Strong Versus Weak Pokemon Powers

[The Walrein]

How strong are Pokemon powers and abilities in your fics? Can a pidgey's gust lift a fully grown human off their feet and send them flying through the air, or can it only blow their hat off? Can an abra teleport across an entire continent in a single bound, or would they struggle to make ten meters? Can a charmander wade through lava without harm, or could they burn themselves with a cigarette lighter if they weren't careful?

My own writing usually tends towards the lower end of the power scale, but there are pros and cons on both ends of the spectrum. Here's what I see as the advantages of each approach:

Low Power
- Easier to suspend disbelief during nonlethal battles: If the average Pokemon attack can smash through a concrete barrier with ease, it can be a little hard to swallow that the Pokemon themselves can take those attacks and only receive slight bruises.
- Easier to set up obstacles that are difficult for the protagonists to overcome: The more powerful Pokemon are, the harder it is to threaten them with 'mundane' dangers like being trapped in a burning building or falling off a cliff.
- Easier to portray a distinct range of 'power-levels': If an abra can lift an apple with their telekinesis, a kadabra can lift a bowling ball, and an alakazam can lift a steel safe, than it's easy to show that Mewtwo's really strong by having them fling around cars and boulders with their psychic powers. But if even the abra can pick up a car, you're going to have to show the kadabra flinging around buses, the alakazam hurtling around tractor-trailers, and you're going to have to contrive a battleship lying around or something if you want Mewtwo to be able to show off. At least to me, all feats beyond a certain level tend to blur together somewhat, while I feel like keeping powers within the general range of things humans could do makes them easier to intuitively understand and compare against each other.
- Makes settings where humans fight alongside or against Pokemon in combat more plausible
- Easier to avoid plot-holes caused by various super-abilities: If you have a character with very-long range teleportation (especially if they can bring other characters with them), you're always going to have to think about, "well, why don't they just solve problem X by teleporting to place Y?" while that's not a probem if they're limited to teleporting across the room. Also, having strong powers can cause a lot of worldbuilding implications you might not want to deal with ("if any ghost pokemon can turn invisible and phase through walls, how do people protect their valuables in this world?")

High Power
- Easier to justify stories where individual trainers take on massive criminal organizations with just the strength of their teams, or where individual trainers can otherwise wield a lot of power: The stronger mass-produced forms of power like guns and technology are relative to Pokemon abilities, the more advantage a large number of grunts has versus one trainer with a strong team.
- Good for creating a sense of awe or 'epicness'
- Can allow for tactics and plots that wouldn't be possible with weaker powers

How powerful are Pokemon in your stories? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of high-power and low-power settings?

 

[Venia Silente]

Power is much a subjective concept that this thread comes as a very interesting and potentially engaging discussion.

In the stories I write, the power of power tends to be all over the place. Weak Pokémon. Strong Pokémon. inb4 use your favourites. Down the line however I rely on two primary factors: who uses power and what feeds is. Powers basically start weak, with the common wild Pokémon being a high-powered animal, but scale quite well. After all, a Trained Pokémon has to be able to deal with continuous combat with 10 or 20 enemies on the road on a daily basis, and a basic Legendary Pokémon has to be able to contend fight with teams of 6, if not more, well-Trained Pokémon with a Trainer packing healing items, potentially a number of times a week, and a higher-tier Legendary Pokémon should be able to lord over its "trio relatives" below its bracket as well as keep any of a number of high-order universal concepts such as Truth or Time checked, et cetera.

Keeping a well-defined scale between the basic power levels of defined categorizations of Pokémon helps write stories much easier for me because unless I am mixing brackets within a story, all I have to worry about is how strong the "normal" Pokémon in the bracket I'm displaying appears to be, not how strong the powers actually are. Built for Risk showed ace-level trained Pokémon fighting in a tournament context and exerting to the best of their abilities, but no matter what they do there there's no need for the story to concern itself with how their powers relate to other Pokémons' powers; Playfield shows two Pokémon at the top of their game and how they function above the immediate setting around them but they are still contextually a common wild or trained Pokémon; similarly, even for featuring a Legendary Pokémon as one of the mains, Simpler than Magic needs not treat Ho-Oh as anything more than a bird that fires and is angery (up to the very end where I leave it to the reader).

