that the player is an exception when it comes to both finding and catching rare Pokemon, as well as training them. I'll come back to this a bit further down, but in a more realistic light, characters in-universe don't have the same resources the player has to do these things. The player's character doesn't have stamina when exploring, doesn't need to sleep or rest or eat, is able to look up the specific data for how to get specific Pokemon, and we have all the story beats line up so we can catch various Pokemon gods... because. So the access to the species that are the strongest and have the specific abilities is very limited, overall. And that's without once again addressing that Pokemon, in universe, are still living beings who only have so much energy themselves- PP is a representation of this, moves can't just be used an unlimited amount of times without rest. And they would have to want to do the work anyways, because with the really powerful ones it'd be hard to force them. So once you narrow it down, I question if there would be enough trainers, able to catch and train enough powerful Pokemon, with enough of the right moves, that are willing to co-operate, for there to be enough of them all up that between all of them could consistently replace all the technology while each one still gets enough rest. I think maybe the most difficult thing in an essay like this is while you can do all kinds of analysis and breaking down of the in-universe content, there's a space where it gets weird when you look at it without also looking at the broader meta context and real life stuff going on. For all that I've been surrounded by Pokemon in different forms since I was born, there are so many finer details of the deeper world building that I'm not familiar with- so I can't really comment on that side of it, I think some other commenters maybe have that better covered than me. But one thing I can note is what you said about how it's built as a game first and foremost, and maybe it's the game dev/designer side of me, but I feel like looking at all of the design choices without accounting for the design side of it might make it harder to get a lock onto the intentions or reasons behind some of the things you talked about. One thing I did want to make note of specifically in regards to this was the number of people/size of the towns and stuff. Playing the games over time as they pushed them further, the 'people' thing always stood out to me- and now I understand it a bit deeper, as well. Looking at the games chronologically, you can sort of tell that they're trying to find ways to get the impression of there being way more people, more and more as time goes on. In the earlier games this was really hard because of the technical limitations they were working within- having larger towns and cities, having more NPCs, is something that can be technically difficult to achieve in the format they're using, and also really time consuming. There's... a lot that could be said for how they manage performance and stuff, but it does seem to me that they are trying to push the idea of a more densely populated world, but falling short on that front. When it comes to the main character being a kid, that could also be more attributed to the target audience than narrative significance- even though that trips over itself once you have adults playing the game, the thing is that it's often typical for player characters, or otherwise protagonists, to be made to match their target audience in some way, to the point where that can even take precedence over the plot-holes it makes. Especially when it comes to kids' media, it's made to be relatable to them, but kids don't often want to be treated like "kids" in their escape fantasies, so the whole thing is a built in contradiction that generally has to be kind of solved by not addressing it. Otherwise you break the fantasy. Okay woah, so there's definitely more I could have added to this, but I'm just realising it's 1.30 AM where I am and that might be my signal to call it. This ended up much longer than I thought it would, and I hope it doesn't come off as too harsh for all the counter-arguing; I genuinely hope it comes across as a testament to how interesting, deeply planned, and thought provoking your video essay is that I just wrote essentially another essay in response, even if it was maybe largely in disagreement over the specifics 😅Thanks for making this video and sharing your thoughts! I look forward to seeing any future video essays you decide to post!
Hey! Thanks so much for taking a chance on some random internet guy’s 45-minute ramble on the pragmatics of a fictional universe! Sorry for the delayed response, but I can never resist a comment essay xD I’m gonna try to answer you in the same order as you posted, but I do ramble a lot, so we’ll see how long that lasts! First, I definitely oversimplified a very complex point when I said “technologies were made so rich people had to do less work”. I spent time on examples, but what I really should’ve done is go into explaining this idea better. So, here goes: When I talk about “technologies” in this video, I’m not just referring to modern technology. Rather, I’m talking about every innovation of humanity. We modern humans have a tendency to associate the word “technology” with modern gadgets: computers, telephones, televisions, cars, things like that. But the class of things that are “modern” has been one that is, definitionally, always changing. I went back and forth on using the word “technology” and “innovation” for the section, but I settled on the former because I was talking about objects, not ideas. There isn’t a great word for the idea of “things that were invented that happened to be tools,” unfortunately, so I settled on the next best thing. I tried to highlight this by describing the (real, as best as historians can tell) development of the ramp as an intentional technology. The other half of that point is the assertion itself, and I actually think we’re describing the same phenomenon in different ways. Technologies (using the above description) were, almost universally, not created with the intentionality of manifesting a tool to do something easier. Many were, as you state in your side note, made by people for the hell of it; at least, in their first iterations. Some were made accidentally, by people trying to create something else, or someone not trying to create anything at all. It’s the “rich people” - governments, companies, armies, Elon, whoever - that find these innovators, take their base invention, and develop it into something useful. I love the plane as an example of this; it was created as a passion project for the sake of it, and governments around the world saw its potential. So, they poured money into developing it as an instrument of war, making the killing of people easier. Then, over time, it continued to develop into an object for transportation of goods and people. You might say that the plane’s development was one fueled by war, and I’d call it “rich people.” We’re describing the same thing. My wording probably wasn’t optimal, and was more intended to be catchy than perfectly descriptive, but I do stand by the idea of it. Second: you’re pretty much totally in the right here. I mostly overlooked Pokémon rarity and human connection to them. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake, but there's some value in it. After all, the domestication of animals in the real world was no small task. It took generations of dedicated, focused civilizations to domesticate just a few different animals the planet over. But, when it was done, the population of those animals skyrocketed. Obviously, a wild Miltank is quite the predator to a group of people with nothing but a sack full of Apricorns, but I have to imagine that there were some Pokémon that were at least tameable (is that a word?) before Pokéballs were invented. So, there definitely should’ve been some Pokémon domestication in the world. Otherwise, how did the world get the kinds of technologies that ours has in the first place? Relatedly, one thing that I didn’t touch on in the video is precisely what a Pokéball is. We basically took it for granted that it was a *checks notes* perfect technological bridge between the real world and cyberspace that losslessly converts Pokémon to energy, can itself be turned into digital information and stored on the internet, and can be summoned from the internet back into a physical object, but also irreparably breaks upon failing to catch a Pokémon and can only hold one Pokémon at a time. We accepted this as technology because it seemed like, for all intents and purposes, the Pokéball was a modern invention. But, as we see in Pokémon Legends: Arceus (PLA), it’s not. We don’t know how long ago PLA takes place, (I incorrectly threw out the number 500 years in another comment, which I’d gathered from a since-corrected Bulbapedia article) but it’s past enough that things like electricity and steam power don’t exist. In our world, that’s at least 200 years. And, yet, the Pokéball exists basically unchanged. It works exactly the same as it does in Sword & Shield, but without any of the surrounding tech. The TL;DR is that the Pokéball, or perhaps the Apricorns from which they are made, have to be magic. Their “invention” was just the discovery of the Apricorns’ property to convert matter into a storable energy. This could’ve happened at any point, which means that the whole process of domesticating animals was skippable in the Pokémon universe; from the discovery of the Apricorn, all Pokémon were within the grasp of humanity. Now, this topic could fill its own 45 minute video essay, but I basically chalk up the “invention” of the Pokéball to mean the invention of a synthetic object that could perfectly replicate the behaviors of the Apricorn. Pokéballs simply have to have predated all applicable tech, making them magic. Also, though healing is streamlined in Pokémon games (which goes to the “game-ification” of the world, which I’ll get to in a second), many Pokémon are capable of healing themselves, some are capable of healing others, and they’re all living creatures who must have some capacity to heal over time. It’s hard to say where battling came from, since it seems to be a thing that already existed in PLA in spite of how rare Pokémon training is in that world. The tech that surrounds Pokémon battling is all just technology replacing all and only the exact functions of the Pokémon, without advancing it at all. This is, of course, one instance of the major fallacy that this video is made to address; that widespread tech isn’t done just because. We didn’t replace horses with cars until the cars were better than the horses in our world. Pokémon health tech doesn’t do the job better that Pokémon can. Again, this is probably something that’s been game-ified, but it seems that most Pokémon are, through biology or magic or both, able to heal themselves or visit a healer after injuries, and that they are able to be quickly restored to completely healthy. Battling probably was realized when it became clear just how fundamentally easy it is to restore Pokémon to full health; battling, burning, HP, being knocked out, this is basically to Pokémon what exercise is to humans. The restorative tech didn’t improve their ability to heal from this. For Pokémon and human labor: yeah, I definitely missed some examples here, but I don’t think that impedes my point very much. The fact that the people of the Pokémon world don’t have the game-ified stamina would, if anything, incentivize them to use Pokémon to work for them. We really don’t see any major examples of Pokémon being employed to do work that humans could not. Honestly, the best example I can think of is the Ampharos in the Olivine City lighthouse. The fact that this kind of work - the work that animals do/did in our world that humans cannot - isn’t outsourced to Pokémon is the problem. I think everything else that you mentioned is pointing to the fact that the world has been “game-ified” or that other adaptations of the world exist without any indication of which is the most accurate, if any are. I don’t really consume any Pokémon content outside of the video games, so there's certainly a lot of potential problems and holes in this argument that I could’ve missed. And, again, with things like the player character’s capabilities, the power of individual Pokémon, and even the population of the world, I just did the best I could interpreting the games and trying to translate those mechanics and features into a world. I’ll be the first to admit that I did not do this particularly well, and you bring up a handful of those examples here. As I work on the North & South follow-up project for later this spring (hopefully, there's a couple other projects I need to finish before it), it’s comments like yours that will inform further research into how the Pokémon world should be interpreted. And, finally, thank you again for taking the time to write all this out after my video. I love a good comment essay, even one that’s mostly focused on criticism, and I feel so fortunate and flattered whenever I see one. I’ll confess that, no matter how much of a comment is systematically disassembling the arguments of a video, I always have a big, cheesy grin on my face when I read them. I do hope you enjoyed this video and my response, and that you stick around the channel for whatever comes next. (And oh, look, it’s almost 2 in the morning here. I guess this is prime time for comment essays xD)
@@volcaronite Agreed the video uses the assumption that Pokemon were always commonly usable & that humanity is a much lesser number than our world when we just don't know that much about the realities of that world. For all we know the Pokemon World is a post apocalyptic world or only seems nice on the surface. Even the games hint there's some sort of darker lore that they don't want to tell us. Perhaps Godmons have people living in fear & require them to follow certain rules & we see a result of what happens when those rules are broken in Alola with the Tapu Village.
A very fresh perspective towards PKMN. I appreciate it! Personally, I think technology in PKMN runs in parallel to these beasts.. instead of benefitting from them. The world of this franchise is plagued from a lack of creativity, unity, binding and a lack vision for its worldbuilding! Machokes are shown carrying boxes for people that move in to new houses, or Anime Pikachu powering up things with electricity.. but nothing else! PKMN are a replacement for workforce, actions and resources. There's simply little to no in-game space dedicated to their Technology (that is suspiciously like ours) being completely and utterly dependent on PKMN as a whole! Take Bill's transmuting/teleport machine from Red and Green.. where it just is. No allusion to Abra's being involved or anything even remotely interesting. Their Trains are like ours, period. Humans in this world are like us, and therefore dumb. In the face of Power and Possibility, they succumb to a TikTok need for fame and Instagram need of Likes and "achievements".. with violence. All this is just another way to say PKMN isn't all it could be.. and that circles back to gameplay too.
I do think part of it could be how Pokemon has developed over the years too that we've seen this heavier magic shift into raising the stakes. As you pointed out, we saw a shift in Gen 3 and beyond where the story became about summoning and stopping deities of immense power and while I think Gen 3 does have particular elements that could make that work (Ex: Sootopolians, Dragonoids, Infinity Energy, Sea Mauville) if organized correctly, it's clear Gen 3 made that first big step away from Science Fiction and into Fantasy. Gen 1 and Gen 2 were very much set in a more scientific world than their sequels, with Mew being all Pokemons' ancestor containing all their DNA and learning every move and Mewtwo being an experiment trying to tame nature that went wrong and fought back. Gen 2 you could argue made the first movements towards magic though, or at least towards slight mysticism: Ho-Oh creating the legendary beasts from Pokemon perished in a fire and the mystery behind Unown. While there were magical/mystical elements they were very isolated and those particular Pokemon weren't out destroying their region or world because they were angry or being manipulated by maniacs. They were just kind of there and stories from isolated areas. Immediately post Gen 3 - in Sinnoh - science fiction and isolated mysticism fell on the wayside completely to literally make way for Magic and Religious Pokegods straight out of the playground of the 90's, where kids made outlandish claims about their video game luck and abilities. Suddenly the likes of Pikablu, Doomsay, Doomsday, and Mewthree were childish one-uping claims made real. People took those ideas and made them the reality of the Pokemon world because they grew up, but never realized how poorly thought out those ideas they had a kid were since they were made up in an instant and only for playground bragging rights. How do we up the stakes from forces of nature? God and Space-time. How do we up God and space-time? Destroy what it created and remake it. How do we up from that? Do the same thing but start region-specific mechanics to cover up the copied story. How do we up that? New mechanic, fully manipulate space-time to transverse different universes and dimensions beyond space-time. How do we up that? New mechanic and make the 90's-fan Doomsday an apocalypse reality. How do we up that? New mechanic, space-time manipulation and turning the imagination of our minds into the actual reality around us.
@@offandsphere6788I mean there’s nothing particularly wrong with stories that encompass greater regions and aspects but it does tend to lose personal-touch when it does. A murder on your street hits you a lot harder than a murder across the country. One character in Dragon Ball reaching a new stage is very impactful, but also loses speciality when a handful of others follow suit soon after but the story won’t shift away. Before a writer knows it they have to just keep raising the stakes each time because that’s already worked and it’s the easiest thing to do with the smallest amount of effort.
yea, you have some REALLY GOOD points, that wouldnt work as well in pokemon world because of many reasons. 1: Food problems: yes you can grow food on pokemon like tropius, and anime show many diffirent pokemon based food. but that is impossible to sustain in long run, with thousands of people. 2: Pokemons are as smart as and stronger than humans, and Pokemon Legends-Arceus touched that point in two ways: people are afraid of pokemon, and people respect pokemon. 3: pokemons arent, surprisingly, the solution to every problem humanity has. even if we consider many points, pokemon cant create complex buildings. Rock moves like stone edge and rock tomb are primarily used to point that, since stone is primary building material. yes, you can summon a pillar out of nowhere, but you need to build a roof. yes you can chuck a rock out of nowhere, but you need proper stonemason to carve it into usable blocks. 4: Pokemons, unsurprisingly, cant create pure metal out of nowhere. all steel type moves are either A- comes with (Metal name)+(body part) combination that would limit what is allowed, or B: some kind of energy attack using magical energy. 5: Teleportation. even if we stupify as 'all pokemon can teleport', to teleport large objects like entire food of a city, it will require a group of highly specialised teleporters that only trained for teleporting stuff. 6: Teleportation 2. even if we consider all pokemon can teleport, some are worse than others at teleporting. 7: Teleportation real problem. not all pokemon can teleport. only Psychic pokemons, which are one of the two most dangerous types to focus because of their abilities. Psychic pokemons are generally smarter than humans, can lift stuff with just their minds, can see fuckin future, and some of them, yes SOME of them, can teleport. 8: pokemons are sentient beings just like humans, and can build their own civilisations like humans did. do you think a blastoise would like to be your permanent sentient water faucet, or charizard for permanent sentient heater? my answer would be no. 9: some of the pokemon, like Tyranitar, Salamance, and Fearow, are territorial. that means there are groups of elementals that doesnt like others coming near their nesting place. and yes, they can kill. 10: predators. considering wild pokemons act like their real world counterparts because insticts, there are a LOT of pokemon which has one of natural poison as both offense and defence mechanism fire organ that allows them to BREATHE fire which you may know the results, electric organ that would overcook someone, ability to freeze things to death, Literal GHOSTS and over that we have pokemon made out of various rocks, steel and gemstones, psychic pokemons, walking plants, giant bugs that can eat someone, DRAGONS and martial artists that lives and breathes to beat the shit out of each other and seismic tosses each other into orbit. 11: fear against wild: Technology grew because people needed that technology. considering wild pokemons that are as smart as humans are around, PW humans would have even faster technologial growth than our world. first they would discover how to make fire to scare wild pokemons, since no one would fuck with fire pokemons. then, domestication of the prey pokemons would begin, like humans domesticated sheep, dogs and cows, PW humans would domesticate miltanks, tauros, Mareep, Wooloo, and growlithe. then humans learns how to respect and gain respect of more dangrous prey pokemons like Ponytas and Sawsbuck, which leads to development of carts and everyhing moves forward. only thing that pokemon world wouldnt have is guns, since you have sentient flamethrowers, water jets that can cut mountains, electricity that can cook someones insides and stuff.
LOVE THE VIDEO, THANKS, when i did the search on youtube, i thought well, its time for someone to have done this thing i always thought of this franchaises, YT has matured enough jajaja, as a young millenial, deconstructing and bring the ultimate consecuences of a setting / world building, without the suspension of disbelief and playing with the TVtropes, was my bread and butter aaaahh, the memories... TIME TO RECONSTRUCT THOU!!! 🤣🤣🤣
I created my Magimon setting as way to explain a lot of oddities in Pokemon. One thing in pokemon is how the professors talk like pokemon are new even though the pokemon have existed for a long time. I explain this in Magimon by saying that humans are actually new to the world having come from Earth with technology, and so technology is there because it is already normal for humans. Also, the most powerful pokemon are extremely rare, too rare for reliable use everywhere and thus most people need technology while a select few have an alternative.
Somebody else made the point about yhe meta backstory but it's important to think of how Pokémon were designed during the first couple of generations, too. Those vast elemental powers? Actually extremely restricted. While most Pokémon of an elemental type would learn a couple of moves of that type, the majority of a Pojemon's natural moveset was actually Normal-- tackle, bite, scratch, growl, glare. So.e Pokémon learned NO moves of their own associated type-- at least, not naturally. The technological advancement unique to Pokémon is actually in the technical and hidden machines. It's not in a Pokemon's nature to gerry humans across water, but you teach them Surf through an artificial mechanism and suddenly they've been tamed enough to allow it. So the world building is actually the other way around. Humans augmented Pokémon. Humans introduced this level of 'magic' to the world through those augmentations, meaning that technology taking advantage of those powers would still be fairly nascent. This gets muddy as the design philosophy behind the game design shifted, both in worldbuilding and gameplay, but I think 'taming the monsters with human technology' was more the original intent.
