Ooh boy...
I know this is going to be a wall of text, so let me begin by saying I'm not sure this really fits here, given its length and rather lack of the narrative itself because that would even unbearably longer. And, as you can probably tell, I only really made this account because I've always loved Pokemon, and had this strange kind of ever-building analysis of what it would be like to truly be in that universe. What the actual streets and houses and shops and things would have to be like. And what it would be like to travel, and that led to thinking about the lack of acres and acres of orchards and wheat and corn and vegetables that would always turn up for days even when driving by car.
So, I've been thinking of this kind of 'explanation' to things in Pokemon. I've been thinking about it almost since as long as I can remember, by early Elementary school, certainly. But back then it was pretty whimsical 'I bet all the grocery stores are stocked by Pokemon gathering fruit from all the forests' and imagined asking a Pokemon for help getting the cereal I liked. So this is not exactly a fic idea, per se, but more an extrapolated explanation of a lot of stuff in the Pokemon Universe. I'm not sure exactly if this is the right place for this, but a lot of it is my own wild speculation and another member recommended I talk about this here, so here we are.
As I got older I started to make up my own 'Journey' stories for my Pokemon characters (I hope I'm using that right, I think I know what it means from reading through this forum a bit) some of which were of course interwoven with characters from the show which I always loved to watch even as I got older, especially in middle school. But much of that was left lacking both in the limited material I had on the actual 'World' of the Pokemon 'Verse at my disposal. Eventually I stopped watching the anime, getting more and more into the game and then at some point someone told me about the Pokemon Special Adventures manga. I didn't want to dive into it at first, but then when I figured out that it didn't star Ash and that the world was much more like the games my interest was piqued. Imagine me, short dark hair, sitting slumped beside a bungalow feet stretched toward the chain-link fence facing the street, playing my old GameBoy with its magnifying lens attachment, looking up blinking into the failing autumn sunlight just as the decision was made to read the first volume that night instead of watching Star Trek, which would always be there anyway if it turned out I didn't like it.
But even after I had sated myself once I got to the Emerald arc, I had burning questions whose answers I couldn't yet come up with. Most prominent of which was What do people in the Pokemon world eat? That sly question which people who like being clever often bring up when discussing 'Things About Pokemon Which Beg Explanation' (hello, yes, umm... also one of those people, clearly, yes) another popular one, Who's Ash's dad?, and by extension, the other characters' parents? Both in the game and manga if parents aren't prominent in the characters' lives they aren't really mentioned. It seems to suggest that it is commonplace that often children are raised by one parent and that there is an understanding that no one need to ever discuss why this is. Not even idle conversation, although I can't be sure how extensive the anime is on this subject because I haven't seen most of it by now. I confess a much heavier bias towards the manga since I like it a lot more. Anywho, after learning about that post by AndyNemo of Tumblr (or perhaps it was someone else, I also confess to often not being as diligent as others on confirming authenticity) about how Giovanni was the good guy all along and they have a fantastic breakdown of the Rocket motto which reveals the secret if you look at it contextually. (I would of course put a link here not only as a good break in the wall of text, but to be fair to the progenitor of the idea, only I'm so new that I cannot yet do so; spam filters, y'know)
Not that this post answered those particular questions, however its generally understood that new information or a fresh perspective can open up all kinds of new thoughts once its had time to process. And I thought, well yes it makes a lot of sense that Giovanni is behind the scenes trying to keep their worlds from being split up by crazed cults of doom by keeping them from harnessing enough power to do so. Who else is?
By this time during my education, I had learned much about How Things Are Run i.e. governments and what is needed to sustain the different types of lifestyles within the societies we have observed in human history. So when looking at Pokemon, we have the answer to whatever factors go into making the world we see in the games and manga and anime, we just don't have the equation itself. So we have to work backwards; I must work within the laws established within the windows from which we see their world. And I have come to the conclusion that these myriad island nations are overseen by a benevolent autocratic dictatorship called The Pokemon League.
I'm not saying that the League is evil or anything, I said that they were a benevolent dictatorship, but still, y'know, a dictatorship. They are all clearly ruled by their strongest trainer, the League Champion of their region apparently serving as the primary policy maker of that region's Pokemon League chapter. And in a society whose economic system is clearly heavily dependent upon Pokemon, the one who controls official policy regarding the treatment of Pokemon and the Pokemon industry has almost all the power in that society. The only other powerful entity that intervenes on matters of national security being the International Police who we don't see until Diamond and Pearl. Other than those two organizations it doesn't seem like any other entity is running things or otherwise keeping an eye out for organizations trying to take over their regions.
Especially in the manga, Giovanni sometimes arrives as a sort of deus ex machina to intervene in cataclysmic events he had been monitoring usually for reasons of personal gain which are often left not entirely clear. So perhaps we could tentatively add Team Rocket to that list, however, there a few problems with that. First is that they are actively working against the current reigning government which officially makes them enemies of the state if not an outright terrorist organization according to their laws, for upsetting and endeavoring to upset the current balance of power which can and has been bad for their society. Second, they do not respect Pokemon as much as the League does, though I have my own theories as to why this is. They regularly engage in research deemed unethical and dangerous to Pokemon and humans by the League, and have likely hurt or killed many Pokemon and people in the course of their activities as well. Thirdly Team Rocket members themselves have been central to a few apocalyptic events, and while they did so while not under the command of Giovanni, they still did so under the Rocket banner and so that should count against them as a whole.
