I’m something of an originalist in Pokemon. I think that the games are the core of what the narrative flows from and everything else is flexible story that builds on that. What’s more, in Pokemon, people can say things, but there’s nothing saying that they’re right. People are wrong all the time in Pokemon, and sometimes people even lie to the player characters, to themselves, or to one another. What’s more, the player character is a kid, somewhat, but also a kid who is experimenting with and learning about Pokemon training and breeding, so chances are good, people would explain the useful things to them.
But they don’t.
There’s a mechanical answer to the question of course. After the first two years of the game and then for twenty-ish years of the game, what you did was you dropped the Pokemon off at a daycare centre, and if the pair of them were compatible in some way, they’d produce an egg if you spent enough time waiting around. This version of the system was pretty elaborate, too – whether or not the Pokemon bred and the results of how it bred was a bit like a complex flowchart where you had to check details all the way down. For example, two Pokemon of the same species could breed, obviously, but two Pokemon of the same type could check each other’s genes, which was how the game did its best to keep Pokemon that were related from creating offspring. That system isn’t checked any more, which I think means that you can hypothetically get two sibling Pokemon to reproduce nowawadays. Or maybe they’re just more complex now and the game tracks that some other way.
This egg hatches based not on time but the number of steps you take while holding it, which I guess is either a compromise of the way the games express time, or it’s an actual mechanical need where the Pokemon eggs require constant agitation. There are Pokemon who supply warmth to eggs that speed this part of the process up, which kinda suggests the latter, especially in the newer real-time games where you can see Pokemon wandering around and doing their own thing.
Nowadays, instead of a daycare centre, where Pokemon get up to the thing they get up to off-screen where you don’t see it and don’t have to work out what a Cradily’s donger is like, Pokemon instead reproduce by going to a picnic and having a sandwich. Doing this, they leave an egg in your basket and they can leave a lot if the sandwich is really good. The thing is, they do this without you necessarily losing attention on the Pokemon. There’s some interface fades, which I guess can be treated as a lapse of attention, but also, do you think of the time and experience of Pokemon as being a wholly in-camera real-time experience? It doesn’t seem to be, at least based on the way that the game cross-fades to combat scenarios.
But that’s the mechanics of the game and the camera. These mechanisms are there to let you, the player, engage with the game system of Pokemon, which is mostly about transferring information between Pokemon of stats, moves, and sometimes natures or even species. That’s not really answering the question I’m asking, which is instead:
How do Pokemon breed?
There’s a lot of routes to take this kind of analysis. Pokemon is a game world with a lot of supplementary material, and some of that material was generated en masse to feed a demand for media in a wide variety of markets and audiences. If I wanted to I could find any number of sources that explain how Pokemon Breed in a variety of different G-rated nonsense ways. Plus there’s the Pokedex, full of unreliable information (as far as we know). If you want to, you can construct an entirely realistic, meat-based way to consider Pokemon Breeding. I understand if you go to furaffinity you can find an extensive documentary process considering all sorts of material opportunities here.
I don’t want to, because there are infinite texts of dubious relationship to the core material. There’s a genuine chance some local magazine to your home town made its own Pokemon Guide and writing from an unguided expert trying to pump out a booklet for a kid to buy got made and was licensed enough to have a Pikachu on the cover, but none of that implies they know anything about what they were writing about.
This is of course, a game for four year olds, but I think the thing that deserves attention in all this is that the Pokemon aren’t animals. We know they’re not. The whole nature of Pokemon is that their world is so wildly different to our own and we keep on defaulting to think about Pokemon in a way that treats them as animals. Pokemon breeding, as best we know, doesn’t even require physical contact. They need to like one another – compatibility is an issue – but it’s not like the Pokemon even need to materially interact as far as we know.
We know that Pokemon can change their mass and scale freely; they shrink down to get into the Pokeballs, rather than the Pokeball coercing them into it. When you throw the ball, it’s not that the ball captures them and does something weird and wonky to them, it’s that the ball is something the Pokemon investigates. What this means is that the entire vision of agency you see in the Pokemon universe, with trainers capturing things, is actually kinda backwards. Pokemon trainers aren’t capturing things, they’re presenting an opportunity to the Pokemon and seeing if the Pokemon wants to do it. The battles between Pokemon and trainer are also consensual – the Pokemon can refuse to do things – and if you want to see it, check out what happens when you transfer a high-level Pokemon to a starting character. Pokemon are sentient and sapient. Pokemon are also capable of regeneration and production of food that humans can consume and give it up consensually. A bunch of them are in some way, plants, at least they’re considered grass types and have some kind of self-sustaining relationship to sunlight.
Okay, then, so they’re not animals, not proper animals.
What does that mean for their breeding?
Well, I mean, whatever you want it to.