I think there’s an interesting idea that pokemon like Alakazam are claimed to have an IQ of 5,000 and that they might want to create technologies and pitch them to humans to help alleviate the burden of their fellow pokemon. Councils of highly intelligent pokemon and human government officials would be common. This wouldn’t necessarily change everything about your world of course, since there are some jobs that pokemom could do infinitely better than machines, but it could allow for some technology. In fact, it might be interesting to have a highly futuristic setting due to the cooperation of humans and the superhumanly intelligent pokemon, something like Solar Punk. The wisest pokemon convincing and assisting humans to develop technology to make everyone’s lives easier, including pokemon, and leveraging the labor pokemon are currently used for. Almost like a labor strike. Maybe that’s what happened in the canon pokemon world?
Yes, technology is generally used and developed for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but it doesn’t have to be in a cooperative and egalitarian society. The smartest pokemon would understand that and could teach (or bargain with) humans for this future.
You left out an important aspect to the definition of Pokémon, although your definition still work. Pokémon shrink. The Pokéballs trigger a Pokémon innate ability to shrink. That's why Pokémon aren't able to be captured after they feint because the become so small that you can't see them. Pokémon don't have to be unconscious to shrink either. They can do it pretty much any time they want to. That's why giant Pokémon can be hiding out in tall grass. What the Pokéball does after is it makes so that when Pokémon shrink they go back into a specific pokeball.
I think Legends: Arceus does a good job at kind of providing at least some level of context to how the world could technologically advance while still being in the presence of magical creatures such as Pokemon. You get taken back to Pokemon equivalent of Meiji era Japan (so like late 19th century) and people are largely still afraid of Pokemon, with many still viewing them as being scary predators to their prey. You kind of touched upon this when talking about technology developing alongside magic based on the availability of magic for average people, and so by that logic people weren't really able to make use of Pokemons capabilities as a technology surrogate until pretty far along in the timeline. And given that the galactic survey team (many people of which coming from other places) was a lot more familiar and comfortable with Pokemon than the residents of Hisui who had no familiarity, it can be inferred that different regions culturally in their development had domesticated Pokemon at different rates and thus would have different levels of development technologically as a result. This could explain why we have regions like Alola which have a lot of room for wildlife that hasn't been technologically developed, VS a region like Unova where they have highway systems and sprawling cities.
33:39 I don't know why but literally everyone is like the protagonists are 10 years old. 10 years old is the youngest age someone can become a trainer.
Teleport. You ignore the potential limitations. Teleport might have a limited range and be too tiring to use repeatedly enough to travel long distances.
Really dope and ambitious video you got here! I would just point out that if Hisui is anything like other regions c. 150 years before modern times, humans will have already developed a lot of modern technology due to the lack of pokeballs and the relative danger of feral pokemon. Maybe this just proves your point tho haha
4 Things: 1: I love the ideas you bring up, they are very interesting and most of it makes enough sense that even though I just got here, I'm impatient to hear about pokemon north & south. 2: The city concepts you put forward are fundamentally amazing, fantastical, and I wish they were in the game. But on a game design level, with there needing to be at least eight cities per region to keep up the current formula, it seems like it would be draining to try and have so many spectacularly different cities. Let alone there's a certain point where too much different becomes unrecognizable, and while not bad, the games so far have had a basis in reality, so a sudden shift would basically require a complete reboot. I guess this could be slightly resolved by having a larger development window, or team or whatever, but ignoring that for the sake of this. Instead, I feel that (although the logic may not be sound) there should be *some* fantastical cities each generation, maybe one that especially ties into the plot/namesake of the game, (time gen 9, energy gen 8, alternate universes or Kanto influence gen 7, and so on) and more that resembles ours in a basic way, except yes, more fantastical. Just maybe not a tree city, but a more integrated town, my favorite example being the mystical grove play from gen 8, looked sick as heck, but was so small it was just depressing. 3: Even given teleportation exsisting, I feel that it would just allow for easier transportation between major hubs as, unless they have major breeding programs for every Pokemon, trainers who are invested in making a perfect team would *need* to leave their settlements to go and find new pokemon, train their pokemon, explore just for the heck of it (like hiking). There are many reasons roads may be set up to connect places, so I feel that saying all transportation in this world would disappear is a bit farfetched (pun unintended... at first). As with all evolutions of our world based in technology, old things don't just disappear, they get reused and repackaged in a new way. Horse and buggy wasn't just expelled, it was transformed into the car we know today. You could say that even just farming is done in such a way that it is unalike its roots in anyway all the same. 4: Although not said, an interesting aspect of worldbuilding is the unwritten laws within the games. You can't have more than six pokemon on a team, you can't do many things we deam 'evil,' etc. What if using pokemon in the ways mentioned go against their laws as they deem it unacceptable? I mean we aren't allowed to work our animals to death, and they know they won't *die* from fighting, so its similar (to a degree). But what id forcing labor we are *able* to do on to these living beings is considered an unnecessary punishment of sorts? Hence why you see them in battles, but not at work pretty much anywhere it might be dangerous. I mean they explicitly say in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet that Team Star still has to be punished for making the starmobile, as it was against some rule or another to tamper (or build? I don't remember the phrasing) with pokemon.
So the fix is to have a sparcely populated world slowly become industrial. With that they reach a level of technology that makes it possible to domesticate non normal pokemon. There is a lack of cars in the regions as you travel by foot. A Pc is relatively new and pokemon centered. Tv and radio are really basic. Trains and ships are for mass transportation only since pokemon are too small. But they are powered buy pokemon energy from pokemon power plants. Taiming and domestication is HARD. Therefore it can not happen on a large scale. That emotionally open children are great with interacting to pokemon is actually realistic. Pokemons are not a subject to any science up to very recently as there is still a high need search for new species. Imagine that only 50 years ago some technology like a pokeball was found or some chemical that made them less aggressive towards humans. Since then a technological revolution has taken place but is still in its early decades.
What if teleportation was more common like in scenario 1 before some event happened (possibly faked) causing people to be scared of teleportation for a time, which then made societies form like in scenario 2?
The same reason people lose jobs to ai and robots Pokémon lose jobs to machines. Pokemon need breaks, they need food, they get sick, they have to use the bathroom. Your pikachu cant churn out endless electricity like a coal plant. Machamp may carry mountains but it still is a living thing that will get tired.
I can't really agree with making all pokemon inherently prone to bonding with humans. It would make for a far more interesting world if we, like in real life, were not able to tame most species and had to rely on only some of them. The others could be too dangerous, too dumb (or smart), not useful enough or any combination of these traits. The constraints could make for very creative scenarios.
There is the Orre region makes more sense in that well it is a barren desert where even wild pokemon is rare to find (so not using pokemon for everything makes a bit more senes) the region seems to also have a lot more crime (in Pokemon Colosseum... in the sequel Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness the region seems to have cleaned up a lot... can't have pokemon be too dark after all)
Thanks for stopping by the video :) I must confess that I never played either of the Gamecube Pokémon games, so I'm not familiar with the Orre region but, from an outside perspective, that makes sense to me!
I think the biggest factor here is that up until legends arceus with I think is around the 1850s? pokemon we're completely untamable, and thus humans HAD to use technology, they couldn't use abras to teleport goods cuz they were afraid it was gonna kill them, and it was stated that Japan in this world was on of the first places to somewhat tame pokemon and it spread from there, so let's assume the rest of the world cought on to pokemon taming a few years after that, so around early 1900s. After that, most scientific advancemt would refocus on better taming of pokemon ofc while still making other tech for other stuff, until pokemon taming was perfected. The sociatal focus on pokemon battling instead of using them for more practical stuff is odd. But it definitely does not discredit the invention of cars, or at least carts, as pokemon usige by humans is for the most part an extrimly modern concept. And I mean.... If I saw a 8m water serpent burning villages with its eyes, I'd probably want to avoid it as well, long before the idea of taming it would come across my mind.
25:10 thnx for calling them Yen. To adress the the Elephant in the Room, yes the Bike is not 1 Million dollar expensive, but no even whit Yen its fare from Cheap. 38:00 and dont forgett Guys, Abra can teleport other Objects. In Gen 2, in the League, a Abra can teleport you alone back to your home City.
You bring a lot of great points against the existence of technology in the world but the way I see it is that people have more control over pokemon because of technology i.e pokeballs I would imagine controlling wild animals with the power to rip you to shreds wouldn't be feasible without an ability to better control them so I don't find it as hard to believe, as for how they became as advanced pretty quickly, like you said there's pokemon that literally shoot electricity, steel and fire so thinking of technology should've been as hard plus I imagine dams still use water pokemon and power plants use electric pokemon like we've seen with electrodes, yeah some stuff still make no sense like you said but pokemon also don't have infinite energy either
You're 100% right. I grabbed that number from a Bulbapedia article right after the game came out, and just internalized it. I never bothered to check again, because there has been no confirmed duration for precisely how long ago PLA took place. I should've used a more general "some hundreds of years ago," as that seems more reasonable.
Also, populations would absolutely still become packed together. Look up the mouse utopia experiments. Populations free from danger will not spread out despite available space.
I think your foundational assumption is wrong. Pokemon magic is very powerful, but it is not universally accessible. The player character is canonically the best trainer in the entire region. While you may be able to fly and teleport at will, npcs are almost never shown doing that, the only exceptions being some rivals and some champions. You may command the power of the gods, but 99% of NPCs in the setting have a single weak pokemon that they never train. e.g. level 5 meowth. So the magic, while amazing, is not available to most people. On the other hand, those people do know such power exists, motivating them to look for alternatives. Pokemon also have needs that technology doesn't. Using your example of squirtle-powered running water, how practical is it to have a sink that needs training, food, rest, and daily walks? Also, since Pokemon are highly intelligent, they would be easily bored, and would probably get upset if you asked them to stand in front of a drain all day for the rest of their lives. Not only is there still a role for technology in a pokemon world, I think it would actually progress faster than it does in real life. In the real world, gliders and airplanes were the result of people seeing birds and thinking, "That doesn't look so hard." Turns out it was hard, and studying animals was a major part of solving the problem. Now imagine how much more helpful it would be if your inspiration understood human speech. "Alright, Mr. Alakazam, this helmet will record your brain waves, please teleport across the room as slowly as you can." If you compare the technology of the pokemon world to the real world, you will find that most of their future tech is some version of teleportation or mass manipulation, both things that pokemon are good at. And of course, wild pokemon are dangerous, and that would push technology as a means of defense. As in your Game of Thrones example, the existence of dragons didn't mean that war was all dragons, it meant that ballistas got popular. TL;DR In a setting where everyone has equal magic, technology is irrelevant, but in a setting where the elite have more magic than others, technology progresses even faster than normal, as the common man struggles to keep up. And since literally every fantasy setting has unequal amounts of magic among the populace, high tech magic worlds are inherently more realistic than medieval magic worlds.
And of course somehow a "capitalism bad"/"eat the rich" rant makes its way here as if a lot of technological advancements weren't brought about by working class people and tradesmen trying to make their own jobs easier.
Nice. I've been doing my own PTU worldbuilding, where its just straight our world + pokemon. I think you've got a lot of points here, and I think that means pokemon need to be modern, not ancient. I'm thinking that WW1 or WW2 would mark the first major use of pokemon by humans, and much of their official research and widespread use is only due to the aftermath of those wars.
So, why develop technology? Simple, as literally every game has shown, and PLA showed in even more detail, most pokemon are dangerous. Training them is difficult, it seems easy to us playing the protagonist, but that's ignoring that the protag is always stated to have a special unique bond or ability to train pokemon. The technology exists because the average person can't use pokemon to do everything. We do see pokemon being used to do things like working a powerplant, or a lighthouse. and not just back in gen 2, even as recently as gens 7 and 8 we've been shown day to day interactions between humans and pokemon. Pokemon helping out in a bakery, or helping get rid of trash. It's more or less stated in alola that they don't have any trash dumps and next to no pollution because of the grimer and trubbish eating the trash, allowing them to put more research into improving recycling. Also, the "every pokemon protagonist is prepubescent" thing is just wrong. Slightly less wrong than calling them all ten year olds at least. The black and white characters were 15, the X and Y characters were 16, and while it's post this video's release, Scarlet and Violet's protagonists are 17. This is actually common for kids media, children and teens prefer characters around three years older than them as the main character.
Currency. You mistake the purpose of currency. Currency exists so trade can occur without bartering things one might not want to be rid of. Currency works because it has trade value but is emotionally easy to trade away for something else. Currency has no sentimental value nor any value beyond it's usefulness to trade away.
Thanks for this video! Your analysis was very insightful and got me to think more about the relationship between magic and technology in my own worlds.
I mean, i still think technology _could_ exist. This is a world that _thrives,_ it's just that the tech stays stagnent usually due to the lack of need. That being said, as great as pokemon are, they arent infallible, and surely some people are going to be at least a bit curious about alternative solutions, and that isnt even talking about anyone who'd wanna research about some of the magic stuff that pokemon can do. Take professor Sycamore for example, he was the dude who spearheaded mega evolution research. I think that labs actually make some sense the way they're presented in the games and anime, at least in some capacity, Would it be wrong to compare them to the consept of sects..?,
I disagree that currency wouldn't be invented. A barter system requires both parties to see the value in a good and want to directly exchange them and all labour needs to result in a good (or the promise of providing for someone's needs in a one sided goods exchange). It's just wildly inefficient compared to using currency.
As for the technology part, i want to point out that catching Pokémon was a relatively recent development and they were for most of human history feared. So, at least until the time of PLA, technological advancement would have been parallel to the real world.
I would say the advent of technology is to keep humans on par with pokemon. Your concept of using magic for everyday needs implies that the ones using the magic are agreeing to these conditions, if they do not, then it does not matter if the job can be done easier, the magic simply wouldn't be used. I would say what we see instead is an equal world where instead of pokemon treated as slaves, they are treated as partners, and if humans simply treated pokemon as domesticated animals like in your example, then with their intelligence level, we would see more revolts, revolutions, and possibly the overthrow of humans being the dominate species. What we see with the technological scale is not only humans showing a superiority over pokemon, they are only doing it as that show of force, while also intelligently keeping a social connection with these beings of magic. All it takes are pokemon forming an army, simply a couple of Tyranitars could decimate a city, Alakazams could come up with strategies and invoke inspiration to pokemon held in captivity. Simply put, They are the magic users, not humans, humans simply learned how to work alongside them. They intelligently did so by incorporating them into society and learning their behaviors, while still showing they wield the bigger stick. Technology is human's non-magical solution to be on the same level as pokemon, otherwise, they would just be another normal/fighting type that can only learn basic normal or fighting moves.
This is a very masterfully done video. And while i enjoy it. I do not agree with some of your viewpoints for the simple fact that. While yes pokemon are animals and can be used to make human life better. Many pokemon can be depicted in anime as having comically short tempers. So i believe that using pokemon as if they were machines (which kinda felt like the vibe youbwere going for) would be a very fast way to find just how angry irritable pokemon can become. Not to mention the way in which you make your case arguments almost feel detached from the reality that the pokemon franchise had created. Like its an "outsider looking in" point of view. Not looking to start an argument, just saying i enjoyed the video. Even if i feel some things could be done differently.
Why would magic stagnate tech instead of advance it further? There are tons of reasons for people to develop technology in the pokémon world, particularly before they had the tools to properly tame pokémon in large scale and use them as beasts of burden. Like... Can you IMAGINE what it was like WAY BACK THEN when people were hunter gatherers and had to hunt pokémon to survive? Sure you can argue that one or two villages had a mofo with a zigzagoon who could help, but the ones who couldn't? How hard do you think it would have been to 1v1 a mamoswine?? How do you protect yourself from hungry DROWZEE that want to sneak into your cave at night to feast on your dreams? I feel like your argument is also flawed because it simply overlooks the way in which people interact with pokémon as a phenomenon. They're not just animals, they are straight up an example of why nature needs to be RESPECTED. Like, yeah of course people don't just polute everywhere. Can you imagine the apocalyptic hellscape that a world overcome with poison types who EAT TRASH would look like? Grimers and koffing as far as the eye can see. This is straight up a shintoist inspired world and it shows. Pokémon has the potential to be THE solarpunk setting. TLDR: Magic doesn't need to stagnate tech; Magic is tech;
"How to make food last longer and how to see in the dark were rich people problems." ...ah you never studied actual technological development. Because food preservation was around for a good long while before fire was tamed. The main benefits of fire were cooking (possibly the most important invention in all of human history) and to stay warm so you don't freeze to death. Seeing in the dark to help protect you from predators was a nice bonus, as was most species natural fear of fire which helped to ward away dangers in the first place. And so on and so forth with many many inventions. Heck the idea of money wouldn't be invented for another 7000 years or so, everyone was a worker. Magic is not the death of technology, magic should ACCELERATE TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT. The only settings that seems to get this is the Avatar series and Eberron. Fire benders bring about steam engines, industrialization, large scale smelting, and electrical generation moving the world from one where most people traveled on foot between dirt roads between peasant villages to one where cars were mass produced and people went around in battle mechs in only two generations. Meanwhile in Eberron they figured out how to assembly line via magical items and make magic engines to power all sorts of things allowing for a full blown industrial revolution. Magic facilitates more complex processes and productions by skipping the need to develop requisite technologies and refine them before being able to work on later technologies. It also often simplifies logistics chains and bypasses other issues. For example a steam engine needs metal for construction, a steady supply of coal for fuel, a steady supply of water for steam, properly installed and maintained pipes, and the rest of the machine you need to run and everything you needed to do to make that work. Eberron's magic engines I mentioned before massively simplify that. You need a properly sized chunk of magical crystal, you enchant it properly, and then you install it into the thing you want it to run. You still need to work out how to make a machine do what you want but the engine is so simplified that finding uses for it is more incentivized. With steam engines you had to integrate the tech you wanted to power right into the system from the start. So any problems would render the whole thing a waste of time and resources. But with engines that can be just plugged in it the machine doesn't work you can more easily reconfigure it or work on the problem directly and if you can't fix it you can just use the engine elsewhere without wasting the resources needed to make the engine in the first place. As such since the engine is reusable with minimal fuss there is a much greater reduced cost in labor and material waste if your invention fails.
The easiest reason is pokemon have a will of their own. You cant dominate them as easily as you see in the games. Watching the anime or reading the manga tells you this.
