User:Salmancer/To promote Pokémon

As with all media franchises, the ultimate goal of The Pokémon Company is to convince the audience to catch them all. Preferably, by getting those audience members to form memories around Pokémon so as to prime said audience members to buy the merchandise. (Game sales? Pfft. Small potatoes compared to the lucrative plush market.) This overarching agenda can influence the way Pokémon stories are structured in odd ways. This page documents some of the more blatant cases where logical storytelling takes a backseat to promote Pokémon.

Contents

Hide

Close table of contents

• (Return to top)
• Cross-Media
• Pokémon Masters EX
• Pokémon Quest
• Pokémon the Series

Contents

Cross-Media

• Some stories describe Mew as being extinct. This proves to be true 0% of the time, mostly because Mew has a design that needs selling. So a massive organization with loads of resources like Team Rocket can go on grand expeditions and turn up nothing but fossilized remains, while Mew gallivants about and turns up at seemingly arbitrary points.

Pokémon Masters EX

• In The Light Devourer, a Dusk Mane Necrozma that can become Ultra Necrozma appears. In all other Pokémon media, Necrozma taking control of Solgaleo to become Dusk Mane Necrozma is described as a less than stellar experience for the unlucky Solgaleo involved. Except this time, because the power of Sync stones makes it A-OK! This Solgaleo is just willing to be a light battery for the rest of eternity. More than likely, this is so that Lusamine can have an Ultra Necrozma while still being on the moral up and up. Which in turn allows the player to have an Ultra Necrozma in Masters.

• In Unova: Team Plasma & Two Heroes, Hilbert is indicated to have a Poké Ball containing a Pokémon that he'll bring out in an emergency. It just so happens to be a Kyurem, and the problem of the day just so happens to be Ghetsis trying to assemble the Original Dragon using his Kyurem, N's Reshiram, and N's Zekrom. Hilbert's Kyruem prevents this by fusing with the Zekrom, such that now the heroes have a Black Kyruem that N can keep, which is sold as a brand new Sync Pair!
  • This one is so incredulous that even Ghestis complains about it in the story. Hilbert's retort is less than convincing though. The issue is not that there are two Kyruem. The issue is that there is no good method for Hilbert to have obtained a Kyurem that would not make it a known factor before this story. If he caught Kyruem on Pasio, then there should be a big hubbub over a Legendary Pokémon appearing. This is indicated by most events regarding Legendary Pokémon. If Hilbert instead had Kyurem on hand before arriving on Pasio, then Hilbert has refrained from pulling out this "ace in the hole" for a very long time, even in storylines where revealing Kyruem would be advantageous.

Pokémon Quest

• In Pokémon Quest, Mewtwo had been sealed away on Tumblecube Island in the Chamber of Legends for a long time. Recovering all of the island's statues freed it. This raises way too many questions: The statues are conjectured to have been made by an ancient civilization. Mewtwo has to be created in the modern day, given that it is a clone. These concepts cannot coexist, because how would the ancient civilization have trapped Mewtwo long before its creation? The only way for this to work is if Mewtwo time travelled to the past, Pokemon Quest takes place in the far future, or some third group (wild Pokémon?) used the statues to seal Mewtwo away. All of these explanations involve adding new elements that are not alluded to in the game. The most likely explanation is that Mewtwo is the strongest Pokemon out of all of the original 151, so it just has to be the final boss of a game featuring that set of Pokemon.

Pokémon the Series

• In Pokémon the Series: Sun and Moon, a distinction is drawn between Z-Rings and Z-Power Rings. Only a Z-Power RIng is capabable of fitting certain Z-Crystals of specific shapes. (This is technically true in the video games, but only because the Z-Crystals that can only be used by the Z-Power Ring are only in Pokémon Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon, both games where the only ring the player obtains is the Z-Power Ring.) This gets silly in a hurry. In Revealing the Stuff of Legend!, Ash obtains a Solganium Z but is unable to use it because he has a normal Z-Ring. This requires the Guardian deities to upgrade his Z-Ring to a Z-Power Ring, so that he can use the new Z-Crystal. This would suggest that Z-Power Rings carry actual narrative weight that their in-game counterparts do not... only for the Team Rocket trio to just get one from Nanu for free during Why Not Give Me a Z-Ring Sometime?. Why? Because Mimikyu has a Z-Move that needs to be seen on camera, the Mimikium Z was introduced as a Z-Crystal that can only be used with a Z-Power Ring, and the trio have a Mimikyu.