Animals in PMD stories

[love]

Since I often put animals in PMD stories, I felt it worth thinking of some ways to actually justify that choice from a worldbuilding perspective (from a personal perspective, the justification is that I think animals are cool). So I wrote up some possibilities. I don't think these possibilities really invalidate anyone for feeling weird about animals in PMD, since it breaks canon and clashes with the fantastical elements of the series, but I hope I can at least provide some inspiration or maybe open some minds.

Anyway, here's what I wrote.

It's worth considering how animals could fit into a PMD setting, since it is commonly supposed that pokemon would drive them to extinction. I think there are ways to poke holes in this idea, many of which don't explicitly break canon:

1) Perhaps the simplest and most effective: pokemon just don't have as strong a drive to reproduce as humans and other animals. Sure, they *could* kill all their competitors, but there just aren't enough of them.
1a) Or perhaps they have long life cycles. A pokemon may take many years to reach sexual maturity, or perhaps they have very long pregnancies. The latter could also be a reason why they wouldn't *want* to reproduce as much. However, I believe it would break canon.

2) Pokemon can only sustain themselves off of in-universe food (berries, seeds, etc). This may be because these foods are much more energy-dense than irl foods, so eating real plants and animals would basically be a waste of time. There may have been evolutionary pressure on animals to be less powerful than pokemon because, indirectly, this would result in them being less worthwhile to eat, and allows them to survive off different food sources. This idea would justify pokemon not hunting animals for meat, but one could still object that pokemon might hunt animals for other resources, like fur or bones. It also is arguably contradicted by the presence of Apples, Bananas, and Chestnuts in PMD, which restore a lot of hunger. Are these to be considered different from their real life counterparts? If not, do they still have the same pollinators, and why haven't said pollinators been hunted to extinction...

3) Pokemon live in a post-scarcity world. There's no point in eating animals; it would be needlessly cruel. Plant food is abundant. Overpopulation may or may not be imminent. Pokemon may have to cull animals to keep populations in check. Could present some interesting animal welfare problems.

4) Pokemon may have advantages, but some animals still outcompete or evade them. Prey that can't overpower or escape predators can succeed by concealing themselves, being toxic to eat, being spiky, etc.

5) Pokemon can overpower animals or use their special abilities to hunt them, but it's not worth it because these abilities burn immense amounts of calories. So they use special abilities for self-defense or generally rely on weaker moves. Pokemon might also have higher basal metabolic rates that put them at a survival disadvantage.

6) Like humans, pokemon *are* driving animals to extinction. They're just not finished yet.

7) As in Those Who Will Inherit the Earth: there is a finite store of poke-energy which pokemon can draw from (I guess it's like Infinity Energy in the canon?) The more pokemon are born, the weaker their abilities become. This keeps their advantages in check to some degree.

8) Animals are entering from another world (the human world?) due to space-time distortions/mystery dungeon fuckery.

9) You could also accept that pokemon don't even make sense to begin with and you might as well just say fuck it and add animals to the mix. It's not like all pokemon are powerhouses anyway. Magikarp comes to mind.

I'm sure there are other justifications one could come up with, and there are probably ways to poke holes in my hole-poking. An issue with the above ideas is that they can be tricky to exposit in a story. Like, maybe there are certain facts about the universe or biology that keep pokemons' advantages in check, but who are you going to have talk about them? How are you going to show it? Maybe it's easier for those with amnesiac protagonists, because then your character can just ask.

 

[canisaries]

Are you talking specifically about larger animals like ungulates and carnivorans and such? Because having ants in a story vs having dogs in a story are vastly different to me. Even the smallest canon Pokemon species are 4 inches / 10 centimeters tall, which in the world of bugs is pretty huge. The fact that Pokemon are so strong doesn't really matter in the case of bugs because, well, anything bigger than a bug is usually very much able to kill a bug, but bugs are just so small and numerous that it doesn't matter.

The same pattern can also be applied to a lot of other relatively-small-but-numerous animals in our world, like fish and frogs and mice. As long as there is no competition with Pokemon in the niches for smaller animals (even if there are fish and frog and mouse Pokemon, they're nowhere as small as a lot of their real counterparts) and Pokemon aren't able to eat or kill them fast enough, I don't think it's far-fetched at all to have them in a world. In fact, the reason behind them existing in my stories is precisely the fact that the ecosystem doesn't feel like it would work otherwise (and the fact that the arachnophobia element in Hunter, Haunted really wouldn't work if the only spiders that existed actually were deadly and worth fearing).