Great video unfortunately has many counter claims just like : magic in the Pokemon are not permanent, we can see that when Pokemon use they're magic it disappears easily People in the Pokemon world view Pokemon as dangerous creatures and unlike other fictional world the magic in the Pokemon is uncontrollable sure they have PokeBall but who can say that all the Pokemon will obey, it could further bring destruction Side note the mahic of the Pokemon world is kinda similar to Avatar the last Airbender wherein magic further advanced technology
I am making a pokemon mistery dungeon comic and you are right i had to make a lot of changes to the magic system only because the story would be broken in shambles if i dont
Which includes -teleport is useless in combat since the battles are 3vs3 teams or singular duel i made so the -1 priority of teleport makes the move useless and the only dude who uses that move at a good rate in the story is crazy op (if you ask is a male meowstic with prankster i know it cant learn it in the game but i made so he found the kantonian teleport mt) -teleport only teleports 2 persons at time unless you are also powerful but powerful psychic pokemons are highly cotized and extremely rare so they cant be all teleporting persons, goods or things like that -pokemon now follow the law of equivalent exchange which means that water type pokemons cant create infinite water or rock and ice types pop gigant structures from nowere without sacrificing something this translate differently depending on the pokemon for example a Water type needs to be hydrated to use its powers or it can die or a fire type having to wait until its biological fire fuel fills or eat something to fuel the fire -since pokemon have a more limited energy system they can only use a couple of attacks before rendering themselves defenseless which also made so pokemon use medieval weapons unironicaly and lowkey nerfs special attackers since then they cant just snipe you out of the distance this also buffs rock steel flying ghost and lowkey fight and normal types since they either are very resistant inmune or good at dodging attacks form melee weapons or have a great advantage at close combat regardless of weapons, this also makes blunt weapons the usual best choice since they are the best at damaging highly armored pokemons and even without pp a pokemon still usualy has superior strenght and other weapons like swords shoud need more maintance making swords basicaly useless -psychic isnt telekinesis it can only be used for pushing or pulling objectives but not both and the move telekinesis is reworked to work only on your attacks, thought powerful psychic pokemon can still do telekinesis but takes massive efford to do so, the only pokemons who can use telekinesis in combat constantly are a huge deal on the story and they usualy are legendaries and they are still incapable of using it on dark types Also airships where invented far earlier since helium and similar gasses is far more efficent at lifting things on the ground the main inspiration is that in the game a single helium balloon can basicaly lift a ton weighting pokemon so its far easier getting things at flight
Thanks for watching! You're definitely right; I've a bad habit of rambling and going on tangents. It's something I've got to work on for future content, certainly. But thank you so much for watching through this one 😊😊
Honestly... I'd happily take a Pokègame where you are just Someone and even the most important people you meet are a randomly chosen human model with a randomly picked name and there ain't any bad guy team or legendaries runnin' 'round.
Phenemonal video! I hope this goes viral because it's not only fair criticism of a beloved property, but it's also a fair dive into worldbuilding and the origins of human civilization. You made points about worldbuilding and the history of civilization that I probably wouldn't have been able to form on my own. It's quite serendipitous that I came across this video because I myself have been thinking about Pokemon's worldbuilding for quite some time now. It appears that since the worldbuilding of Pokemon is so fundamentally flawed, there are 2 options: 1. Alter the powers, numbers, and location of Pokemon so that human civilization in the Pokemon world would highly resemble our own. or 2. Leave the powers of Pokemon unchanged and logically arrive at a conclusion of how this would radically change human civilization. (Most resembling your conclusion) I have LOTS of other things to say, but I'll post them in one or more comments because I'm working on being less wordy and having my points coherently flow into one another (not just one long ramble). Anyway, I'd very much be interested to see your interpretation of a "properly worldbuilt" Pokemon.
Thank you so much for stopping by the video :D and I'd love for it to go viral, too! I'm definitely going to create a pitch for Pokémon North & South at some point in the near-ish future, so I'm really thankful for your interest in it! I'm not going to go so far as to call it a "properly worldbuilt" version; after all, I'm at least as prone to storytelling mistakes as anyone else, if not more so. But, I've described myself as being obsessed with storytelling, so this is something that's interested me for a long time. I'll take a swing at it soon enough, and then wait for it to get rightly eviscerated by anyone who watches through it! Finally, this channel is DEFINITELY a place for rambles, raving, and all-around wordiness on whatever! See both of the big videos and literally every single comment I've written. But, I mean, if you want to leave multiple comments and boost that number on this here tiny channel, I'm certainly not going to complain! Anyway, thank you again for watching. I look forward to hearing what you have to say!
I think your overestimating the useability of Abra, and reliability of Pokemon in general First of all, this is a videogame. I doubt the process of catching it as easy as it in the games. You have to remember that as a game, it abstracts the process of catching it to be easier. The animes generally depict a pokemon journey as lasting a year or so, but the average pokemon playthrough can take a couple days at most so I doubt its as easy as your making it out to be. Second, I doubt training an Abra is as easy as you make it seem. Abra sleep like, 16 hours a day or so. This thing is basically a psychic teleporting cat. It evolves into intelligent and hyper-intelligent cats as it grows. cats that are MORE intelligent than you. Do you honestly believe a supergenius psychic cat's going to be serve a weak human unquestioningly as a taxi even if they are loyal? no. Its a cat. they believe we're meant to serve THEM. and Abra's one of the safer pokemon arguably, many of them are more dangerous in multiple ways. Again this is a thing that a videogame abstracts out: realistically, pokemon are dangerous and full of their own quirks, personalities and flaws. You can give a bunch of children bikes because the bikes are objects they don't have opinions, but a ponytas are animals with FIRE for hair, you get a ponyta that doesn't like a kid, you get a burnt hand. parents would look at that go NOPE. like just because one machoke is useful doesn't mean they all are, they might not like the job you give them, a machine doesn't have opinions. Also your ignoring Legends Arceus in general. people didn't start domesticating pokemon until like, a century or two ago, and the explanation given is that well....pokemon are scary and dangerous because of what they can do. we can talk about how much or little sense that makes, but thats what happened. and a device to like catch them and carry them around wasn't invented until that time, so....imagine before that, imagine trying to go up to a teleporting cat and trying to convince it to serve you as a taxi without any magical balls to catch them, imagine it being scared of you and just teleporting away! you don't know where it went. you don't know if it understands anything you just called out to it. your probably holding a berry it might or might not like, you don't freaking know, and you don't have any pokemon already loyal to you to fight for you and even if you did, you might have only one to do so with if your lucky, because even if you do befriend pokemon you still have to travel with them as a group all around you without pokeballs, you basically become this herder of them, if you don't have a way to transport them....which means you need to TECHNOLOGY to utilize pokemon like this in the first place. and like, not all pokemon are found in places that people like go to go. like many fire types, unsurprisingly, are found near or in volcanoes. who the heck goes to volcanoes? while most water types? are out at sea, and thus you need to fish. hope you like catching magikarp that you don't know how to train and basically useless! oh and evolves into a terrifying temperamental serpentine dragon if you do get it right, and what kind of person makes friends with terrifying sea dragon? not someone anyone wants to BE friends with, I bet. oh and all the bird pokemon that can just like, easily fly away from you if you don't have a pokemon to battle them and a pokeball to catch them. your more likely to encounter grass or bug pokemon in the forest and fields.....and those can be POISONOUS and PARALYTIC. sure gloom and paras look friendly and goofy but they can like, kill you with poison powder and likely to attack you if they feel threatened, and they feel threatened by you coming near them. even normal types are very strong, fighting types are probably stronger.... oh and if you start making graveyards that attracts ghost pokemon, who you can't hurt and can mess with you in all sorts of ways, so mourning your dead becomes dangerous. and assuming your successful in taming anything, your dog can potentially kill you by getting too excited and like, shocking you with electricity or breathing fire and burning down your house. so.....the light and happy tone is doing some heavy lifting here in terms of what does/doesn't happen. also your ignoring all the science-fiction inspirations that Pokemon is built on: Mewtwo, Deoxys, Clefairy being from space, Porygon, magnemite, things like that. pokemon draws as much from futuristic sci-fi stuff like aliens, robots, as it does from fantasy and magic, and while Palkia and Dialga are deity-like beings, what they are gods of: time and space are fundamentally science fiction in nature. by cutting out the technology your cutting out a lot of good pokemon and concepts that inform this or that pokemon. I'd say that pokemon is closer to a superhero setting than high fantasy, because its a mix of science fiction and fantasy in a modern world, and all the evils you fight are pretty short-lived doomsday stuff that superheroes are expected to fight compared to a fantasy evil which has space for its evil to work and exist for long periods of time. like this is a good analysis, but I think you made a mistake in assuming what genre you think it is from the get-go instead of figuring out what genre suits pokemon best as it is, because what it is now is what made it so popular no matter how little sense it makes. and it sounds more like you want to make your own pokemon-like world but not actually pokemon, which I can respect if thats what you want to do, I'd recommend it even, because this kind of thing fuels creativity and makes new stuff, new worlds, new iterations on the concept in your own way. but if you just want to keep to fanfic, that understandable to, not everyone wants to make their own thing after all. but y'know consider that maybe what you've made could be a world inspired by pokemon that can be, rather than a pokemon that never be, just a thought.
While this is not the case for the Pokemon world, as I do like the way it is, I've always hated when people introduce Modern Technology into a fantasy world. It ruins the magic of the world for me, and doesn't fit. I don't know why people keep doing it.
Thank you so much for watching the video :) Urban/modern fantasy isn't a genre I have a ton of experience with myself; as I said in another comment, I think Bioshock is about as close as I've come outside of Pokémon. It's conceptually interesting, and may make the worlds feel more friendly and familiar, but it comes at the expense of a fundamental failure of worldbuilding unless it's very carefully addressed. I love Bioshock, but the "magic as science" approach to Adam and plasmids leaves a lot of massive plot holes. I feel the same way about The Boys, actually. Modern magic is a difficult balance to walk, and I've yet to find a story that doesn't incorporate magic into the world haphazardly. In my opinion, that doesn't mean those stories aren't worth telling. There's a lot to be said about suspension of disbelief to get behind those stories. That's why I love the Bioshock games and The Boys despite their worldbuilding failures. But it's definitely understandable that plot holes of that magnitude can come off as inauthentic and false, so I completely sympathize with your distaste for the subgenre.
@@volcaronite No, I agree. If you make the world a mix of Magic and Technology from the start, then it's fine. But if you establish a world of magic with barely any technology, and suddenly includes it later it ruins everything.
u forget one thing the world of Pokemon wasn't created for the humans but the Pokemon themselves by their god Arceus, Pokemon created humans in the Pokemon world so they obviously made the humans of that world not want to rely on Pokemon to build things for them or something like that. Pokemon are friends to the humans (well most humans) they dont abuse their power like u would suggest other than with Pokemon battling, there are actually plenty of Pokemon that help out their humans with building buildings and stuff like that, have u not seen Machamp with hard hats on carrying around heavy steel girder's and stuff like that in the anime and games? at the end of the day Pokemon do get tired just like animals in our world and that is why there are still cars and plans and stuff like that in the Pokemon world alongside trainers just travelling on their Pokemon because they both coexist together by utilising each others powers and as insane artificer said it is not really known how teleportation works in the Pokemon world as we can only use it to teleport back to the last Pokemon centre that we visited or our house and even then we dont know how much weight they can carry alongside them (i would assume it would be based by their psychic power). so your whole video is just plain wrong imo it is not in any way a failure but a very well thought out world that both Pokemon and Humans coexist in.
this is a great video and im giving it a like because of that but i think just on most points in this video (especially the tropius one) i just absolutely completely vehemently disagree.
27:47 This is where I believe the heart of the problem lies in your video. You say that taming and training Pokemon is easy, when in reality, it's only easy for the player character, or in other words us. Just as we consider catching Pokemon is easy, we also consider the story of the Pokemon games to be easy. We collect 8 gym badges, defeat the Pokemon League, and become the champion, and it requires far less effort than it would to say, 100% a game like Dark Souls. But the problem is, *we* are the exception, not the norm. We as the player are skilled enough to become the champion, but we're only the top 1% of people in the world that are capable enough of achieving such a feat. Most people in the world of Pokemon aren't trainers or battle with the Pokemon they do have whatsoever. Even the trainers we do battle never have 6 Pokemon, unless they're some fisherman who has 6 Magikarps on his team. Within the world of Pokemon, even having more than 6 is something that only truly skilled trainers can do, not just your average joe on route 1. No kid is being handed a Gyarados that can tear down entire cities, or an Alakazam that can transport you wherever you want to go. What *we* consider to be "easy" within the game, are feats that aren't possible for the average person in the world. Just look back at Legends Arceus, if taming and training Pokemon was so easy, then everyone in Jubilife Village should've had at least one Pokemon, but they didn't. In that time, Pokemon were considered dangerous creatures that cannot coexist with humans. And it would be a long time after that until the Pokemon world reaches the state it's in now. So within that time where humans distrust Pokemon and only VERY very few people even have *3* Pokemon at most, why wouldn't humans develop technology to help benefit them? No one is riding around on their Rapidash or flying around on their Charizard, so how else are they going to transport their supplies and produce around? TLDR: Instead of looking at our actions as the player the norm, look at our actions as the exception. We're a prodigy trainer, skilled enough to take down an evil organization, save the world, become the champion, and completed the Pokedex (maybe), all before we've finished going through puberty. And all of that isn't something the average person can do in the Pokemon world. Edit: Furthermore, the very power of teleportation shouldn't be something taken lightly. Even though Abra is capable of teleporting itself and it's trainer, that's really all we see of it's power. We don't know if Abra can teleport large shipping containers across the world, and even if it could, it already takes a lot out of Abra to consistently teleport like that. There's a reason why Abra needs to sleep 18 hours every day if it wants to consistently use it's telekinetic powers.
Not t say you don't have good points however
1. Saying teleportation makes books and the internet a non thing I feel is a bit of a reach as even with your teleport around and tell your story example human memory would still distort it as seen by places who had people who's job it was to memorize and tell stories
2. We can't say they can rely on teleportation when we have never seen these teleporting pokemon do more then teleport out of a cave with their trainer or more short distances
3. Your building examples fails due to that being shown via dynamax meaning it would only be at one area of the world making it not able to be used elsewhere. not to mention that stone is very much uncut and unrefined so great way to get stone but to pop up houses would be out of reach. Also outright saying that steel pokemon can summon steel beams is not found in any of the material as that is just a move name.
4. You cannot compare every pokemon to the likes of tyranitar, aggron, or machamp in their power
5. you did not address pokemon rarity or the fact that the pokemon may reject to being the house faucet or heater
6. As per your admission pokemon are quite intelligent especially abra and kadabra, and alakazam. No way in hell they would just sit there and do boring shit all day.
However powerplants would totally be more pokemon focuses though I do wonder if pokemons increased intelligence would make them less willing to sit and once spot to heat up water, or follow a person around to be a light, not to mention them wanting to develop pokeballs more to help transport and carry these powerful beings. Because lets be real if the targaryen's could carry a mother trucking dragon in their pocket they would have funded them project to death.
In short I think you have a good point but while it should have a greater impact I don't think it would have the same impact that you are talking about as for example having all the water pokemon generate the water at one spot and then charging people for it and then pumping it around would be very tempting, along with dealing with plumbing and not wanting to have a toilet squirtle.
also what do you do if your teleporter gets knocked out? just die I guess?
Also saying there would be no currency an just barter makes me think of someone needing to go on a full chain gathering sidequest for a pair of pants. Like the guy who bought a car using a paperclip or the tumbler post about the guy making a necklace and fixing a bee keeper after doing a bunch of other small tasks
Hey! Long response incoming.
Thanks so much for watching the video, and for taking the time to dissect and rebut a lot of my arguments. I'd like to respond to all of your points, but the major issue in my video that you correctly point out is this: I massively overestimated the power and prevalence of teleportation in the Pokémon world. I missed the mark on max distance, accessibility, scale, and a whole lot more. This is, inarguably, the biggest flaw with the video. A lot of your points are absolutely correct for this reason, but let's see if I can't shed some more light on them regardless.
(1) Of the three "things" that are spread through travel - goods, people, and information - information is definitely the one which would benefit from teleportation the least. I think that, even imagining the world that I described - one in which teleportation is freely accessible and generally limitless - that we'd see a fair bit of development in this field. The printing press seems to be a pretty reasonable endpoint for this, since it would help for the standardization of information before teleportation would distribute it widely. Of course, for the Pokémon world, then we'd probably see even more, given the limitations of teleportation. You're completely correct here.
(2) Mostly, the same. If we take the move "teleport" and establish its limitations as the rules of teleportation in the Pokémon world - which seems like a reasonably fair way to estimate without any other measures - then a Pokémon with the move is capable of traveling from anywhere in a region to a single designated spot. So, for example, someone could teleport from Mt. Stark in Sinnoh to Canalave City, also in Sinnoh. This is pretty far in the games, but it's obviously not a continental journey (for reference, you'd activate this in-game by visiting the Canalave City Pokémon Center, then not visiting another and using teleport from Mt. Stark). In this way, it kind of works like messenger birds do in real life; a Pokémon can always make its way back home. So, in order to be able to teleport to a location, one would have to either have already visited or have a Pokémon that has done so. Again, both of these are limits that I wrongly did not consider.
(3) I'm willing to stand by this point, actually. I used footage of Dynamax because it was a very apt visual example of what I was talking about, but I think similar results could be obtained without it. Many Pokémon are capable of creating magma, summoning rocks from the ground, and generally manipulating the ground with relative ease, so I think that many, if not most buildings would be created of the earth or stone. Wooden buildings are also quite possible, since many Pokémon are very capable of growing trees almost instantaneously. I'm not trying to say that infrastructure would be as sophisticated as it is here, but that's sort of the point; that technological sophistication would be stumped by the prevalence of magic, making these creations easy and common enough that innovation would've been unnecessary and, likely, avoided.
(4) 100% agree. I consistently ignored the strengths and weaknesses of specific Pokémon. No notes.
(5 & 6) One of the biggest points I struggled with in this video was how, precisely, to consider Pokémon intelligence and sentience. I immediately ruled out claims made by the Pokédex as inaccurate, almost folklore-esque stories made by people that hadn't actually scientifically studied each Pokémon. Numbers for size, weight, temperature, IQ, age, and even power are consistently blown way out of the realm of possibility, to the point that they simply aren't compatible with, like, the laws of physics. This argument alone could be its own 45-minute video, but the Pokédex simple can't be accurate, so I routinely ignored it. Instead, I sort-of invented a class of intellect that lived in between the smartest of animals and the dimmest of humans.
When I was editing the final chapter and began listing the rules for the Pokémon world that I would eventually create, I cut the first rule down. It originally read like this:
"This world has to be one in which the fundamental aspects of the games remain constant. Specifically, the practices of catching Pokémon and battling other trainers must exist basically unchanged. That means that, as intelligent as Pokémon are, their sentience is objectively less, or less important, than that of humans."
