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New Pokémon Regions not being mentioned in older games or anime

I just thought about this and I am wondering why new pokemon regions arent talked about blatantly by characters in any older previous generation games or the anime. For instance, why wasn't the Galar region talked about in Alola or Kalos? Or, why wasn't the region for the Scarlet and Violet games that were just announced talked about in Galar or Hisui? Do the adults in the pokemon world like to hide stuff from us? I know the real-life reason is that it wasn't invented yet, but I want an in-universe lore answer!

Thank You to everyone who answers!
 

Pokefan_1987

Avid Pokemon TCG Card collector.
I just thought about this and I am wondering why new pokemon regions arent talked about blatantly by characters in any older previous generation games or the anime. For instance, why wasn't the Galar region talked about in Alola or Kalos? Or, why wasn't the region for the Scarlet and Violet games that were just announced talked about in Galar or Hisui? Do the adults in the pokemon world like to hide stuff from us? I know the real-life reason is that it wasn't invented yet, but I want an in-universe lore answer!

Thank You to everyone who answers!
No it's a matter of that region doesn't exist or hasn't been revealed. You can't predict the next regions ahead inside the games inside the story.
 

MrJechgo

Well-Known Member
The Orange Islands have yet to be mentioned anywhere in the games :S

Those weren't added as new areas in Fire Red, Leaf Green or Let's Go.
 

Captain Jigglypuff

Leader of Jigglypuff Army
There have subtle hints to new regions since XY. XY hinted Alola with the Strange Souvenir and the Backpacker who gave you it hinting that the region’s champion is something different. I think USUM had a map. SwSh I think the hint that no one noticed are the male Artist NPCs are wearing a striped shirt very similar to the one Pablo Picasso was known to wear. I only noticed this reference after Scarlet and Violet were revealed and people were saying that the new region appears to be based on the Iberian Penisula.
 

Reinhardt

You! Me! Rivals! Yes?
As far as an in-universe lore answer, perhaps it's just not relevant to whatever is going on in the story at the time. How often would a French person talk about Hawaii if they weren't either originally from there or planning a holiday? Same with a Hawaiian person talking about Britain. I would also continue the analogy to "and an British person talking about Spain", but speaking as a Brit, the British are obsessed with Spain, with many going there every year for holidays and some even straight-up moving there. But either way, unless you have some personal connection to a country, are planning to visit or move there, or it's frequently in the news, an average person in one country probably doesn't spend that much time thinking about another country. The same is probably true for Pokemon regions.

With all that being said, since at least X and Y there have been subtle hints to future regions in the games. X and Y had the tourist from Alola that gives you the Starnge Souvenir and says "You'll see soon enough" when talking about his region, there was an Alola Exeggutor poster in OR/AS, a Gigantamax Toxtricity poster in Sun and Moon, and most recently in Sword and Shield there's a blocked off area in Hotel Ionia with a painting of oranges and grapes in the background hinting toward Scarlet and Violet.
 

Luthor

Well-Known Member
There are also examples such as Exeggutor's ruby pokedex which says "Exeggutor originally came from the tropics". Alola presumably is within 'the tropics' of the Pokemon world. Sometimes people just use generalisations rather than name the exact place. Plus at least in the anime (and potentially other media) a lot of people became trainers at the age of 10 and some may not have done any further formal education. Its possible that some just aren't great at geography and just don't know the names of various regions.
 

octoboy

I Crush Everything
Yeah, it seems a bit hard at times to reconcile the existences of these regions in previous games which likely actually aren't mentioned because they hadn't been come up with yet, especially in gen 1, with Kanto being right next to Johto yet no one in Kanto mentioning it, or its having an American character (Surge) who never mentions Unova or whatever adjacent region he was presumably from. Then again, munna appears to be alluded to in gen 1, which may be a case of the developers finding ways to turn off-hand comments into foreshadowing, which kind of helps.

I don't remember much about whether the text of the 1st gen games insinuates that the gen 1 pokédex is an exhaustive list or not (the anime pretty clearly states it isn't right from the get-go, what with the ho-oh showing up in the first episode). Oak is, however, claimed to be the "world authority on all pokémon", which makes it suspect that he'd call the gen 1 dex complete when it doesn't even include every pokémon from Kanto (some pokémon that live there, such as the gen 2 nocturnal pokémon found in Kanto, aren't part of it). Again, I guess some of that can be chalked up to the developers not yet knowing whether the game would be a one-off game or not, and thus not insinuating there would be more to discover before it was clear there would be. And, as I said before, this does force retroactive suspension of disbelief by leaving earlier games a bit difficult to reconcile with later ones.

And it does seem occasionally that the developers will take the easy way out of this, having introduced multiverse theory around gen 6, which is a pretty quick fix for any plot holes, as you could say any inconsistencies are due to different games taking place in different parallel universes and whatnot. What exactly this supposed gen-1-specific universe would look like still may raise further questions, though, as it seems the only way to explain its having a world pokémon authority only knowing about 150 pokémon without living in an isolated region (which, again, Surge's presence rules out) would be mass extinctions of all other pokémon (with the exception of a few possibly surviving species rendered cryptids such as munna) with the outside regions ending up in a similar state to Orre, being only populated by introduced species, or not having wild pokémon at all. Which means that such band-aid hand-waves leave the situation of some of these gens rather bleak under the surface.

Though I guess that isn't all that new, considering enforced bleakness has occurred in cases such as gen 2's version of Kanto having had a lot of places seem to undergo hardships due to the lack of memory space leaving it impossible to fit them (Safari Zone comes to mind).
 
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