>>53379336All of the people are dead, and the pokemon world is the afterlife.
Pokemon are animal spirits that were strong enough to maintain their shape when they cross over into the pokemon world. Some pokemon look like people or objects because they had traumatic deaths, and their spirit twists to resemble the thing that killed them. Pokemon and humans can't actually die in this afterlife, but they can become ghost type if they experience something that makes them THINK that they die while in the pokemon world. Pokemon want to battle alongside the spirits of deceased humans because their powerful souls grant them enough energy to gain a more powerful form. This is also why nobody ever gets older, why people talk about events that happened in the real world but not the pokemon world, and why there seems to be so many family members missing. Children are without parents because their parents are still alive.