I don't know of a better way to handle this idea. If I assume their intelligence is any lower, then what they're capable of is just impossible. If I assume it to be any higher, then capturing them, forcing them to fight, and storing them in perpetual digital purgatory is not far off from abusive. Similar to the last point, I ignored the intelligence of specific Pokémon in order to create this blanket assumption. This compromise, along with the Pokémon world's general utopic depiction, combine to create a world in which Pokémon are happy to do work of any kind, and the the humans treat them with respect and dignity in return.
(untitled final paragraph) Something I did a bad job of explaining was how modern phenomena would be adapted into the Pokémon world. When I spoke about that, I wasn't imagining a world in which a toilet was literally the same object, but was just powered by a Poliwag instead of a pipe. No, I was in the same area as I was when discussing point (3): innovations would've been stymied because of the power of magic. There'd still likely be chamber pots and outhouses, and citywide running water would be powered by strong water creators that can pump water down large pipes for people to store in tubs and barrels in their home. Of course, all of this is speculation on unwritten fiction, so there's no way to know for sure. But I always tried to imagine Pokémon working with that respect and dignity, not compromising the core games. Plus, most Pokémon captured by trainers live in Pokéballs for their entire lives, doing nothing. Surely, a life of freedom and service is at least as tolerable as one of constant battling, damage, and healing. At least, I think so.
I just want to thank you one more time for leaving your comment. You raise some seriously valid points, ones I will consider when I get around to the follow up/North & South project. I hope you were able to enjoy the video despite its flaws, and you've definitely earned your credit of "being neat" :)
@@volcaronite Thank you for the reply! I will admit I did forget about there being pokemon who could summon whole trees and that is my bad and I will admit I more hold the point that those abilitys would be used to supplement building rather then replace it if only due to the more crude nature.
Also ya pinning down pokemon intelligence is basically impossible as all we know is that they are smart enough to pick up names and listen to commons to do more complex actions like battle.
I would like to suggest in the pokemon world the prevalence of electric, and fire pokemon would encourage industrialization if only due to the fact that if you work with the pokemon can give them food or other care in return, not to mention pokemon like rotom.
Also lets not forget that there are pokemon like chansey around that in every conceivable appearance can use their little egg like healing magic so that would stunt the medical field without a doubt.
I would continue this to still suggest that currency would still come about if only because of the inherent problems with a pure barter system and the culture of the world being shaped around using small balls to capture these creatures and the need for more of them and even better versions to be made.
I would also argue this. Why does the ability to cast fire balls suddenly make more automatic and clean ways of dealing with waste and delivering water and heat such a non starter? Given that in every form of media abra are still more rare (though ofc en mass breeding could fix this issue like humans breeding the horse) I would still think that a attempt to make things more clean and avoid disease and a bad smell would still push for these as the magic of the world cannot make what is in the chamber pot vanish, not to mention I bet it would attract muk.
Last note: While I worked on wording my response that did not detract from my enjoyment of it as atleat someone was talking about the giant metal square elephant in the room, that is a piece of high grade construction equipment by itself. I mearly talk about these points if only because I find it fun to think about.
Also side note some of the new pokemon made the food issues even less of one. the food is the least of your problems if you have pokemon.
@@volcaronite the slugma-powered house shows exactly what you are talking about. I suggest taking a look (they have it heat the house, heats the stove and the tubs and stuff). it even shows the spider pokemong giving a old lady the silk she needs to sew
wait this comment and replies are actually thought out and not attacking the person saying them?? this must be some sort of record or something for most respectful youtube comment/replies
I think the primary challenge to your hypothetical world is that it assumes no events in which people questioned the sustainability of relying on Pokémon for everything. What if bandits knock out the Pokémon keeping cities afloat? The world being similar to ours suggests that either Pokémon were not always available to help while these technologies were being invented, or that some events occurred that made them realize they needed to be less reliant on the magical creatures around them.
I think this isn’t just a Pokémon problem, but a problem with the entire urban fantasy genre. Unless it does one of two explanations: the magic is hidden from most of society, like in Harry Potter, or the magic suddenly comes into existence, or did exist in medieval times, was lost, and then came back. There’s quite a few works in this genre, some more illogical than others.
This genre is made to be more accessible, since modern society is more relatable than a Medieval one, so ironically urban fantasy feels more realistic if you don’t think about things too hard.
I guess people take our technology for granted, and don’t realize how it came to be in the first place.
Thank you so much for watching 😊
To your point: absolutely! Obviously, the modern fantasy, or urban fantasy, is not a genre exclusively occupied by the Pokémon games. I know there are some games in the Final Fantasy series that live here, for example.
I chose to focus Pokémon for a number of reasons: timeliness and my own affection were, of course, among them. But, another reason is this: because it's got such powerful and accessible magic and, yet, the world remains the same, Pokémon might be the most egregiously incoherent world of the genre. I won't say that definitively, since I definitely haven't played every urban fantasy game ever, but it's still a powerful example.
The way some series get around this problem is thought what I might describe as "magic through science." That is, the series' fantastical elements are all justified in-universe through fictional scientific advancement. Bioshock comes to mind as a game of this variety, though most superhero movies also fall into this camp. This sidestep has problems, too, but it ends up with a similar effect to the one you described about the force of magic itself ebbing and flowing: a world with magic, designed by a people without it.
Thank you again for taking a chance on a video essay with a two-digit view count from little old me!
@@volcaronite Thanks for the feedback! Here are just some random thoughts I had.
I guess the “technology so advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic” trope can help explain the discrepancy between magic and technology, by saying that they are the same. This wouldn’t work for Pokémon, as if Pokémon were all technologically based, then it would be called Digimon.
A part of me wonders if this issue of the incompatibility between science and magic is something most writers are even aware of, or even care about. Sure, George RR Martian probably did, but I think the main reason for fantasy typically being in a Medieval setting is because back in Medieval times, people believed in the supernatural, so the worldview of the population doesn’t need to change much with the existence of actual supernatural things. And it calls back to legends made during medieval times that involved things like dragons. And the supernatural being hidden can be used to have your protagonist be just as unfamiliar with the supernatural as the audience, making exposition dumps make more sense. I guess it depends on the author.
One explanation for why the world in Pokémon is similar to our own despite the existence of magical animals is because, well, they’re animals. You still gotta take care of them, feed them, etc. The games make it look easy, but that could just be gameplay and story segregation, as Pokémon is a rpg, not a pet simulator. And most trainers you fight only have one or two Pokémon, despite being able to have 6. Also, it’s also implied that Pokémon being more easily tamable is a recent thing; most animals in real life aren’t tamable, after all. Granted, raising animals is a lot easier than creating fire out of thin air, so it’s not really that good of an explanation. And plenty of Pokémon based on easy to raise animals have useful abilities. Eevee and it’s evolutions represent half of all the types, and is a friendly, easily raisable dog/cat/rabbit thing. So this isn’t a foolproof explanation.
Pokémon is also quite a cheery and optimistic franchise, even with all the evil teams running around. Especially when compared to Game of thrones. So it’s overly optimistic view of the world may have affected its world building.
Interestingly, a light novel made by the original writer for the Pokémon anime mentions that Pokémon just popped into existence, well after society industrialized. Real animals did exist, but went extinct due to Pokémon, besides humans. This explains some of the issues in the video, but raises more questions than it answers. Like, why did Pokémon just suddenly appear? Why do they superficially resemble real-world animals? What are fossil Pokémon then? How can mew be the ancestor of all Pokémon if Pokémon just appeared out of thin air? I can see why this concept is retconned in current lore.
I guess Pokémon is a fundamentally flawed franchise, and is best enjoyed by not thinking about it too much. Although, I guess I’d rather have a creative new idea, rather than another fantasy rpg, even if one make more logical sense than the other. I guess you could do what you conceptualized, but good luck putting that on a gameboy.
This is why I think the setting of Fate/Stay Night Visual Novel is my favorite Urban Fantasy. In that world, during the ancient times physics as we know it simply did not exists and everything was very dependent on the mystics like powerful mages and gods. Than, due to some events, gods were gradually weakening, the art of using magic in more accessible and repeatable way was developed and the world was "rewritten" to work on physics. Moreover, the magic works on "mystery". Understanding magic makes it weaker. With this setup the magic gradually grew weaker and weaker while technology grew straonger and stronger. Magical communities became undercover, because widespread, widely understood magic will not have any mystery left and thus - it would stop working. Magic and widespread undesrstanding are directly at odds of each other with magic being able to function in the modern world purely because of the secrecy.
There are more to that as the mechanisms governing that world are quite complex, but the gist of it is that in that world the set up exists because magic grows weaker and eventually disappears if the understanding of it is too much widespread among the poppulation.
maybe is be because in Japan's history industrialization came directly from the west, it just appeared suddenly, and they adopted it to a point were its ubicuous and utopic in the colective subconcious
I think its explicitly stated by multiple characters throughout the series that "Pokemon are not to be used as tools". Not to say we dont see pokemon using their abilities to make life more conviniant for humans, but I do think this is why we see a world that is self sufficient and more closely mirrors our own, dispite the accesability of such creatures.
Its also worth noting that most wild pokemon are notibly dangerous and hostile, which is the whole reason people are advised to travel with partner pokemon, however not every person partakes in training or battling and may not even possess the skills to do so. This could probably explain why we don't see everyone in possession of a teleporting pokemon, which is actually a suprisingly small handful of pokemon in the first place.
Hey, thanks for watching and commenting! It really means a lot to me :)
I think the single biggest flaw with this video was my overestimation of the power of teleportation in the world. I talked about this in several other comments, but teleportation is not the fix-all that I made it out to be in the video. You correctly point that out, and I just want to acknowledge that.
As for the fact that "Pokémon are not to be used as tools"...why not? I mean, what is the in-universe answer to this question? And I mean the answer for why they shouldn't be tools, not why they shouldn't be abused as tools. I think that there's a lot of room for the responsible use of domesticated Pokémon that the world simply ignores, and that leaves huge problems for the history of the world and how magic was used by the first people who domesticated Pokémon. If Pokémon domestication is a recent phenomenon, then how did the rest of the technology develop in the first place. If it's not, then why aren't Pokémon used as beasts of burden?
Thank you again for watching the video. I hope you were able to enjoy it despite its many flaws :)
@@volcaronite Thanks for the responce! I think the "pokemon are not tools" quote might have been less about not using them at all and more about not abusing them. I can recall multiple situations where mons were used as "beasts of burden" such as an electric generator powered by pikachus in the anime. In the games we see multiple instances of fighting types being used to build and move heavy loads, rock types being used to mine ore etc.
I think the world u envisioned is already there in a way, just not taken to the extreme. Its a world that more or less chooses to live along side pokemon rather then using them to elevate themselves. We see this in places like Fortree City in Hoenn which is literally built in the forest canopys.
In the end I think the world mirroring our own is what gives it its charm and makes it more relatable to us, especially due to the fact that the regions of the pokemon world are literal equalivants to our real world countries.
Agreed. I think a common mistake people make when judging the pokemon world is assuming that the main character is an average person. However, game explicitly states in essentially every level of the world building that you are player as an incredible super prodigy, capable of befriending and commanding any pokemon. The reason why you run across so many people who just have a handful of pathetic pokemon of the same species is because they just don't have the knack for pokemon training that you do.
True. Game mechanics make it look like it's easy to train pokemon. But far from everyone is a pokemon trainer. Though I would love to come home and show my family the wailord that's going to live with us from now on.
@@volcaroniteI'd love to see the vid you mentioned for pokemon north and south,
Hissuian Snow is canon to Legends Arceus. The Implication of that is merely 10 years before the game they didn't have Pokeballs, and the only reason they have them is because of some time and space shenanigans that caused plans from the future to become available. It would seem the reason why modern technology exists is that the ability to tame Pokémon at Scale didn't exist until after the industrial revolution had started in some places.
Also the integration of the Pokeball occurred at different rates. Draden stated in Black and White that when he was a kid, Unova didn't have Pokeballs at all and any domestication of Pokemon required the same methods that we see in our world and Draden is in early 60s so in what would have been the equivalent of the 1950s in our world didn't have a reliable way to capture and train Pokemon in a way that didn't require a large amount of time and resources, meaning that there would be there would be more technologically advanced countries in the world by necessity as they couldn't rely on Pokemon.
@@declanmckenna6854 Legends Arceus may have retconed this but in the original game canon Pokeballs were only created in the 20th century. The discovery that started their development happened in 1925.
So add time for development and distribution.
Magic is not anti-technology, magic does not make technology stagnate, magic *is* technology, and therefore people use the technology they have, and only pursue new solutions for problems they do not already have solutions for.
It is just like how humans on earth do not bother with better solutions unless they have to.
there actually is a very strange and meta reason why the tech of the pokemon world dosnt match the existence of pokemon. you see in the 1990s aka the first 2 generations pokemon had a very different continuity, one where the setting was straight up just earth with an identical history to our own up until the 19hundreds where random species of pokemon started appearing out of nowhere replacing various animals although pokemon was retconed in 2002 to be a non-earth planet with it's own history.
But how does this mesh with the fossil pokemon? They had to have existed long enough ago to be fossilized, right?
@@SurrealKeenan I don't think that much thought was put into it, but the exact script talks about how normal animals started to disappear from the world and being replaced by pokemon, it could simply be that the fossil pokemon were cases of prehistoric animals becoming pokemon if you accept the theory that the reason why animals disappear around the same time pokemon appear is because the animals were evolving into pokemon
Granted the fossil explanation is a theory but it's pretty much impossible to find a work of fiction that doesn't have at least 1 or 2 contradictions
Ie in the Kalos games an npc tells you he's from a region that's not any of the previous regions and gives you an item called the strange souvenir and tells you that item comes from his home region and that his regions champion is something else
In the Alola games it's stated the strange souvenir originated from Alola
Problem of course is that Alola has no pokemon league or champion at the begining of the game as the player is alolas first ever champion which would contradict what the box in Kalos said, and you can't make a good argument for the Kalos games taking place after the Alola games because professor sycamores assistants appear in the Alola games and are visibility older and literally introduce mega evolution to the region so the Alola games are proven to take place after the Kalos games
Well, we can at least infer what happened to the Indian Elephants.
Canonically, It's very explicitly mentioned that you can't drink the water summoned by water type pokemon. It's described as bitter and doesn't quench thirst. The implication here is - is that it's not 'real' water. It is indeed magic but it's not fully analog to the element it represents. It makes sense in hindsight, otherwise the world would flood several times over over eons. It was a great video regardless. Big subscribe.
I'd also say that the water disappears as easily as it is created, meaning that even if you could drink it without issue, you'll be massively dehydrated when it disappears.
The ideas of world building you mentioned in this video are infinitely more interesting than any cannon pokemon lore. I'm actually interested to explore a world like that in a game or story, compared to the standard boring pokemon worlds. An utopian world where humans live in a strange harmony with nature, utilizing magical creatures to fulfil every need. People riding on strange beasts, giant birds, and the few who can teleport. Giant creature conjure and mold trees and sand and earth into structures. Bugs filling the city with light at night. People heating up with beasts made of living flame, feeding with fruits conjured by giant turtles, drinking water brought by beasts, or by summoned rain.
There is so much to be explored with the powers of pokemon, that is just ignored by the games
I've seen so many video essays that talk about the tropes of the openings for video essays, that I'm starting to expect the joke to go one layer deeper soon.
you seem to be forgetting that in the main series the player is always portrayed as a prodigy and that only the player and big name battlers really evolve their pokemon, the average person only raises like 3 at most and are unevolved so chances are any society that relies on pokemon for supplys or labor would likely be using unevolved pokemon.
in pokemon teleportation can only carry person roughly a single region's length and requires the trainer or pokemon to be familiar with the location.
First off, thank you so much for watching and engaging with the video!
Your comments have stuck in my head for the past couple of days, as I've been wondering why your very legitimate points missed my attention while researching this video. So, let me take a swing at addressing them (and I'll be answering both of your comments here):
-I actually didn't know that the Pokémon world had ever been considered to be a low fantasy rendition of our world, never mind that it had been retconned out. In the asterisk towards the beginning of Chapter 1, I briefly mentioned an interview that Junichi Masuda, one of the primary creators of the Pokémon games, gave with Game Informer back in 2012. In it, he explicitly states that the designers of the games consider the Pokémon world to be wholly separate from the real world.
One of the greater failures of this video (along with its bloated length) is that I didn't properly site my sources for things like this interview. It's one of the many things that I'll have to improve on as I continue creating video essays in this style.
-Another point that I missed out on is the extent to which the magic of the Pokémon world was "game-ified" in the actual main-series games. By that, I mean how the canon of the video games must modify the magical capabilities of certain moves and monsters in order to facilitate the kind of gameplay that is being developed. This is kind of a ludicrous thing to think about, I know. Given that the Pokémon games were the first medium in the Pokémon franchise to be developed, one could very reasonably believe that they represent the purest form of the world; that the way things appear to be in the games is likely the way that things are in this world.
There's truth to this idea, but there's also some holes. For example, I'm reasonably certain that most would consider the turn-based RPG combat system of Pokémon to be only a strategic representation of what Pokémon battles might "actually" look like. Speed checks aren't really looking through multiplicative stat buffs and rolling checks against other Pokémon: they're seeing which Pokémon can get its attack off first, before the other strikes back.
I think the same logic can be applied to the capabilities of the protagonist in comparison to the other trainers around the regions. The protagonist is always going to be the best trainer in the region because that's the way that the game was designed. Most other trainers pose little challenge to the protagonist in order to highlight this growth, as well as to make those official matches against Pokémon League employees feel more impactful to players. The protagonist is always going to catch the legendary Pokémon because that's the way the story was paced. The player character isn't doing anything different than anyone else; Pokémarts across all regions sell Ultra Balls, and every Shroomish and Kricketune can learn a sleep move and False Swipe, so there's nothing stopping others from gathering the tools to take on the legendary beasts of the regions. It's all about the way that the stories of these games are written to revolve around the protagonist in order to give the player a fun, memorable experience.
I'm not going to say that this is the right answer, or that there aren't problems with this answer at all. But, to me, it seems that the reason the protagonist seems so gifted is so that the stories of the games feel almost as if they were destined to revolve around them.
-Your comment about teleportation is the hardest for me to justify. Indeed, I still don't really have a great answer for it. The best I can come up with are half-arguments about the inconsistency of the sizes of regions and the limitations of the games preventing cross-regional teleportation. How far away are the Sevii Islands from mainland Kanto? How big is Sinnoh? How do secret-base warp panels work? Why don't Pokéballs work on lifeforms that aren't Pokémon?