I'd probably describe my setup for Pokémon powers as a combination of "Low Power, High Scaling" and "Powers are Personal", and it's probably about time I write a treatise about that kind of work too. Basically the pros and cons I can see going for it are:

- Easier to setup character development: you have a number of iterable, concrete goals which you can attach to stages of character development: "find rival in bracket", "tutor ally in bracket", "get to top of bracket", "get to next bracket", stuff like that.
- Easier to setup believable obstacles because you have clearer concepts of what an environment / antagonist needs to gain or lose in order to become an even match, even across power categories.
- More open, but tighter defined, boundaries for writing customized / personalized powers without them becoming OP or "sueish".
- More dependent on developing the team as a character; for Trainers this means a powerful Pokémon will need to have a synergy and a well-defined role in the team that they can specialize for.
- Easier to write one-on-ones even if the characters are relatively uneven in power, because justifying a character being able to turn the tables becomes more straightforward than "but the heart of the cards".
- More difficult to write multi-battles, in particular if they involve Pokémon across different power categories, because you have to take care that the aftereffects of a powerful Pokémon using their power don't simply disable any chance for fighting at a lower category (eg.: even if you have a Groudon by your side, it now becomes a question of if your other characters in their categories can survive the terraforming).
- Easier, but longer, to write superpowerful characters as Characters™.
- Makes it more difficult to write a sustainable way for a character who gains power to remain powerful that is not "dedicated exclusively to threats in this power category".
- Makes it more difficult to write a sustainable way for a character to lose power that is not "goofed off for six months without any training" or right out crippling injury.

 

[Negrek]

This is a really interesting question! Overall I'd say "strong" powers are definitely more popular in fanfic, which is probably to be expected, since it's what's portrayed in the anime. The games are more ambiguous in that you rarely ever see the actual effects that pokémon can have on humans or the world around them outside of the battle screen.

Like Venia Silente, I have pokémon's abilities range pretty widely. Young and relatively weak pokémon are pretty comparable to mundane animals, some with minor element-manipulation powers. Getting tackled by caterpie, for example, is pretty equivalent to being tackled by a small dog, unless that caterpie is like lv. 50 or something. Once the pokémon starts to get up to around level 30 or the starts start to rise towards the pseudolegend range is where things begin to get supernatural. If you want to talk about lifting cars and cracking concrete and so forth, those are usually pretty seriously battle-trained pokémon, around level 50 or above. Your family growlithe isn't going to be able to do much more than potentially destroy your furniture, but a fully battle-trained arcanine could probably reduce bone to ash and hit with enough force to smash through walls. (Trying to decide on an example for that last sentence led me to contemplate train vs arcanine, tho, and I think in general train would still win.)

There are also some pokémon that are just exceptional on the basis of their physiology, like an onix is a gigantic rock snake, so it can kind of squish things just by virtue of being a gigantic rock snake. I also tend to portray pokémon as very sturdy, very physically resilient, so even though being run over by an onix would definitely kill a small dog, a caterpie would be unhappy about it but ultimately okay.

In general I will admit a fondness for super high-powered pokémon portrayals. I am here for stories that go ridiculously shonen and have cities being toppled and out-of-control natural disasters and general over-the-top fantasy beastishness. I can get pretty picky about how it's executed, but I find a lot of joy in seeing magic monsters just absolutely go to town in a ludicrously unrealistic and large-scale way.

 

[Namohysip]

I'd like to second what Negrek said in terms of going full shonen. Ambyssin (followed by my betas...) has told me that my work reads like a good shonen anime (...manga, I guess?) and the power scaling matches. Start relatively small and quickly upscale to great clashes of superpowers... but at the same time, there are still normal, mundane Pokemon out there, too, who live normal, peaceful lives. And therefore, they do not reach incredible feats of strength.

It makes for an interesting dynamic to implement both strong and weak Pokemon abilities. In Hands of Creation, most Pokemon that are civilized actually live in such a way that there is no need to fight. They don't become strong. In fact, most of them only train long enough to fully evolve--and even then, some don't bother at all! They're perfectly content being an un-evolved form their whole lives. Owen and co. are exceptions, and are actively training to protect these "citizens" from dangers like outlaws, ferals, and the mutant here and there that has nothing to do with the plot, nope.

So, yes. If I'm going to be writing about a world of fantasy with fire conjuring and water blasting, go big or go home. It's already unscientific. It already breaks most suspensions of disbelief. And if we're looking at the top-top tier individuals of the world, the sky's the limit! You don't have to worry about things like, "Well, what if everyone was like that?!" because that's just it--everyone isn't like that! Most folks are normal! So that aspect is covered... and you have the best of both worlds. Civilians with weak powers, and the opposing forces striking one another with the power of anime.