 

[IFBench]

I just have animals exist without delving deeply into it. I don't have Pokemon hunt other Pokemon because they're all sapient (aside from dungeon Pokemon), so for meat they eat animals instead.

 

[love]

@canisaries I wasn't really talking specifically about larger animals, but rather about animals as a whole—which loses a lot of nuance, but getting into which animals would be most viable in a pokemon-filled world seemed like a really big rabbit hole that I didn't feel like jumping down since the post was pretty long already. I think the insects thing kind of falls under option 4 (pokemon can kill insects, but insects have an advantage in reproducing in much larger numbers), and I agree with it. Understandably, people are generally a lot more okay with the inclusion of insects in a pokemon story than big animals, but I also wanted to include ideas that would justify the less usual suspects. Likely, the inclusion of pokemon in a world would result in at least some animals being disadvantaged to the point of extinction—it's hard to imagine that not happening with anything more than a trivial pokemon population size—but I'm still rather attached to charismatic megafauna, so part of the inspiration for writing this stuff out is questioning if there aren't reasonable ways to keep some of them around.

Maybe a less weird compromise would be to invent original non-pokemon megafauna inspired by real-world counterparts, sort of like the animals in Avatar: The Last Airbender, because otherwise it can feel a bit dubious (even if realistic animals are possible in your pokemon world, doesn't it seem unlikely that they evolved exactly like the animals we see in the real world, even in the presence of pokemon?) However, going this route means you might need to exposit/describe more things, because I can assume that a reader knows what a deer looks like, but I can't assume they know what my off-brand pseudodeer looks like. A bit easier in a visual medium since you can just look at the thing without stopping to draw attention to it. Maybe it's better to make everything original at that point.

Or include fakemon? But an advantage to having big animals, as Bench alluded to, is that it gives you a less uncomfortable option to feed carnivores, assuming obligate carnivore pokemon exist in your world and they aren't all just eating apples or whatever. Maybe obligate carnivore pokemon could eat farmed insects too, but I'm not sure how reasonable that would come across, since nutritionally, insects are still pretty different from beef/chicken/fish/whatever.

I did not realize that there aren't pokemon smaller than 4". I guess it makes sense. It's hard to train something that you can barely see at most distances. Would tiny pokemon also have tiny attacks to match? Seeing something get blown away by a fingernail-sized energy ball would be pretty funny. Also, this definitely has implications for pollinated plants. Plants meant to rely on small, abundant pollinators (like a lot of real plants) might not get by in a world without insects. I would hazard a guess that that's one of the reasons you say that the ecology of your world wouldn't make sense without certain real-world animals.

 

[canisaries]

even if realistic animals are possible in your pokemon world, doesn't it seem unlikely that they evolved exactly like the animals we see in the real world, even in the presence of pokemon?

I don't have much to say to your response, but I would like to point out that humans and several plant species (like apples) evolved roughly the way they are in our world, so it's kind of excused by the canon already.

 

[love]

I don't have much to say to your response, but I would like to point out that humans and several plant species (like apples) evolved roughly the way they are in our world, so it's kind of excused by the canon already.

I guess that's true. Perhaps it was a bit silly of me to say that.

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Generally, I find any explicit mention of real animals takes me out of it, because it's a pretty big thing that rarely gets mentioned even within settings that have them, and I've never never seen them have a significant impact outside giving us something we're already morally accustomed to the idea of killing and eating. I can't picture any carnivore, nor most herbivores having an ecological niche. Perhaps it's because both of my multichapter works have had me thinking about what the actual ecosystem would look like, but it's just something I think about whenever this stuff comes up. At the end of the day, though, the fact that animals exist won't see me drop a fic. Offhand mention of animals are really a pet peeve at worst to me.

Insects, though, those I go back and forth on. Their ecological niche is just existing in several orders of magnitude of expendability above even something like rodents. I never make explicit mention of them in my own work, but I feel like they don't have the same Big Worldbuilding Implications when thrown in on an offhand mention compared to, say, a farm animal, so they don't bug me like non-insects do. (Rather ironically.)