But, as is certainly obvious, these questions are mostly distractions from the fact that yes, teleportation has only ever appeared to move a single person and their immediate belongings across the length of up to two regions. Indeed, this is another limitation that could be explicitly placed onto teleportation in the games (and one I'll consider as I create my own story considering the magic of Pokémon more seriously). Missing this point definitely weakens the arguments of this video as a whole in a not-insignificant way. I'm actually a bit disappointed in myself for missing this, but I do thank you for bringing it to my attention. Hopefully, I'll be able to do more thorough research for future projects.
Once again, thank you for watching the video. I hope you were able to enjoy it despite it's problems. And thank you again for engaging with me and giving me the opportunity to respond with a comment almost as rambling as the original video!
Hey, thanks so much for watching and commenting! Let me see if I can't address your points.
1) I'll partly accept this, but enough people are capable enough of capturing and training Pokémon that it seems like they should have a larger labor role in sustaining the village. They do play a small role, as we can see with the few in the farm and the Mr. Mime at the gate, but they should be doing much more. Their domestication is a big deal, just like domestication of animals was in our world, and the fact that they aren't being utilized is problematic.
2) The time travel aspect of PLA (and Pokémon in general) is something that I have a hard time coming to grips with, simply because of my own personal belief, as a fiction writer, that time travel to the past is fundamentally paradoxical and could never exist. Even suspending my disbelief, though, with time travel being as prevalent and widespread as it is in PLA, it's impossible to believe that there hasn't been some wider spreading of information and mechanics on how catching and training Pokémon works. This is another instance of the implications of powerful magic not being considered in the worldbuilding.
3) Something I left out of the video that I'm beginning to regret is the discussion on what a Pokéball even is. I wrote about it in another comment, but I came to the conclusion that, due to it's mostly unchanged depiction in PLA, a game that takes place some hundreds of years ago, the Pokéball has to be magically powered. It couldn't do everything it needs to do with the simple mechanics of the world in PLA without magic. I actually never entertained the idea that it was the Pokémon themselves that could shrink and live inside the Pokéballs; why would they do that willingly? But maybe the magic of the Pokéball is one of comfort and convenience, and the process of 'capturing' a Pokémon is simply convincing it to stay? I don't know, I'll have to think about it some more. Thanks for bringing it up. Where did that information come from?
Counter point: in the games, teleportation can only take you to the last pokemon center visited.
Also with pokemon being as intelligent, or more than people, they could just refuse to do things and what is the person going to do about it? Hit the pokemon? As you pointed out, these are creatures with borderline apocalyptic potential.
So, at some point, people realized this potential for failure of the entire system, and invented technology as a backup, and eventually it was adopted as the mainstream.
Also we don't know what the limitations of teleport would be. Sabrina's father in the anime only managed to get Ash out of the Gym. He couldn't take him to Lavender town to get a ghost pokemon, he had to walk. He is a fairly powerful psychic. Though not on Sabrina's level. How much stronger is an Abra? Probably not that much if it is at all. Evolving them takes time and effort. Not everyone can, or will.
I watch a lot of Pokémon videos and this deep cultural analysis of mankind in a darn Pokémon video is way ahead of what it even needs to be or almost all of the time is. Super dope
Funnily enough, "pokemon were shoehorned into the real world" was the initial canon, according to channels like Did You Know Gaming that went into early Japanese material. They just started being discovered in the world. Of course, that didn't stick.
After watching your TOTK video, it's clear that your videos, while there aren't many, are EXCEPTIONALLY detailed and well produced. Definitely gonna stay tuned for future content.
Great points to be made! Very interesting & educational video. Also, wow, 'ancient' WOMBO Arts.
one thing to add to the definition of pokemon, is that they must be able to shrink when a pokeball is thrown at them 😭
just saw that someone else commented this, never mind lol
i listen to a lot of video essays while playing video games or drawing, but i spent most of this video glued to the screen with my game paused. you definitely deserve more views, cant wait to see you grow in the future
Thank you
My theory is that the ability to tame every Pokémon via Poke Balls is a recent development, less than 300 years old. Before that, Pokémon were dangerous creatures that humans largely feared. Only a few Pokémon partnered with humans on their own, such as the ones based off of domesticated animals like Growlithe, Gogoat and Ponyta or "magically created" ones, like Golurk, Sigilyph and Baltoy.
Perchance technology could still exist in a magical world as an enhancement of magic itself?
Heck, what if the two being considered distinct at all was considered Disallowed for some fantasy stories?
I actually kind of love that idea - the idea that technology and magic are actually the same thing? I have no idea how one might incorporate that idea into a story, but the idea of tech being used to enhance magic itself, as opposed to animals and humans in our world, is an interesting one. The tech would still be radically different from the way it appears in both our world and the Pokémon world, so that fantasy world would still feel quite fantastical. But it's something I'll think about as I continue to write fiction.
@@volcaronite If you view magic and technology as both products of science, it becomes easier to incorporate. In today's world we conflate science with technology, but they are not the same thing at all. Science is defined as "the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained." Science is strictly scholarly and academic in nature. Technology is industrial application of knowledge. A farmer using a tractor-mounted harvester to collect crops is not using science, they are using technology created by industry.
The use of magic can be viewed in the same dynamic. No matter how complex, powerful, or unwieldy the magic of the world is, it is part of the world. For that world -even if it didn't exist but suddenly does- magic is as natural a force as electromagnetism, gravity, thermodynamics and quantum physics. All are unseen, powerful forces that shape our world and with the right circumstances could be immensely destructive. They are also impossible for man to manipulate consciously. These forces power our bodies but we can't stop our toes from feeling cold because we can't consciously control our internal thermodynamic forces. But we can make socks!
A few fantasy worlds play on this by claiming that magic is a 'life-force' flowing through all things, and through a 'systematic study of the structure and behavior of the magical 'life-force' through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained' a select few can manipulate this life force. All fantasies treat magic as a form of energy or force, to power things and perform work.
When I turn on a light, I am using a technological infrastructure designed to manipulate electromagnetic forces to manipulate thermodynamic forces to make metal glow. When a wizard uses a fire spell to light a torch, he is using a magical ritual designed to manipulate magical energy to manipulate thermodynamic forces to make cloth combust through chemical forces to produce light. Magic IS technology and the spells ARE the tech.
At the quantum level, physicists in OUR WORLD, the REAL WORLD, have observed short range teleportation of particles and particles existing in multiple places simultaneously. (quantum superpositioning)They have observed particles going through barriers without stopping, just phasing through the material. (Quantum tunneling) Both of these properties are used to operate computers today. Teleportation IS REAL, we just haven't figured out how to manipulate quantum forces properly to teleport anything larger than a few subatomic particles.But our society is utilizing subatomic teleportation right now, and we are clever. One day, we will be able to manipulate atomic teleportation, then molecular, then macro. We just have to refuse to stop trying.
TL;DR: Science is the study of things and magic is a thing to study. What we call technology is using matter to manipulate matter and energy. What we call magic is using energy to manipulate matter and energy. They are different disciplines of the same system. A urban magical world would have iSpells and Android talismans to protect your smartphone screen from cracking.
The one leniency that I want to give the world building is on the teleportation basis. The main teleporters I think of are abra and ralts, both of which are extremely timid pokemon, to the point where abra are notorious for being extremely difficult to catch in-game as they'll use teleport immediately, so I believe domestication efforts of them would be difficult when your main tools are snares, group tactics, and other pokemon (you could certainly have an arena trap, shadow tag, or mean look to keep them in place, but you'd need that to be maintained across the entire domestication process
Legends Arceus also suggests many of these pokemon are initially aggressive and thus it could be dangerous to try and domesticate the creatures unaided.
Having said that, I would basically see technology progressing either as normal, or with the explicit intent of domesticating pokemon up until the pokeball is created. Which then means that I wouldn't be expecting things to progress much further than feudal japan, and thus likely medieval times worldwide. If we got to the point of the modern pokeball rather than the apricorn pokeball, well then I can see technology progressing for the sake of itself, but I don't know how the tech tree would progress from Legends to the mainline titles
18:16 You actually make a good point about how it's easier to worldbuild magic in a medieval fantasy setting. While some consider it overused, I really like medieval fantasy, especially the costuming and weaponry of the late medieval and early renaissance periods, though I don't often see that explored in most currently popular fantasy settings. I'm working on a fantasy comic set at the end of the medieval period (14th and 15th centuries) that's inspired by 80's rpgs and explores the sudden appearance of magic and alchemy on a low tech, medieval world. In my world, magic was uncommon until 50 years prior to the story, when the demon king's defeat suddenly made it accessible to everyone. Now, people are starting to take advantage of stuff like indoor plumbing, improved health care, abundant food and faster travel to trade with nearby kingdoms in order to become extremely wealthy. However, they are also creating new weapons that use magic, biological diseases and deadly chimeras that threaten to plunge the world into darkness once more.
I loved this video, and I really want to hear more about your more realistic pokemon setting! It sounds truly magical!
I think your analysis on the purpose of technology is flawed in that it assumes that people who live without technology in nature don't have reason to improve their lives. Technology was invented and continues to be improved upon because people aren't satisfied with dying because of the circumstances of their environment. People invented medicine so they'd stop dying of diseases. They invented food preservation tech to make their excess food last longer into their famine times. They invented shelter to prevent death by exposure.
Honestly, it's only fairly recently that tech has been advancing specifically to make the lives of rich people easier and even still it doesn't outweigh the amount of tech that comes out to extend human life
This was really fun to listen to :) I’d love to see future pokemon games focus on some of the subjects you hit on in this video
I have to disagree with you for two reasons, one lore based, and one on a more meta-level.
In terms of lore, we know that Pokéballs weren't always a thing. Depending on the region they were as little as less than a century old.
The bigger issue in my opinion is that what we see from the Pokémon world isn't neutral, it's the perspective of a young prodigy who cares way too much about battling. When NPCs in Legends Arceus fear Pokémon, when NPCs have trouble taming and domesticating Pokémon, when NPCs claim that the protagonist is "special" - this is worldbuilding too! But all we ever see is the perspective of a prodigy who has an innate ability to bond with Pokémon unlike anyone else, who is not burdened, like an NPC, with keeping six pet-friends entertained at the same time.
To relate this back to your video: Many humans simply can't utilize the powers of Pokémon to teleport, to build, to survive, etc. the same way the player can. An additional bit of lore is also the fact that most humans can't reward Pokémon. What do they have from cooperating with humans (that aren't the protagonist)? In the world of Pokémon, humans rely on Pokémon for food, transportation, and power. But Pokémon never needed humans. Those animals that humans could domesticate (because yes, even real life animals aren't always domesticable) benefitted from this by getting better, more, and more consistent food, by getting shelter, etc.
One way I can think about the Pokemon world working is if the technology required to create pokeballs is complicated enough to necessitate technological advancement.
And of course that the more fantastical pokemon require pokeballs to domesticate unlike the ones that are similar to real animals.
Another solution would be that the fire or water or other elements used by pokemon are distinct from natural elements, in that for example it isn't real water/fire and it dissipates shortly after an attack and lacks the same properties of real fire/water. Like in Skyrim where fire magic doesn't actually spread or do the damage that one would expect from real fire.
One thing is for sure though, pokeballs should be far far more expensive for good world-building.
Like imagine a pokemon setting where you really have to choose which pokemon to catch and can't just spam pokeballs due to the cost.
A pokemon world where even one regular pokeball is valuable.
This would then legitimize why its so hard to be a pokemon master or the business model of Team Rocket or why it really isn't that easy to catch certain pokemon.
long comment incoming:
But an easy way around magic vs technology could be that much like the real world humans developed alongside pokemon before they co-existed- we kind of see that happening in Husui snow a spin off series following a man named Alex who works in medicine and how he basically developed the known medics hippocratic oath of treating indiscriminately when people of Jubilife village would keep to themselves and let pokemon essentially die
Legends arceus also explores a somewhat timeline of when pokemon became part of the pokemon world- like gen 4 being based of an actual place, legends the same but different place is the same and even shares a general timeline alongside it's real life counterpart (not the best for this, but I seen a video detailing the time) and concluded that it's been less than 100 or so years since the pokemon and humans began work together (Abra the world building destroyer even plays a role in Husui snow as being one of the ones to join near the end + with it's teleportation makes it harder to catch plus it's somewhat rare status means it doesn't completely destroy world building as only the skilled owns one in the beginning of societal development)
And another answer as to why the modern pokemon worlds have modern amenities could easily be explained as people taking inspiration from pokemon to craft their own transportation to stay somewhat self sufficient and or not use pokemon more than they have to. Pokemon are seen as friends and or pets so some like to spoil and let them live comfortable as seen with Delcatty who is known as the prim pokemon. The rich could've put people to work on technology so their precious insert name here could rest easy despite it's exploitable nature- as all it takes for innovation is the eccentric as if I lived in the pokemon world and had the brains I could've been a commoner and tried hard to innovate to ease pokemons burdens
In conclusion: I love the video and even agree, but there is always an answer for everything. Exploring it in pokemon probably won't happen but it's fun to imagine as I too love world building- And I also have a love-hate relationship with modern pokemon for HM's and friendship mechanics, BDSP lost stakes with the hardest champ for it (I mean it was still hard but RNG is always on my side since my luck IRL sucks xD)
Thanks for watching, and we love a long comment here on this channel xD so forgive me for my long comment response.
I mentioned this in another comment, but definitely think I overestimated the power of teleportation in the Pokémon world while constructing the arguments for this video. Teleportation has never been shown to span anything more than a small surrounding area the length of a region, and Pokémon capable of teleportation are notoriously tricky to capture; even in the mainline games, the mechanics of the move Teleport make them a bit tricky to capture. My misunderstanding of teleportation was, probably, a fundamental mistake from the video, which you've correctly pointed out.
As for people using Pokémon as inspiration for technologies: I'm not sure. I think it's certainly possible in some cases. People can see a Rolycoly burning some strange black rock and sliding around without legs, and so may be able to find that similar black rock and realize the invention of the wheel. That does conflict with the real world pretty substantially, since most human invention took place very slowly over the course of two hundred thousand years. But nature works very differently in the Pokémon world, so it's possible that the modern human creature has existed for far less time in the Pokémon world; maybe as little as a few thousand years, given the oldest age of human-created artifacts we se in the games. They would've diverged not from apes, since typical apes probably don't exist, but from near-neighbor Pokémon. Pokémon could've acted as inspirational catalysts to fuel a very early industrial revolution, rocketing humanity up the tech tree. In fact, this could also be why there's so few people in the Pokémon world; they've just not been around that long. In a certain light, this all makes a lot of sense.
But the idea that humans would choose not to use the useful capabilities of Pokémon simply because they're too intelligent and friendly is fundamentally inconsistent with human nature. Humans, after all, did capture and domesticate Pokémon for a long time before modern technologies existed; Pokémon Legends Arceus takes place 500 years ago, and that society has at least a few people who can domesticate Pokémon. And humans are, as I talked about in the video, almost universally incapable of exerting more long-term energy than is minimally required. With Pokémon that can instantly summon and create things like water and energy, it seems like humans would be hard-pressed to go out of their way to replace these sources. And I think it's this dichotomy between the real world and the Pokémon world that struck me enough to go about making this video.
I think that, carefully considered, there definitely is a way to keep the friendly and positive world of exploitative intact (that is, not abusing, inhumanely farming, or otherwise exploiting Pokémon) while keeping the real power of Pokémon in mind. If Pokémon are willing and happy to battle each other then, certainly, they'd be just as happy to work with their trainers in other venues.
I'm drawn to the Oreburgh Mine in Sinnoh as an example here; people are working as coal miners, and their personal Pokémon help out. They work hard, together, as equals. Or in Pokémon Ranger, where you go through the mission in the Fall City sewers to clear out the contaminated water. You work together, with local Pokémon, to clean the sewers and purify the water. It seems to me like this kind of relationship would be a natural, almost universal staple of the world, and would have from the very beginning of domestication.
Now, to be sure, all of this is hugely speculative. I'm not an expert on, well, anything, really. So, it's very likely that I'm misunderstanding other aspects of both the Pokémon world and your response here, so I do apologize for that. But I'm still trying very hard to workshop these ideas as I work on my North & South follow-up project, so I wholeheartedly welcome any critique or ideas.
Thank you again for watching and enjoying the video :D
Excellent video. Not sure how much I agree with all of your points, but they're interesting to think about either way.
Thanks for watching and I'm so glad you enjoyed it!
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic! I'll be doing a bit of follow-up to this video as a part of my North & South project, so any criticism would be welcome! My arguments are far from perfect, to be sure, so anything you can provide would be greatly appreciated 😊
Thank you for this video, while I have some points that lead me to disagree I never would have thought this deeply on the pokemon worlds development if not for this video. And since some of my points are already covered by others comments, I will simply thank you once more for helping me to think more on something I love.
In a game setting, the best examples of fantasy/magic combining with technology are (in MY opinion):
Arc the Lad 1, 2, 3 and Twilight of the Spirits. Especially #4; magic is exclusive to animals/monsters/Deimos, while special attacks are exclusive to humans. BUT they both require Spirit Stones - the mineral stones of nature - as fuel. The game(s) even allude to the fact that both societies would collapse without them, and is one of several points of major conflict.
If this interests you, I highly recommend trying these games. Or at least the 4th game, as it doesn't require you to have played the earlier 3 - although doing so makes the experience that more fulfilling!
Honorable mentions:
- The Horizon games by Guerrilla Games
I loved this video!!. I would also love to see your pokémon north and south story!
Commenting prior to actually watching the video to point out how based your choice in pokemon avatar is. Volcarona is one of my favorites!
Alright time to listen to this on my drive to work
Honestly thought you were going to go over the challenge that I usually run into: Why would people be ok with pokemon battling? It's technically animal cruelty. It's something that got brought up in black and white, but was basically glossed over because the writers realized they couldn't answer it favorably for the pokemon franchise.
As for teleportation, I think you're over-estimating how effectively it can be controlled. Without human guidance, teleportation greater than short distances (within sight) is generally pretty random. With human guidance, teleportation can only be conducted to places that both the pokemon and trainer have traveled to themselves. Meaning transportation is still neccessary for those that don't have access to a limited pool of psychic types that can only really transport to one place each. Basically, it's less "teleport" and more "Mark/Recall" which is actually still quite useful.
