The Terrifying World of Pokemon Go
When you think about it, Pokemon Go is actually a somewhat terrifying game. Well, it’s terrifying when you think about things too hard, which is what I’ve been doing lately. The premise of Pokemon Go is simple – Pokemon are escaping the Pokemon universe and appearing in our universe. First it was affecting Kanto only, but it’s been spreading, and now Pokemon from the Hoenn, Johto and Sinnoh regions are appearing as well. They’re basically invading our universe.
In the mean time, us mere humans have been fighting back in the only way we know how – by capturing and enslaving these Pokemon. Special stations have been set up at important human monuments across the planet so we can repeatedly stock up on our weapons of choice – Pokeballs. Sure, we might not have the technology to develop Pokeballs as powerful as those in the Pokemon universe, but our four types of Pokeball will knock Pokemon out with ease.
Not that much effort is required. Many of the Pokemon that are transported into our universe are very clearly damaged and stunned when they arrive. They just stand there, not sure what they should be doing with themselves. Occasionally they’ll lash out, but that’s okay, we’ve created replicas of Pokemon Universe berries that will make Pokemon more susceptible to being caught, drug them so they don’t fight back or, worst of all, make them shit out ‘candy’, which we then feed to other Pokemon of the same species. In fact, there’s a whole bounty system going on, as we can trade defective Pokemon in for more candy, that we can use to make non-defective enslaved Pokemon that we own better. Why? So we can use them in gladiator battles, just like we did in Ancient Rome.
It IS worth mentioning though that these Pokemon might not be normal Pokemon. Normal Pokemon actually attack you and understand that they are in danger. The Pokemon we see are too dozy and confused to do anything, and there’s so many of them. Plus, creatures of a mythical status that would normally never be seen in the Pokemon Universe seem to come and go in our universe. In fact, we installed special buildings that we call Gyms in order to contain the specific Pokemon that come through. We then let kids fight them, and when they’re defeated, these legendary monsters shrink down and split into smaller copies of themselves, which we can all then catch.
But why are they all coming here? Why are they invading our universe? I think it has to do with quantum mechanics and teleportation and cloning. You ever heard of the theory that teleporters aren’t actually teleporters? The idea is that a teleporter scans and destroys your body in the starting location, then creates an exact copy of you at the end location. But if you skip the ‘destroying your body’ part, you’d have a perfectly good cloning machine.
Chances are, there’s some Team Rocket base hidden in the depths of Kanto, desperately trying to get their cloning machine to work, only for their cloned Pokemon to blink out of existence. Where do they go? They appear in our universe.
There’s a little more evidence to this as well, that these Pokemon are just dropping in and out of existence but they always appear in similar spots. But they also disappear after a while. Because they are unstable. If not caught, they dissolve into nothing, and the only way of not dying due to unstable DNA is to be captured by a human. Even legendary Pokemon suffer from this, but they can last a little longer because they’re simply stronger.
Back in the normal Pokemon world though, everyone’s none the wiser. All people know is that those silly professors are out there doing field research on this strange phenomenon of “Pokemon candy” and “Pokemon in other dimensions”. Plus, they’re all perfectly used to enslaving Pokemon, so they don’t mind too much.
Is all of that a very pessimistic way of looking at a game aimed at kids? Yes. But who cares? Pokemon aren’t real.
Well, until someone starts making them in labs…