COG Considers: Why Drive When You Can Teleport?
Pokemon turned 25 this week! In honor of this momentous occasion, let’s take a moment and consider the humble Pokeball. Actually, it’s more like the entire system of capturing and storing Pokemon. Let’s examine that just a tiny bit. When you capture a Pokemon, it’s shoved into an object the size of a baseball. In fact, in the anime, it shrinks to the size of a golf ball when it’s not in use. No matter what size said creature was originally, it’s now being carted around like a piece of sports equipment. Since said Pokemon doesn’t come out of the ball looking like it was hit by a hydraulic press, we can assume they’re being harmlessly held and released. But how?
The answer lies in the Pokemon storage system. Since you can access your Pokemon from any computer in any town, it seems like they’re being transported from a nebulous z-space to your inventory. And since people eat Pokemon in this universe, we know they’re not digital monsters or anything. Mostly. So Star Trek transporter tech is in this world? And that same tech is so common you can sell it to children for like 200 poke, or yen, each. Just fish out some pocket change and pick up a portable device that can re-arrange living beings into a highly compressed form capable of instantaneous, data-style transmission across great distances.
The best part is that people are almost certainly using the technology in this way already! Think about it. There are no cars in Pokemon games. Roads and pathways are exclusively for trainers to go on their Pokemon master journeys. Bikers, swimmers, and hikers only exist because they’re also Pokemon trainers. Boat travel is an extravagant luxury. The first bike you encounter sells for a million bucks. This means that the common, unspoken method for travel for the rest of society involves this same teleportation/transporter tech. If you developed this kind of power there’s literally no way everyone on Earth wouldn’t be using it constantly.
And yet, none of the adults acknowledge this. Everyone makes you, the protagonist, traipse around on bikes or hot air balloons while they’re zipping from place to place at the speed of light. Maybe people with developing brains can’t be transported? Of course if that’s the case, then what the hell is it doing to your Pokemon? Also, if this is actually Star Trek transporter tech, the kind that obliterates you and recreates you at the new location, does that mean it’s purging you of disease at the same time? That would explain why Kanto only has one graveyard, and why said graveyard is only for Pokemon. But then what’s keeping the population from exploding? What kind of world exists beyond the borders of the games? Good God, Game Freak, you can’t just unleash this kind of terrifying power on a populace without consequences! Anyway, have fun following the implications of this tech to its logical conclusions! Hope you’re able to sleep tonight!