That being said, flying types still raise similar issues. Especially given pokeball technology can allow people to minimize items as well. Effectively meaning anyone with a backpack and a pidgeyotto can ferry an industrial level of goods from one location to another in pretty quick times.
i just discovered your channel and honest to god question before even watching any of your videos or even finishing this one
would mega volcarona even be good? it takes 50% from stealth rock
just saying
also 150th subscriber i think
I just stumbled across this video and it raises some really interesting and good points, though now it's making me think in over drive about a lot of things and I do have some counter-points for you to consider- given this is such a long video I'm trying to write down my thoughts in response as I have them, so forgive me if this comment is disjointed!
The first thing that really stood out to me was the discussion about why we have technology in the real world as we do. I don't know anything about your background in learning about science and technology and stuff, but from my own understandings I think attributing even the majority of technological advancement to the rich wanting things easier maybe comes at it from the wrong angle. I actually thought you'd say 'war' or 'conflict' or something like that, which I think would be closer to the truth. But in general I think it's more that rich people take advantage of the advancements of people to make their lives easier and increase their power. New technologies that could take things even further have been worked on but not gone anywhere because the rich and/or powerful couldn't profit from them, and with those people in control of the market, developments coming from the "lower classes" struggle to gain traction due to lack of funding. And when you consider that there seems to be an ongoing pattern of evil organizations/corporations being dismantled by children (the player), who as you mention becomes the most powerful trainer in the region, then at least then it would seem like that choke hold on the markets might not be as strong.
(And as a side note, people absolutely do innovate for the hell of it- just something to think on, but it's much the same for some people as it is for gamers that spend time working out niche strategies for a game they enjoy. There's not a pressing need to dig into specific data and run numbers to know exactly how to do the perfect sequence of actions to finish a run 3 seconds faster, but people do it anyways. Just 'cause, tbh. It's enriching, it's satisfying, and it gives a sense of fulfillment. That happens with real world stuff too.)
From there when it comes to the argument of the choice of magic over technology, I don't think you're wrong on that, but I do think there's something you overlooked. I think it comes down to the thing you mentioned where everything is based around Pokemon battling. Pokemon need healing, rest, can get sick, and while it's not a mechanic you really deal with explicitly in the games, they presumably need to eat and get other stuff to stay alive. Without all of that, Pokemon battling as it is couldn't ever happen, and a lot of the technology is geared towards that, something which a lot of the Pokemon themselves couldn't really do on the large scale it happens on. Additionally, being able to use Pokemon for any purpose that technology would normally be used for assumes that humans and Pokemon coexist perfectly all the time. As we see in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, until the player comes along, a lot of people have barely connected with Pokemon at all, something which only truly even happens once they have the technology- the Pokeball- to control them. Which brings me to another point; as you mentioned, the majority of people can't use a form of magic, and we know that people have been really scared of them in the past. Without doing a heap of digging for specific examples, from memory a lot of technology development either increases the human's control over Pokemon, or gives them some kind of benefit that allows them to stand on more equal ground.
When it comes to the use of Pokemon and their abilities for labor- it seems to me like you missed a lot of examples where they *are* participating in different fields. We've seen Pokemon in, at least, mining, construction, and transportation. But the extent to which Pokemon could fill those roles in society depends on a lot of assumptions I don't think we can fully confirm. Rarity of different species would determine the access to different abilities, and from the NPCs of the world, we can work out that the player is an exception when it comes to both finding and catching rare Pokemon, as well as training them. I'll come back to this a bit further down, but in a more realistic light, characters in-universe don't have the same resources the player has to do these things. The player's character doesn't have stamina when exploring, doesn't need to sleep or rest or eat, is able to look up the specific data for how to get specific Pokemon, and we have all the story beats line up so we can catch various Pokemon gods... because. So the access to the species that are the strongest and have the specific abilities is very limited, overall. And that's without once again addressing that Pokemon, in universe, are still living beings who only have so much energy themselves- PP is a representation of this, moves can't just be used an unlimited amount of times without rest. And they would have to want to do the work anyways, because with the really powerful ones it'd be hard to force them. So once you narrow it down, I question if there would be enough trainers, able to catch and train enough powerful Pokemon, with enough of the right moves, that are willing to co-operate, for there to be enough of them all up that between all of them could consistently replace all the technology while each one still gets enough rest.
I think maybe the most difficult thing in an essay like this is while you can do all kinds of analysis and breaking down of the in-universe content, there's a space where it gets weird when you look at it without also looking at the broader meta context and real life stuff going on. For all that I've been surrounded by Pokemon in different forms since I was born, there are so many finer details of the deeper world building that I'm not familiar with- so I can't really comment on that side of it, I think some other commenters maybe have that better covered than me. But one thing I can note is what you said about how it's built as a game first and foremost, and maybe it's the game dev/designer side of me, but I feel like looking at all of the design choices without accounting for the design side of it might make it harder to get a lock onto the intentions or reasons behind some of the things you talked about.
One thing I did want to make note of specifically in regards to this was the number of people/size of the towns and stuff. Playing the games over time as they pushed them further, the 'people' thing always stood out to me- and now I understand it a bit deeper, as well. Looking at the games chronologically, you can sort of tell that they're trying to find ways to get the impression of there being way more people, more and more as time goes on. In the earlier games this was really hard because of the technical limitations they were working within- having larger towns and cities, having more NPCs, is something that can be technically difficult to achieve in the format they're using, and also really time consuming. There's... a lot that could be said for how they manage performance and stuff, but it does seem to me that they are trying to push the idea of a more densely populated world, but falling short on that front.
When it comes to the main character being a kid, that could also be more attributed to the target audience than narrative significance- even though that trips over itself once you have adults playing the game, the thing is that it's often typical for player characters, or otherwise protagonists, to be made to match their target audience in some way, to the point where that can even take precedence over the plot-holes it makes. Especially when it comes to kids' media, it's made to be relatable to them, but kids don't often want to be treated like "kids" in their escape fantasies, so the whole thing is a built in contradiction that generally has to be kind of solved by not addressing it. Otherwise you break the fantasy.
Okay woah, so there's definitely more I could have added to this, but I'm just realising it's 1.30 AM where I am and that might be my signal to call it. This ended up much longer than I thought it would, and I hope it doesn't come off as too harsh for all the counter-arguing; I genuinely hope it comes across as a testament to how interesting, deeply planned, and thought provoking your video essay is that I just wrote essentially another essay in response, even if it was maybe largely in disagreement over the specifics 😅Thanks for making this video and sharing your thoughts! I look forward to seeing any future video essays you decide to post!
Hey! Thanks so much for taking a chance on some random internet guy’s 45-minute ramble on the pragmatics of a fictional universe! Sorry for the delayed response, but I can never resist a comment essay xD I’m gonna try to answer you in the same order as you posted, but I do ramble a lot, so we’ll see how long that lasts!
First, I definitely oversimplified a very complex point when I said “technologies were made so rich people had to do less work”. I spent time on examples, but what I really should’ve done is go into explaining this idea better. So, here goes:
When I talk about “technologies” in this video, I’m not just referring to modern technology. Rather, I’m talking about every innovation of humanity. We modern humans have a tendency to associate the word “technology” with modern gadgets: computers, telephones, televisions, cars, things like that. But the class of things that are “modern” has been one that is, definitionally, always changing. I went back and forth on using the word “technology” and “innovation” for the section, but I settled on the former because I was talking about objects, not ideas. There isn’t a great word for the idea of “things that were invented that happened to be tools,” unfortunately, so I settled on the next best thing. I tried to highlight this by describing the (real, as best as historians can tell) development of the ramp as an intentional technology.
The other half of that point is the assertion itself, and I actually think we’re describing the same phenomenon in different ways. Technologies (using the above description) were, almost universally, not created with the intentionality of manifesting a tool to do something easier. Many were, as you state in your side note, made by people for the hell of it; at least, in their first iterations. Some were made accidentally, by people trying to create something else, or someone not trying to create anything at all. It’s the “rich people” - governments, companies, armies, Elon, whoever - that find these innovators, take their base invention, and develop it into something useful. I love the plane as an example of this; it was created as a passion project for the sake of it, and governments around the world saw its potential. So, they poured money into developing it as an instrument of war, making the killing of people easier. Then, over time, it continued to develop into an object for transportation of goods and people. You might say that the plane’s development was one fueled by war, and I’d call it “rich people.” We’re describing the same thing. My wording probably wasn’t optimal, and was more intended to be catchy than perfectly descriptive, but I do stand by the idea of it.
Second: you’re pretty much totally in the right here. I mostly overlooked Pokémon rarity and human connection to them. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake, but there's some value in it. After all, the domestication of animals in the real world was no small task. It took generations of dedicated, focused civilizations to domesticate just a few different animals the planet over. But, when it was done, the population of those animals skyrocketed.
Obviously, a wild Miltank is quite the predator to a group of people with nothing but a sack full of Apricorns, but I have to imagine that there were some Pokémon that were at least tameable (is that a word?) before Pokéballs were invented. So, there definitely should’ve been some Pokémon domestication in the world. Otherwise, how did the world get the kinds of technologies that ours has in the first place?
Relatedly, one thing that I didn’t touch on in the video is precisely what a Pokéball is. We basically took it for granted that it was a *checks notes* perfect technological bridge between the real world and cyberspace that losslessly converts Pokémon to energy, can itself be turned into digital information and stored on the internet, and can be summoned from the internet back into a physical object, but also irreparably breaks upon failing to catch a Pokémon and can only hold one Pokémon at a time. We accepted this as technology because it seemed like, for all intents and purposes, the Pokéball was a modern invention. But, as we see in Pokémon Legends: Arceus (PLA), it’s not. We don’t know how long ago PLA takes place, (I incorrectly threw out the number 500 years in another comment, which I’d gathered from a since-corrected Bulbapedia article) but it’s past enough that things like electricity and steam power don’t exist. In our world, that’s at least 200 years. And, yet, the Pokéball exists basically unchanged. It works exactly the same as it does in Sword & Shield, but without any of the surrounding tech. The TL;DR is that the Pokéball, or perhaps the Apricorns from which they are made, have to be magic. Their “invention” was just the discovery of the Apricorns’ property to convert matter into a storable energy. This could’ve happened at any point, which means that the whole process of domesticating animals was skippable in the Pokémon universe; from the discovery of the Apricorn, all Pokémon were within the grasp of humanity. Now, this topic could fill its own 45 minute video essay, but I basically chalk up the “invention” of the Pokéball to mean the invention of a synthetic object that could perfectly replicate the behaviors of the Apricorn. Pokéballs simply have to have predated all applicable tech, making them magic.
Also, though healing is streamlined in Pokémon games (which goes to the “game-ification” of the world, which I’ll get to in a second), many Pokémon are capable of healing themselves, some are capable of healing others, and they’re all living creatures who must have some capacity to heal over time. It’s hard to say where battling came from, since it seems to be a thing that already existed in PLA in spite of how rare Pokémon training is in that world. The tech that surrounds Pokémon battling is all just technology replacing all and only the exact functions of the Pokémon, without advancing it at all. This is, of course, one instance of the major fallacy that this video is made to address; that widespread tech isn’t done just because. We didn’t replace horses with cars until the cars were better than the horses in our world. Pokémon health tech doesn’t do the job better that Pokémon can. Again, this is probably something that’s been game-ified, but it seems that most Pokémon are, through biology or magic or both, able to heal themselves or visit a healer after injuries, and that they are able to be quickly restored to completely healthy. Battling probably was realized when it became clear just how fundamentally easy it is to restore Pokémon to full health; battling, burning, HP, being knocked out, this is basically to Pokémon what exercise is to humans. The restorative tech didn’t improve their ability to heal from this.
For Pokémon and human labor: yeah, I definitely missed some examples here, but I don’t think that impedes my point very much. The fact that the people of the Pokémon world don’t have the game-ified stamina would, if anything, incentivize them to use Pokémon to work for them. We really don’t see any major examples of Pokémon being employed to do work that humans could not. Honestly, the best example I can think of is the Ampharos in the Olivine City lighthouse. The fact that this kind of work - the work that animals do/did in our world that humans cannot - isn’t outsourced to Pokémon is the problem.
I think everything else that you mentioned is pointing to the fact that the world has been “game-ified” or that other adaptations of the world exist without any indication of which is the most accurate, if any are. I don’t really consume any Pokémon content outside of the video games, so there's certainly a lot of potential problems and holes in this argument that I could’ve missed. And, again, with things like the player character’s capabilities, the power of individual Pokémon, and even the population of the world, I just did the best I could interpreting the games and trying to translate those mechanics and features into a world. I’ll be the first to admit that I did not do this particularly well, and you bring up a handful of those examples here. As I work on the North & South follow-up project for later this spring (hopefully, there's a couple other projects I need to finish before it), it’s comments like yours that will inform further research into how the Pokémon world should be interpreted.
And, finally, thank you again for taking the time to write all this out after my video. I love a good comment essay, even one that’s mostly focused on criticism, and I feel so fortunate and flattered whenever I see one. I’ll confess that, no matter how much of a comment is systematically disassembling the arguments of a video, I always have a big, cheesy grin on my face when I read them. I do hope you enjoyed this video and my response, and that you stick around the channel for whatever comes next.
(And oh, look, it’s almost 2 in the morning here. I guess this is prime time for comment essays xD)
@@volcaronite Agreed the video uses the assumption that Pokemon were always commonly usable & that humanity is a much lesser number than our world when we just don't know that much about the realities of that world. For all we know the Pokemon World is a post apocalyptic world or only seems nice on the surface. Even the games hint there's some sort of darker lore that they don't want to tell us. Perhaps Godmons have people living in fear & require them to follow certain rules & we see a result of what happens when those rules are broken in Alola with the Tapu Village.
A very fresh perspective towards PKMN. I appreciate it!
Personally, I think technology in PKMN runs in parallel to these beasts.. instead of benefitting from them. The world of this franchise is plagued from a lack of creativity, unity, binding and a lack vision for its worldbuilding! Machokes are shown carrying boxes for people that move in to new houses, or Anime Pikachu powering up things with electricity.. but nothing else! PKMN are a replacement for workforce, actions and resources.
There's simply little to no in-game space dedicated to their Technology (that is suspiciously like ours) being completely and utterly dependent on PKMN as a whole! Take Bill's transmuting/teleport machine from Red and Green.. where it just is. No allusion to Abra's being involved or anything even remotely interesting. Their Trains are like ours, period.
Humans in this world are like us, and therefore dumb. In the face of Power and Possibility, they succumb to a TikTok need for fame and Instagram need of Likes and "achievements".. with violence.
All this is just another way to say PKMN isn't all it could be.. and that circles back to gameplay too.
5:26 in other words, the pokemon world is WAY BETTER THAN OURS.
I do think part of it could be how Pokemon has developed over the years too that we've seen this heavier magic shift into raising the stakes.
As you pointed out, we saw a shift in Gen 3 and beyond where the story became about summoning and stopping deities of immense power and while I think Gen 3 does have particular elements that could make that work (Ex: Sootopolians, Dragonoids, Infinity Energy, Sea Mauville) if organized correctly, it's clear Gen 3 made that first big step away from Science Fiction and into Fantasy. Gen 1 and Gen 2 were very much set in a more scientific world than their sequels, with Mew being all Pokemons' ancestor containing all their DNA and learning every move and Mewtwo being an experiment trying to tame nature that went wrong and fought back. Gen 2 you could argue made the first movements towards magic though, or at least towards slight mysticism: Ho-Oh creating the legendary beasts from Pokemon perished in a fire and the mystery behind Unown. While there were magical/mystical elements they were very isolated and those particular Pokemon weren't out destroying their region or world because they were angry or being manipulated by maniacs. They were just kind of there and stories from isolated areas.
Immediately post Gen 3 - in Sinnoh - science fiction and isolated mysticism fell on the wayside completely to literally make way for Magic and Religious Pokegods straight out of the playground of the 90's, where kids made outlandish claims about their video game luck and abilities. Suddenly the likes of Pikablu, Doomsay, Doomsday, and Mewthree were childish one-uping claims made real. People took those ideas and made them the reality of the Pokemon world because they grew up, but never realized how poorly thought out those ideas they had a kid were since they were made up in an instant and only for playground bragging rights. How do we up the stakes from forces of nature? God and Space-time. How do we up God and space-time? Destroy what it created and remake it. How do we up from that? Do the same thing but start region-specific mechanics to cover up the copied story. How do we up that? New mechanic, fully manipulate space-time to transverse different universes and dimensions beyond space-time. How do we up that? New mechanic and make the 90's-fan Doomsday an apocalypse reality. How do we up that? New mechanic, space-time manipulation and turning the imagination of our minds into the actual reality around us.
"How do we up that?" man this sounds a lot like people complaining about dragon ball power creep
@@offandsphere6788I mean there’s nothing particularly wrong with stories that encompass greater regions and aspects but it does tend to lose personal-touch when it does. A murder on your street hits you a lot harder than a murder across the country. One character in Dragon Ball reaching a new stage is very impactful, but also loses speciality when a handful of others follow suit soon after but the story won’t shift away. Before a writer knows it they have to just keep raising the stakes each time because that’s already worked and it’s the easiest thing to do with the smallest amount of effort.
yea, you have some REALLY GOOD points, that wouldnt work as well in pokemon world because of many reasons.
1: Food problems: yes you can grow food on pokemon like tropius, and anime show many diffirent pokemon based food. but that is impossible to sustain in long run, with thousands of people.
2: Pokemons are as smart as and stronger than humans, and Pokemon Legends-Arceus touched that point in two ways: people are afraid of pokemon, and people respect pokemon.
3: pokemons arent, surprisingly, the solution to every problem humanity has. even if we consider many points, pokemon cant create complex buildings. Rock moves like stone edge and rock tomb are primarily used to point that, since stone is primary building material. yes, you can summon a pillar out of nowhere, but you need to build a roof. yes you can chuck a rock out of nowhere, but you need proper stonemason to carve it into usable blocks.
4: Pokemons, unsurprisingly, cant create pure metal out of nowhere. all steel type moves are either A- comes with (Metal name)+(body part) combination that would limit what is allowed, or B: some kind of energy attack using magical energy.
5: Teleportation. even if we stupify as 'all pokemon can teleport', to teleport large objects like entire food of a city, it will require a group of highly specialised teleporters that only trained for teleporting stuff.
6: Teleportation 2. even if we consider all pokemon can teleport, some are worse than others at teleporting.
7: Teleportation real problem. not all pokemon can teleport. only Psychic pokemons, which are one of the two most dangerous types to focus because of their abilities. Psychic pokemons are generally smarter than humans, can lift stuff with just their minds, can see fuckin future, and some of them, yes SOME of them, can teleport.