Once we get down to the microscopic scale, we get things that are in my fic, though. My dead PMD chapterfic approached humans by having them predate Arceus' arrival from beyond and their subsequent... Let's call it pokegenesis, haha. They invented training to survive the mass extinction event that followed, and the whole thing ended up working out mutually-beneficially so Arceus let them stick around. My WIP (which is non-pmd but still has to answer the human question) reverses the idea, with pokemon being the originals and all humans being descended from fallers instead.

 

[Venia Silente]

I don't see any good reason to not just have normal animals in a PMD world. Not only do they have normal plants already (unless you want to be the xenofiction hard-ass one who does their world's trees non-IRL "non-trees"), but since in most interpretations of the setting PMD is already a post-apocalyptic mainline world (or even a PMA *human* world), there's simply no reason why specifically only one branch of the Life Tree gets erased yet the rest carries on without issues. And I've not even gotten into the other things from IRL that could or do totally exist already: not only plants, but also fungus and plankton. Viruses are canon already, but there's the subject of it to even call them living things, they are more a multi-layered complex chemical process than anything else..

And sure, there are no Pokémon smaller than 4" in canon so we train what we see and have use for ... but 1.- that's in canon ; 2.- up to April 2022 ; and 3.- once humans in that 'verse go extinct that stops being that useful a distinction. If Generation X introduces a 200 m long Pokémon and a 105 mm long Pokémon, people suddenly realize all hell was already broken loose.

That said, the big and better question is not if and how to have animals, but rather how to allow them to stay there, yeah. IN mainline you can go with a number of alternatives, of which the most notable IMO is the separation of geographical concerns between biomes where the food chain is primarily held by Pokémon vs the ones where it is primarily held by IRL-esque branches of life (that onem ost likely includes human settlements). For example, humans have a good incentive to keep animal (or plant) reservoirs around.

A PMD world? That's a harder set to sell as a stable process. If you go with the "PMD mainline world" which is shown to have 4 continents that cover around half the world and we don't know what lies at the other half, well then, make than Animal Land if you want. Or project the same effect we have in the geographical portrayal of mainline and have the known "routes" (maps and settlements) be the Pokémon world and the lands outside be potentially inhabited primarily by animals.

It's easy to make the animals stay viable as a core group because there doesn't seem to be that many Pokémon in PMD compared to in mainline, let alone talking about inhabited settlements and industrial processes, but then you have to account how exactly the titular MDs factor into it, in particular if in your setting their ability to essentially spawn infinite Pokémon is not just a videogame gimmick.

 

[SparklingEspeon]

My justification for including them is that animals support much of our ecology as is, I think that removing them would disrupt the planet's biosphere enough that it would either have to become much simpler (and therefore unlike our own) to survive, or die out entirely. When reading it in others' stories, I generally don't mind much. But if someone is consistently going out of their way to meta poke at it like it's a thing that Shouldn't Be There but is, I might be taken out of it if that's not story relevant.

It's kind of in the same group as most other "they do this in real life but not in the game" problems to me. It's part of everyday life, just because it's not in the games doesn't mean it can't be there... but putting emphasis on it is weird.

 

[K_S]

Yes and no thogh "animal" is a code word used in my stories to deal with ferals.

In a few unpublished stories of mine in the PMD genre the towns live simply and live off vegetarian/vegan. For the heavy hitting carnivore mon they are reliant on the supplements garnered from dungeons and shared by explorers (gummies and the like can sometimes be meat proteins, processed and the like) but those supplies are limited (and random) so large carnivore 'mon are encouraged to go into explorer teams to tend to their own means and not settle so not to strain the local guilds/towns.

Evolution is also discouraged except for active explorer teams and there's a quota of how many fully evolved mon that can be in the towns for resource management reasons. Outside the towns, in the wilds and dungeons, it's very much 'mon eat mon and being in the dungeons too long can drive even well-trained teams to sink down into feral mindsets. Some of the "higher leveled" feral 'mon in ghost houses for example are just lost souls that had to keep adventuring to eat, went too far too deep, went feral losing everything while perversely trying to just live.

So are there animals, sorta, kinda, in the form of feral 'mon but some of those ferals are just people driven to survive who if brought back up to civilization would be horrified as to what happened to them but they're indistinguishable, thus "animals" is a bit misleading.

And it's something not many are willing to talk about much less do anything about it,