I imagine Giovanni, and Team Rocket while under Giovanni, to be the ones plugging up holes and filling up cracks that the League and the International Police don't see, behind the scenes, most of the time. I mean, we only really see their world through people who are pro-Leaguers, so who knows what sorts of things the mysterious and inscrutable Giovanni and his Team Rocket get up to while the League isn't looking? Perhaps they saved the world on their own a few times, seems to happen often enough that they'd get their chance eventually. But even if they do save the world, and keep it spinning, they are still a criminal organization. They do not get their revenue from tax payers or donations so they must run front businesses like the casinos to make/launder money or they just take what it is they need. They also further their own research to stay on top of world developments in fields they feel the League is neglecting, employing top scientists which make legitimate breakthroughs. What sort of brilliant scientist would join an obviously illegal research group? Some of them were evil, yes, but most aren't; in their hideouts they don't always fight you, even though you are an intruder. And the ones that do, well, you just happen to be on opposite sides of a line drawn in the sand; I'm not saying that the scientists, whatever you think of them, are innocent. They must have known what they were getting into, but I do want to point out that a society in which a large amount of legitimately brilliant researchers feel the need to become criminals in order to make money is not a very balanced society. It's something similar to what has been pointed out about the Scooby-Doo universe, why are so many brilliant people turning to petty crime? Why does everywhere the Mystery Gang goes there seem to be a plethora of large, abandoned buildings or carnival grounds or factories or amusement parks or whatever in which they perpetrate their schemes? There has been speculation about the economic collapse of their world as the reason for most of the plots of that show. But I digress. You can see parallels (or at least where I could draw parallels) between these phenomena in these different worlds, so it doesn't seem so far fetched to suggest that tight economic control on what someone can or can't do with their skills could be effecting the Pokemon world; in their case control via the League dictatorship, rather than the realities of the aftermath of an economic breakdown.
So what does all of this projected politics of the Pokemon 'Verse do to answer my question about what people eat in this world? Well clearly there is enough food to sustain everyone, and it must all be grown or otherwise cultivated somewhere, and the only place that I can think of big enough to feed all the people we see living in these large island communities would have to be another, much larger region than we've seen so far (if not, then perhaps a couple regions on the larger side of the ones we've seen) dedicated economically to providing these smaller, united, super-powered island nations with what they need to sustain their society. Looking at it from every angle I could think of, this seems to be the most likely solution to how the Pokemon world can operate as we observe it. I also think that by necessity, this large region would also have to have a relatively small Pokemon population since clearly Pokemon in the other regions have all but obliterated the regular animal population. We hardly see normal animals at all in the series, and usually as part of the background or something; which makes sense since how can a regular mouse compete with a Rattata or Pikachu? How quickly do you think the natural populations of animals in those regions fell to the rise of Pokemon? I think that control over Pokemon populations in a society which knows that they will all starve if they go the way of the other nations would be very, very important to them.
And it is about here that this spins off further and further into my own wild projections of what that continent would be like, and how those people would live. For example, this nation themselves would not be home to very many technological advancements, but it does reap all the benefits of the research performed in the other, Pokemon oriented nations because that's what they trade their food for. There would be less an emphasis on self-oriented goals, and more promotion of the value of regular, productive members of society. And I mean productive in the classic, literal sense; what do Pokemon trainers actually produce? They have strong Pokemon, yes, that is something intrinsic that they 'make' and they have the vast technical knowledge and training to use them extremely well, but how does that keep society spinning on a daily basis? We are of course familiar with the grand adventures they go on to save the world from total destruction, and of course the entire world would have ended many times over if not for them, I am not denying that. But the reason they keep doing so is to protect the infrastructure that holds up their way of life, infrastructure made up by post carriers and grocery store clerks and dentists and contractors ect. But it is these people, much more like you and I than these prodigy Pokemon trainers, which hold up the world while its not being threatened by crazy people with incredibly powerful Pokemon. So it would make sense to me that in a society where their only advantage is to produce what the other nations cannot that they would stress more the importance of making something that has value to everyday society, rather than the pursuit of personal grandeur.
Anyway, so that is the gist of my 'explanation' for Pokemon; I have my own narrative that I have thought up to weave through this world, but this post damn long enough already so perhaps some other time. If you're still reading this then, well, thank you. I am a trained writer; I am used to telling things through narrative, not separating the world from the story. At least, not when writing things down. So I didn't really know how to start, or how to end or what I should mention and what I should leave out. I've also never written any of this down before, so this is also a very rough draft. So if you've stuck it out this long, you've had much more patience with me than I have. I feel I have reached the end of what my own mind can muster up from all these years of immersing it in Pokemon and I am interested to know what other Pokemon fanatics think of this thing I made up. The only other thing I could possibly ask from you is to tell me what you think. What you think works, and what doesn't work, and why. Or if you have questions, or whatever, really. The only thing worse than being told it's bad is being ignored completely, heh.
EDIT:I think that perhaps I'll post the narrative I have in mind in a separate post to this one and just refer to this post instead of going into detail in the other one. I think I can avoid making that a wall of text as well if I do.
I admit I'm not very good at writing out plot points or character descriptions bit by bit--usually I don't have to think so hard about what I want to do with the story--but I felt that what I had written for Kephi was actually worse than this (in terms of vagueness and content) and I did want to keep the original near-death experience premise, so I tried it out.