8: pokemons are sentient beings just like humans, and can build their own civilisations like humans did. do you think a blastoise would like to be your permanent sentient water faucet, or charizard for permanent sentient heater? my answer would be no.
9: some of the pokemon, like Tyranitar, Salamance, and Fearow, are territorial. that means there are groups of elementals that doesnt like others coming near their nesting place. and yes, they can kill.
10: predators. considering wild pokemons act like their real world counterparts because insticts, there are a LOT of pokemon which has one of natural poison as both offense and defence mechanism fire organ that allows them to BREATHE fire which you may know the results, electric organ that would overcook someone, ability to freeze things to death, Literal GHOSTS and over that we have pokemon made out of various rocks, steel and gemstones, psychic pokemons, walking plants, giant bugs that can eat someone, DRAGONS and martial artists that lives and breathes to beat the shit out of each other and seismic tosses each other into orbit.
11: fear against wild: Technology grew because people needed that technology. considering wild pokemons that are as smart as humans are around, PW humans would have even faster technologial growth than our world. first they would discover how to make fire to scare wild pokemons, since no one would fuck with fire pokemons. then, domestication of the prey pokemons would begin, like humans domesticated sheep, dogs and cows, PW humans would domesticate miltanks, tauros, Mareep, Wooloo, and growlithe. then humans learns how to respect and gain respect of more dangrous prey pokemons like Ponytas and Sawsbuck, which leads to development of carts and everyhing moves forward. only thing that pokemon world wouldnt have is guns, since you have sentient flamethrowers, water jets that can cut mountains, electricity that can cook someones insides and stuff.
💯%
agreed!
Bruh this guy just shows up on UA-cam and already doing well.....KEEP GOIN BOI👍
LOVE THE VIDEO, THANKS, when i did the search on youtube, i thought well, its time for someone to have done this thing i always thought of this franchaises, YT has matured enough jajaja, as a young millenial, deconstructing and bring the ultimate consecuences of a setting / world building, without the suspension of disbelief and playing with the TVtropes, was my bread and butter aaaahh, the memories... TIME TO RECONSTRUCT THOU!!! 🤣🤣🤣
I created my Magimon setting as way to explain a lot of oddities in Pokemon.
One thing in pokemon is how the professors talk like pokemon are new even though the pokemon have existed for a long time. I explain this in Magimon by saying that humans are actually new to the world having come from Earth with technology, and so technology is there because it is already normal for humans. Also, the most powerful pokemon are extremely rare, too rare for reliable use everywhere and thus most people need technology while a select few have an alternative.
Somebody else made the point about yhe meta backstory but it's important to think of how Pokémon were designed during the first couple of generations, too. Those vast elemental powers? Actually extremely restricted. While most Pokémon of an elemental type would learn a couple of moves of that type, the majority of a Pojemon's natural moveset was actually Normal-- tackle, bite, scratch, growl, glare. So.e Pokémon learned NO moves of their own associated type-- at least, not naturally.
The technological advancement unique to Pokémon is actually in the technical and hidden machines. It's not in a Pokemon's nature to gerry humans across water, but you teach them Surf through an artificial mechanism and suddenly they've been tamed enough to allow it.
So the world building is actually the other way around. Humans augmented Pokémon. Humans introduced this level of 'magic' to the world through those augmentations, meaning that technology taking advantage of those powers would still be fairly nascent.
This gets muddy as the design philosophy behind the game design shifted, both in worldbuilding and gameplay, but I think 'taming the monsters with human technology' was more the original intent.
I think there’s an interesting idea that pokemon like Alakazam are claimed to have an IQ of 5,000 and that they might want to create technologies and pitch them to humans to help alleviate the burden of their fellow pokemon. Councils of highly intelligent pokemon and human government officials would be common. This wouldn’t necessarily change everything about your world of course, since there are some jobs that pokemom could do infinitely better than machines, but it could allow for some technology. In fact, it might be interesting to have a highly futuristic setting due to the cooperation of humans and the superhumanly intelligent pokemon, something like Solar Punk. The wisest pokemon convincing and assisting humans to develop technology to make everyone’s lives easier, including pokemon, and leveraging the labor pokemon are currently used for. Almost like a labor strike. Maybe that’s what happened in the canon pokemon world?
Yes, technology is generally used and developed for the benefit of the rich and powerful, but it doesn’t have to be in a cooperative and egalitarian society. The smartest pokemon would understand that and could teach (or bargain with) humans for this future.
You left out an important aspect to the definition of Pokémon, although your definition still work. Pokémon shrink. The Pokéballs trigger a Pokémon innate ability to shrink. That's why Pokémon aren't able to be captured after they feint because the become so small that you can't see them. Pokémon don't have to be unconscious to shrink either. They can do it pretty much any time they want to. That's why giant Pokémon can be hiding out in tall grass. What the Pokéball does after is it makes so that when Pokémon shrink they go back into a specific pokeball.
I think Legends: Arceus does a good job at kind of providing at least some level of context to how the world could technologically advance while still being in the presence of magical creatures such as Pokemon. You get taken back to Pokemon equivalent of Meiji era Japan (so like late 19th century) and people are largely still afraid of Pokemon, with many still viewing them as being scary predators to their prey. You kind of touched upon this when talking about technology developing alongside magic based on the availability of magic for average people, and so by that logic people weren't really able to make use of Pokemons capabilities as a technology surrogate until pretty far along in the timeline.
And given that the galactic survey team (many people of which coming from other places) was a lot more familiar and comfortable with Pokemon than the residents of Hisui who had no familiarity, it can be inferred that different regions culturally in their development had domesticated Pokemon at different rates and thus would have different levels of development technologically as a result. This could explain why we have regions like Alola which have a lot of room for wildlife that hasn't been technologically developed, VS a region like Unova where they have highway systems and sprawling cities.
33:39 I don't know why but literally everyone is like the protagonists are 10 years old. 10 years old is the youngest age someone can become a trainer.
exactly
cuz playing as an young adult/teen would’ve been more refreshing than being stuck as an 10 year old for the 100th time
Teleport. You ignore the potential limitations. Teleport might have a limited range and be too tiring to use repeatedly enough to travel long distances.
Really dope and ambitious video you got here! I would just point out that if Hisui is anything like other regions c. 150 years before modern times, humans will have already developed a lot of modern technology due to the lack of pokeballs and the relative danger of feral pokemon. Maybe this just proves your point tho haha
4 Things:
1: I love the ideas you bring up, they are very interesting and most of it makes enough sense that even though I just got here, I'm impatient to hear about pokemon north & south.
2: The city concepts you put forward are fundamentally amazing, fantastical, and I wish they were in the game. But on a game design level, with there needing to be at least eight cities per region to keep up the current formula, it seems like it would be draining to try and have so many spectacularly different cities. Let alone there's a certain point where too much different becomes unrecognizable, and while not bad, the games so far have had a basis in reality, so a sudden shift would basically require a complete reboot. I guess this could be slightly resolved by having a larger development window, or team or whatever, but ignoring that for the sake of this. Instead, I feel that (although the logic may not be sound) there should be *some* fantastical cities each generation, maybe one that especially ties into the plot/namesake of the game, (time gen 9, energy gen 8, alternate universes or Kanto influence gen 7, and so on) and more that resembles ours in a basic way, except yes, more fantastical. Just maybe not a tree city, but a more integrated town, my favorite example being the mystical grove play from gen 8, looked sick as heck, but was so small it was just depressing.
3: Even given teleportation exsisting, I feel that it would just allow for easier transportation between major hubs as, unless they have major breeding programs for every Pokemon, trainers who are invested in making a perfect team would *need* to leave their settlements to go and find new pokemon, train their pokemon, explore just for the heck of it (like hiking). There are many reasons roads may be set up to connect places, so I feel that saying all transportation in this world would disappear is a bit farfetched (pun unintended... at first). As with all evolutions of our world based in technology, old things don't just disappear, they get reused and repackaged in a new way. Horse and buggy wasn't just expelled, it was transformed into the car we know today. You could say that even just farming is done in such a way that it is unalike its roots in anyway all the same.
4: Although not said, an interesting aspect of worldbuilding is the unwritten laws within the games. You can't have more than six pokemon on a team, you can't do many things we deam 'evil,' etc. What if using pokemon in the ways mentioned go against their laws as they deem it unacceptable? I mean we aren't allowed to work our animals to death, and they know they won't *die* from fighting, so its similar (to a degree). But what id forcing labor we are *able* to do on to these living beings is considered an unnecessary punishment of sorts? Hence why you see them in battles, but not at work pretty much anywhere it might be dangerous. I mean they explicitly say in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet that Team Star still has to be punished for making the starmobile, as it was against some rule or another to tamper (or build? I don't remember the phrasing) with pokemon.
So the fix is to have a sparcely populated world slowly become industrial. With that they reach a level of technology that makes it possible to domesticate non normal pokemon.
There is a lack of cars in the regions as you travel by foot. A Pc is relatively new and pokemon centered. Tv and radio are really basic. Trains and ships are for mass transportation only since pokemon are too small. But they are powered buy pokemon energy from pokemon power plants. Taiming and domestication is HARD. Therefore it can not happen on a large scale. That emotionally open children are great with interacting to pokemon is actually realistic. Pokemons are not a subject to any science up to very recently as there is still a high need search for new species. Imagine that only 50 years ago some technology like a pokeball was found or some chemical that made them less aggressive towards humans. Since then a technological revolution has taken place but is still in its early decades.
great video you earned a sub from me and im happy to be apart of your first 50 subs
Not as happy as I am to have you here 😁😁😁
So glad you enjoyed the video, thank you!
What if teleportation was more common like in scenario 1 before some event happened (possibly faked) causing people to be scared of teleportation for a time, which then made societies form like in scenario 2?
The same reason people lose jobs to ai and robots Pokémon lose jobs to machines. Pokemon need breaks, they need food, they get sick, they have to use the bathroom. Your pikachu cant churn out endless electricity like a coal plant. Machamp may carry mountains but it still is a living thing that will get tired.
I can't really agree with making all pokemon inherently prone to bonding with humans. It would make for a far more interesting world if we, like in real life, were not able to tame most species and had to rely on only some of them. The others could be too dangerous, too dumb (or smart), not useful enough or any combination of these traits. The constraints could make for very creative scenarios.
100% agreed
There is the Orre region makes more sense in that well it is a barren desert where even wild pokemon is rare to find (so not using pokemon for everything makes a bit more senes) the region seems to also have a lot more crime (in Pokemon Colosseum... in the sequel Pokemon XD Gale of Darkness the region seems to have cleaned up a lot... can't have pokemon be too dark after all)
Thanks for stopping by the video :)
I must confess that I never played either of the Gamecube Pokémon games, so I'm not familiar with the Orre region but, from an outside perspective, that makes sense to me!
I am absolutely interested in that Pokémon story concept video thing you mentioned
I think the biggest factor here is that up until legends arceus with I think is around the 1850s? pokemon we're completely untamable, and thus humans HAD to use technology, they couldn't use abras to teleport goods cuz they were afraid it was gonna kill them, and it was stated that Japan in this world was on of the first places to somewhat tame pokemon and it spread from there, so let's assume the rest of the world cought on to pokemon taming a few years after that, so around early 1900s. After that, most scientific advancemt would refocus on better taming of pokemon ofc while still making other tech for other stuff, until pokemon taming was perfected. The sociatal focus on pokemon battling instead of using them for more practical stuff is odd. But it definitely does not discredit the invention of cars, or at least carts, as pokemon usige by humans is for the most part an extrimly modern concept. And I mean.... If I saw a 8m water serpent burning villages with its eyes, I'd probably want to avoid it as well, long before the idea of taming it would come across my mind.
25:10 thnx for calling them Yen.
To adress the the Elephant in the Room, yes the Bike is not 1 Million dollar expensive, but no even whit Yen its fare from Cheap.
38:00 and dont forgett Guys, Abra can teleport other Objects. In Gen 2, in the League, a Abra can teleport you alone back to your home City.
Keep up the great reviews! Really enjoyed this.
Your idea is basically solarpunk but with pokemon.
i think the biggest problem with this video is that NO ONE would drink water from squirtle's fucking mouth
Heres a comment for the algorithm. Great essay!
You bring a lot of great points against the existence of technology in the world but the way I see it is that people have more control over pokemon because of technology i.e pokeballs I would imagine controlling wild animals with the power to rip you to shreds wouldn't be feasible without an ability to better control them so I don't find it as hard to believe, as for how they became as advanced pretty quickly, like you said there's pokemon that literally shoot electricity, steel and fire so thinking of technology should've been as hard plus I imagine dams still use water pokemon and power plants use electric pokemon like we've seen with electrodes, yeah some stuff still make no sense like you said but pokemon also don't have infinite energy either
Thank you so much for watching and enjoying the video
You're 100% right. I grabbed that number from a Bulbapedia article right after the game came out, and just internalized it. I never bothered to check again, because there has been no confirmed duration for precisely how long ago PLA took place. I should've used a more general "some hundreds of years ago," as that seems more reasonable.
Also, populations would absolutely still become packed together. Look up the mouse utopia experiments. Populations free from danger will not spread out despite available space.
The world developed natally, and then pokemon turned up after.
I think your foundational assumption is wrong. Pokemon magic is very powerful, but it is not universally accessible. The player character is canonically the best trainer in the entire region. While you may be able to fly and teleport at will, npcs are almost never shown doing that, the only exceptions being some rivals and some champions. You may command the power of the gods, but 99% of NPCs in the setting have a single weak pokemon that they never train. e.g. level 5 meowth.
So the magic, while amazing, is not available to most people. On the other hand, those people do know such power exists, motivating them to look for alternatives.
Pokemon also have needs that technology doesn't. Using your example of squirtle-powered running water, how practical is it to have a sink that needs training, food, rest, and daily walks? Also, since Pokemon are highly intelligent, they would be easily bored, and would probably get upset if you asked them to stand in front of a drain all day for the rest of their lives.
Not only is there still a role for technology in a pokemon world, I think it would actually progress faster than it does in real life. In the real world, gliders and airplanes were the result of people seeing birds and thinking, "That doesn't look so hard." Turns out it was hard, and studying animals was a major part of solving the problem. Now imagine how much more helpful it would be if your inspiration understood human speech. "Alright, Mr. Alakazam, this helmet will record your brain waves, please teleport across the room as slowly as you can." If you compare the technology of the pokemon world to the real world, you will find that most of their future tech is some version of teleportation or mass manipulation, both things that pokemon are good at.
And of course, wild pokemon are dangerous, and that would push technology as a means of defense. As in your Game of Thrones example, the existence of dragons didn't mean that war was all dragons, it meant that ballistas got popular.
TL;DR In a setting where everyone has equal magic, technology is irrelevant, but in a setting where the elite have more magic than others, technology progresses even faster than normal, as the common man struggles to keep up. And since literally every fantasy setting has unequal amounts of magic among the populace, high tech magic worlds are inherently more realistic than medieval magic worlds.
And of course somehow a "capitalism bad"/"eat the rich" rant makes its way here as if a lot of technological advancements weren't brought about by working class people and tradesmen trying to make their own jobs easier.
Nice. I've been doing my own PTU worldbuilding, where its just straight our world + pokemon. I think you've got a lot of points here, and I think that means pokemon need to be modern, not ancient. I'm thinking that WW1 or WW2 would mark the first major use of pokemon by humans, and much of their official research and widespread use is only due to the aftermath of those wars.
So, why develop technology? Simple, as literally every game has shown, and PLA showed in even more detail, most pokemon are dangerous. Training them is difficult, it seems easy to us playing the protagonist, but that's ignoring that the protag is always stated to have a special unique bond or ability to train pokemon. The technology exists because the average person can't use pokemon to do everything.
We do see pokemon being used to do things like working a powerplant, or a lighthouse. and not just back in gen 2, even as recently as gens 7 and 8 we've been shown day to day interactions between humans and pokemon. Pokemon helping out in a bakery, or helping get rid of trash. It's more or less stated in alola that they don't have any trash dumps and next to no pollution because of the grimer and trubbish eating the trash, allowing them to put more research into improving recycling.
Also, the "every pokemon protagonist is prepubescent" thing is just wrong. Slightly less wrong than calling them all ten year olds at least. The black and white characters were 15, the X and Y characters were 16, and while it's post this video's release, Scarlet and Violet's protagonists are 17. This is actually common for kids media, children and teens prefer characters around three years older than them as the main character.
wow. I hope this goes effing viral. Great job!
couldn't agree more 😂
tl;dw: teleportation go brrr
Remember me that TTGO movie where Raven uses portal as solution to everything.
Currency. You mistake the purpose of currency. Currency exists so trade can occur without bartering things one might not want to be rid of. Currency works because it has trade value but is emotionally easy to trade away for something else. Currency has no sentimental value nor any value beyond it's usefulness to trade away.
would love to see the North and south idea :)
Did I hear a rock and stone!?!
Thanks for this video! Your analysis was very insightful and got me to think more about the relationship between magic and technology in my own worlds.
This is basically exactly what I wanted to hear :D
Thank you so much for watching and enjoying this video!
I mean, i still think technology _could_ exist. This is a world that _thrives,_ it's just that the tech stays stagnent usually due to the lack of need.
That being said, as great as pokemon are, they arent infallible, and surely some people are going to be at least a bit curious about alternative solutions, and that isnt even talking about anyone who'd wanna research about some of the magic stuff that pokemon can do. Take professor Sycamore for example, he was the dude who spearheaded mega evolution research.
I think that labs actually make some sense the way they're presented in the games and anime, at least in some capacity,
Would it be wrong to compare them to the consept of sects..?,
I disagree that currency wouldn't be invented. A barter system requires both parties to see the value in a good and want to directly exchange them and all labour needs to result in a good (or the promise of providing for someone's needs in a one sided goods exchange). It's just wildly inefficient compared to using currency.
As for the technology part, i want to point out that catching Pokémon was a relatively recent development and they were for most of human history feared. So, at least until the time of PLA, technological advancement would have been parallel to the real world.
I would say the advent of technology is to keep humans on par with pokemon. Your concept of using magic for everyday needs implies that the ones using the magic are agreeing to these conditions, if they do not, then it does not matter if the job can be done easier, the magic simply wouldn't be used. I would say what we see instead is an equal world where instead of pokemon treated as slaves, they are treated as partners, and if humans simply treated pokemon as domesticated animals like in your example, then with their intelligence level, we would see more revolts, revolutions, and possibly the overthrow of humans being the dominate species. What we see with the technological scale is not only humans showing a superiority over pokemon, they are only doing it as that show of force, while also intelligently keeping a social connection with these beings of magic. All it takes are pokemon forming an army, simply a couple of Tyranitars could decimate a city, Alakazams could come up with strategies and invoke inspiration to pokemon held in captivity.
Simply put, They are the magic users, not humans, humans simply learned how to work alongside them. They intelligently did so by incorporating them into society and learning their behaviors, while still showing they wield the bigger stick. Technology is human's non-magical solution to be on the same level as pokemon, otherwise, they would just be another normal/fighting type that can only learn basic normal or fighting moves.
This is a very masterfully done video. And while i enjoy it. I do not agree with some of your viewpoints for the simple fact that. While yes pokemon are animals and can be used to make human life better. Many pokemon can be depicted in anime as having comically short tempers.
So i believe that using pokemon as if they were machines (which kinda felt like the vibe youbwere going for) would be a very fast way to find just how angry irritable pokemon can become.
Not to mention the way in which you make your case arguments almost feel detached from the reality that the pokemon franchise had created. Like its an "outsider looking in" point of view.
Not looking to start an argument, just saying i enjoyed the video. Even if i feel some things could be done differently.
You played pearl rather than diamond???
But why???
Why would magic stagnate tech instead of advance it further? There are tons of reasons for people to develop technology in the pokémon world, particularly before they had the tools to properly tame pokémon in large scale and use them as beasts of burden.
Like... Can you IMAGINE what it was like WAY BACK THEN when people were hunter gatherers and had to hunt pokémon to survive? Sure you can argue that one or two villages had a mofo with a zigzagoon who could help, but the ones who couldn't? How hard do you think it would have been to 1v1 a mamoswine?? How do you protect yourself from hungry DROWZEE that want to sneak into your cave at night to feast on your dreams?
I feel like your argument is also flawed because it simply overlooks the way in which people interact with pokémon as a phenomenon.
They're not just animals, they are straight up an example of why nature needs to be RESPECTED. Like, yeah of course people don't just polute everywhere. Can you imagine the apocalyptic hellscape that a world overcome with poison types who EAT TRASH would look like? Grimers and koffing as far as the eye can see.
This is straight up a shintoist inspired world and it shows. Pokémon has the potential to be THE solarpunk setting.
TLDR: Magic doesn't need to stagnate tech; Magic is tech;
"How to make food last longer and how to see in the dark were rich people problems."
...ah you never studied actual technological development. Because food preservation was around for a good long while before fire was tamed. The main benefits of fire were cooking (possibly the most important invention in all of human history) and to stay warm so you don't freeze to death. Seeing in the dark to help protect you from predators was a nice bonus, as was most species natural fear of fire which helped to ward away dangers in the first place. And so on and so forth with many many inventions. Heck the idea of money wouldn't be invented for another 7000 years or so, everyone was a worker.
Magic is not the death of technology, magic should ACCELERATE TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT. The only settings that seems to get this is the Avatar series and Eberron. Fire benders bring about steam engines, industrialization, large scale smelting, and electrical generation moving the world from one where most people traveled on foot between dirt roads between peasant villages to one where cars were mass produced and people went around in battle mechs in only two generations. Meanwhile in Eberron they figured out how to assembly line via magical items and make magic engines to power all sorts of things allowing for a full blown industrial revolution.
Magic facilitates more complex processes and productions by skipping the need to develop requisite technologies and refine them before being able to work on later technologies. It also often simplifies logistics chains and bypasses other issues. For example a steam engine needs metal for construction, a steady supply of coal for fuel, a steady supply of water for steam, properly installed and maintained pipes, and the rest of the machine you need to run and everything you needed to do to make that work. Eberron's magic engines I mentioned before massively simplify that. You need a properly sized chunk of magical crystal, you enchant it properly, and then you install it into the thing you want it to run. You still need to work out how to make a machine do what you want but the engine is so simplified that finding uses for it is more incentivized.
With steam engines you had to integrate the tech you wanted to power right into the system from the start. So any problems would render the whole thing a waste of time and resources. But with engines that can be just plugged in it the machine doesn't work you can more easily reconfigure it or work on the problem directly and if you can't fix it you can just use the engine elsewhere without wasting the resources needed to make the engine in the first place. As such since the engine is reusable with minimal fuss there is a much greater reduced cost in labor and material waste if your invention fails.
I mean Nintendo does usually ride on the backs of fun over story....
Did you forget to play gen 1? 😮
The easiest reason is pokemon have a will of their own. You cant dominate them as easily as you see in the games. Watching the anime or reading the manga tells you this.
Great video unfortunately has many counter claims just like :
magic in the Pokemon are not permanent, we can see that when Pokemon use they're magic it disappears easily
People in the Pokemon world view Pokemon as dangerous creatures and unlike other fictional world the magic in the Pokemon is uncontrollable sure they have PokeBall but who can say that all the Pokemon will obey, it could further bring destruction
Side note the mahic of the Pokemon world is kinda similar to Avatar the last Airbender wherein magic further advanced technology
I am making a pokemon mistery dungeon comic and you are right i had to make a lot of changes to the magic system only because the story would be broken in shambles if i dont
Which includes
-teleport is useless in combat since the battles are 3vs3 teams or singular duel i made so the -1 priority of teleport makes the move useless and the only dude who uses that move at a good rate in the story is crazy op (if you ask is a male meowstic with prankster i know it cant learn it in the game but i made so he found the kantonian teleport mt)
-teleport only teleports 2 persons at time unless you are also powerful but powerful psychic pokemons are highly cotized and extremely rare so they cant be all teleporting persons, goods or things like that
-pokemon now follow the law of equivalent exchange which means that water type pokemons cant create infinite water or rock and ice types pop gigant structures from nowere without sacrificing something this translate differently depending on the pokemon for example a Water type needs to be hydrated to use its powers or it can die or a fire type having to wait until its biological fire fuel fills or eat something to fuel the fire
-since pokemon have a more limited energy system they can only use a couple of attacks before rendering themselves defenseless which also made so pokemon use medieval weapons unironicaly and lowkey nerfs special attackers since then they cant just snipe you out of the distance this also buffs rock steel flying ghost and lowkey fight and normal types since they either are very resistant inmune or good at dodging attacks form melee weapons or have a great advantage at close combat regardless of weapons, this also makes blunt weapons the usual best choice since they are the best at damaging highly armored pokemons and even without pp a pokemon still usualy has superior strenght and other weapons like swords shoud need more maintance making swords basicaly useless
-psychic isnt telekinesis it can only be used for pushing or pulling objectives but not both and the move telekinesis is reworked to work only on your attacks, thought powerful psychic pokemon can still do telekinesis but takes massive efford to do so, the only pokemons who can use telekinesis in combat constantly are a huge deal on the story and they usualy are legendaries and they are still incapable of using it on dark types
Also airships where invented far earlier since helium and similar gasses is far more efficent at lifting things on the ground the main inspiration is that in the game a single helium balloon can basicaly lift a ton weighting pokemon so its far easier getting things at flight
good video but boy do you take long to get your point across
Thanks for watching!
You're definitely right; I've a bad habit of rambling and going on tangents. It's something I've got to work on for future content, certainly.
But thank you so much for watching through this one 😊😊
Honestly... I'd happily take a Pokègame where you are just Someone and even the most important people you meet are a randomly chosen human model with a randomly picked name and there ain't any bad guy team or legendaries runnin' 'round.
Phenemonal video! I hope this goes viral because it's not only fair criticism of a beloved property, but it's also a fair dive into worldbuilding and the origins of human civilization. You made points about worldbuilding and the history of civilization that I probably wouldn't have been able to form on my own. It's quite serendipitous that I came across this video because I myself have been thinking about Pokemon's worldbuilding for quite some time now. It appears that since the worldbuilding of Pokemon is so fundamentally flawed, there are 2 options:
1. Alter the powers, numbers, and location of Pokemon so that human civilization in the Pokemon world would highly resemble our own.
or
2. Leave the powers of Pokemon unchanged and logically arrive at a conclusion of how this would radically change human civilization. (Most resembling your conclusion)
I have LOTS of other things to say, but I'll post them in one or more comments because I'm working on being less wordy and having my points coherently flow into one another (not just one long ramble). Anyway, I'd very much be interested to see your interpretation of a "properly worldbuilt" Pokemon.
Thank you so much for stopping by the video :D and I'd love for it to go viral, too!
I'm definitely going to create a pitch for Pokémon North & South at some point in the near-ish future, so I'm really thankful for your interest in it! I'm not going to go so far as to call it a "properly worldbuilt" version; after all, I'm at least as prone to storytelling mistakes as anyone else, if not more so. But, I've described myself as being obsessed with storytelling, so this is something that's interested me for a long time. I'll take a swing at it soon enough, and then wait for it to get rightly eviscerated by anyone who watches through it!
Finally, this channel is DEFINITELY a place for rambles, raving, and all-around wordiness on whatever! See both of the big videos and literally every single comment I've written. But, I mean, if you want to leave multiple comments and boost that number on this here tiny channel, I'm certainly not going to complain!
Anyway, thank you again for watching. I look forward to hearing what you have to say!
Like commented and subscribed 👍
I think your overestimating the useability of Abra, and reliability of Pokemon in general
First of all, this is a videogame. I doubt the process of catching it as easy as it in the games. You have to remember that as a game, it abstracts the process of catching it to be easier. The animes generally depict a pokemon journey as lasting a year or so, but the average pokemon playthrough can take a couple days at most so I doubt its as easy as your making it out to be.
Second, I doubt training an Abra is as easy as you make it seem. Abra sleep like, 16 hours a day or so. This thing is basically a psychic teleporting cat. It evolves into intelligent and hyper-intelligent cats as it grows. cats that are MORE intelligent than you. Do you honestly believe a supergenius psychic cat's going to be serve a weak human unquestioningly as a taxi even if they are loyal? no. Its a cat. they believe we're meant to serve THEM. and Abra's one of the safer pokemon arguably, many of them are more dangerous in multiple ways. Again this is a thing that a videogame abstracts out: realistically, pokemon are dangerous and full of their own quirks, personalities and flaws. You can give a bunch of children bikes because the bikes are objects they don't have opinions, but a ponytas are animals with FIRE for hair, you get a ponyta that doesn't like a kid, you get a burnt hand. parents would look at that go NOPE. like just because one machoke is useful doesn't mean they all are, they might not like the job you give them, a machine doesn't have opinions.
Also your ignoring Legends Arceus in general. people didn't start domesticating pokemon until like, a century or two ago, and the explanation given is that well....pokemon are scary and dangerous because of what they can do. we can talk about how much or little sense that makes, but thats what happened. and a device to like catch them and carry them around wasn't invented until that time, so....imagine before that, imagine trying to go up to a teleporting cat and trying to convince it to serve you as a taxi without any magical balls to catch them, imagine it being scared of you and just teleporting away! you don't know where it went. you don't know if it understands anything you just called out to it. your probably holding a berry it might or might not like, you don't freaking know, and you don't have any pokemon already loyal to you to fight for you and even if you did, you might have only one to do so with if your lucky, because even if you do befriend pokemon you still have to travel with them as a group all around you without pokeballs, you basically become this herder of them, if you don't have a way to transport them....which means you need to TECHNOLOGY to utilize pokemon like this in the first place.
and like, not all pokemon are found in places that people like go to go. like many fire types, unsurprisingly, are found near or in volcanoes. who the heck goes to volcanoes? while most water types? are out at sea, and thus you need to fish. hope you like catching magikarp that you don't know how to train and basically useless! oh and evolves into a terrifying temperamental serpentine dragon if you do get it right, and what kind of person makes friends with terrifying sea dragon? not someone anyone wants to BE friends with, I bet. oh and all the bird pokemon that can just like, easily fly away from you if you don't have a pokemon to battle them and a pokeball to catch them. your more likely to encounter grass or bug pokemon in the forest and fields.....and those can be POISONOUS and PARALYTIC. sure gloom and paras look friendly and goofy but they can like, kill you with poison powder and likely to attack you if they feel threatened, and they feel threatened by you coming near them. even normal types are very strong, fighting types are probably stronger....
oh and if you start making graveyards that attracts ghost pokemon, who you can't hurt and can mess with you in all sorts of ways, so mourning your dead becomes dangerous.
and assuming your successful in taming anything, your dog can potentially kill you by getting too excited and like, shocking you with electricity or breathing fire and burning down your house. so.....the light and happy tone is doing some heavy lifting here in terms of what does/doesn't happen.
also your ignoring all the science-fiction inspirations that Pokemon is built on: Mewtwo, Deoxys, Clefairy being from space, Porygon, magnemite, things like that. pokemon draws as much from futuristic sci-fi stuff like aliens, robots, as it does from fantasy and magic, and while Palkia and Dialga are deity-like beings, what they are gods of: time and space are fundamentally science fiction in nature. by cutting out the technology your cutting out a lot of good pokemon and concepts that inform this or that pokemon. I'd say that pokemon is closer to a superhero setting than high fantasy, because its a mix of science fiction and fantasy in a modern world, and all the evils you fight are pretty short-lived doomsday stuff that superheroes are expected to fight compared to a fantasy evil which has space for its evil to work and exist for long periods of time.
like this is a good analysis, but I think you made a mistake in assuming what genre you think it is from the get-go instead of figuring out what genre suits pokemon best as it is, because what it is now is what made it so popular no matter how little sense it makes. and it sounds more like you want to make your own pokemon-like world but not actually pokemon, which I can respect if thats what you want to do, I'd recommend it even, because this kind of thing fuels creativity and makes new stuff, new worlds, new iterations on the concept in your own way. but if you just want to keep to fanfic, that understandable to, not everyone wants to make their own thing after all. but y'know consider that maybe what you've made could be a world inspired by pokemon that can be, rather than a pokemon that never be, just a thought.
While this is not the case for the Pokemon world, as I do like the way it is, I've always hated when people introduce Modern Technology into a fantasy world. It ruins the magic of the world for me, and doesn't fit. I don't know why people keep doing it.
Thank you so much for watching the video :)
Urban/modern fantasy isn't a genre I have a ton of experience with myself; as I said in another comment, I think Bioshock is about as close as I've come outside of Pokémon. It's conceptually interesting, and may make the worlds feel more friendly and familiar, but it comes at the expense of a fundamental failure of worldbuilding unless it's very carefully addressed. I love Bioshock, but the "magic as science" approach to Adam and plasmids leaves a lot of massive plot holes. I feel the same way about The Boys, actually. Modern magic is a difficult balance to walk, and I've yet to find a story that doesn't incorporate magic into the world haphazardly.
In my opinion, that doesn't mean those stories aren't worth telling. There's a lot to be said about suspension of disbelief to get behind those stories. That's why I love the Bioshock games and The Boys despite their worldbuilding failures. But it's definitely understandable that plot holes of that magnitude can come off as inauthentic and false, so I completely sympathize with your distaste for the subgenre.
@@volcaronite No, I agree. If you make the world a mix of Magic and Technology from the start, then it's fine. But if you establish a world of magic with barely any technology, and suddenly includes it later it ruins everything.
u forget one thing the world of Pokemon wasn't created for the humans but the Pokemon themselves by their god Arceus, Pokemon created humans in the Pokemon world so they obviously made the humans of that world not want to rely on Pokemon to build things for them or something like that.
Pokemon are friends to the humans (well most humans) they dont abuse their power like u would suggest other than with Pokemon battling, there are actually plenty of Pokemon that help out their humans with building buildings and stuff like that, have u not seen Machamp with hard hats on carrying around heavy steel girder's and stuff like that in the anime and games? at the end of the day Pokemon do get tired just like animals in our world and that is why there are still cars and plans and stuff like that in the Pokemon world alongside trainers just travelling on their Pokemon because they both coexist together by utilising each others powers and as insane artificer said it is not really known how teleportation works in the Pokemon world as we can only use it to teleport back to the last Pokemon centre that we visited or our house and even then we dont know how much weight they can carry alongside them (i would assume it would be based by their psychic power).
so your whole video is just plain wrong imo it is not in any way a failure but a very well thought out world that both Pokemon and Humans coexist in.
this is a great video and im giving it a like because of that but i think just on most points in this video (especially the tropius one) i just absolutely completely vehemently disagree.
27:47 This is where I believe the heart of the problem lies in your video. You say that taming and training Pokemon is easy, when in reality, it's only easy for the player character, or in other words us. Just as we consider catching Pokemon is easy, we also consider the story of the Pokemon games to be easy. We collect 8 gym badges, defeat the Pokemon League, and become the champion, and it requires far less effort than it would to say, 100% a game like Dark Souls. But the problem is, *we* are the exception, not the norm. We as the player are skilled enough to become the champion, but we're only the top 1% of people in the world that are capable enough of achieving such a feat.
Most people in the world of Pokemon aren't trainers or battle with the Pokemon they do have whatsoever. Even the trainers we do battle never have 6 Pokemon, unless they're some fisherman who has 6 Magikarps on his team. Within the world of Pokemon, even having more than 6 is something that only truly skilled trainers can do, not just your average joe on route 1. No kid is being handed a Gyarados that can tear down entire cities, or an Alakazam that can transport you wherever you want to go. What *we* consider to be "easy" within the game, are feats that aren't possible for the average person in the world.
Just look back at Legends Arceus, if taming and training Pokemon was so easy, then everyone in Jubilife Village should've had at least one Pokemon, but they didn't. In that time, Pokemon were considered dangerous creatures that cannot coexist with humans. And it would be a long time after that until the Pokemon world reaches the state it's in now. So within that time where humans distrust Pokemon and only VERY very few people even have *3* Pokemon at most, why wouldn't humans develop technology to help benefit them? No one is riding around on their Rapidash or flying around on their Charizard, so how else are they going to transport their supplies and produce around?
TLDR: Instead of looking at our actions as the player the norm, look at our actions as the exception. We're a prodigy trainer, skilled enough to take down an evil organization, save the world, become the champion, and completed the Pokedex (maybe), all before we've finished going through puberty. And all of that isn't something the average person can do in the Pokemon world.
Edit: Furthermore, the very power of teleportation shouldn't be something taken lightly. Even though Abra is capable of teleporting itself and it's trainer, that's really all we see of it's power. We don't know if Abra can teleport large shipping containers across the world, and even if it could, it already takes a lot out of Abra to consistently teleport like that. There's a reason why Abra needs to sleep 18 hours every day if it wants to consistently use it's telekinetic powers.
I recommend collosium and XD to check out some of the older ones. While the more grindy of the two I think collosium has something that XD lacks