>>51447555The guide is for 3rd parties first and foremost but that doesn't stop them from talking about how they handle the anime like the section about food and how they keep it ambiguous, which Shudo touched on his blog, as well as a section on talking Pokémon and how they handle them so it does tell us a bit about their thought process. But more importantly is contextualizing what the guide is trying to do, it's trying to steer 3rd parties to produce an image they want them to portray. Much of that guide is against humanizing the Pokémon and there's a section strictly dedicated to talking about real animals and Pokémon and how Pokémon replace real animals, the word replace written in italics to emphasize that. Again, it must be stressed that Pokémon aren't meant to be real animals, and this is a distinction made by both the guide and Shudo but neither of them put Pokémon away from the concept of an animal. Pokémon is fantasy but even as c fantasy Pokémon still wants people to perceive Pokémon a certain way.
This is why I mentioned how Shudo's statement and the guide work in unison especially when you consider the contents of Tajiri biography. I already showed the page with Sugimori and Tajiri discussing what Pokémon are and how Tajiri's mind imagined animals instead of monsters, and in particular cats and dogs. A few pages later there's a section where it states Sugimori saw Pokémon as beasts and for that reason he based his designs primarily on real wolrd animals, it's basically stating that Sugimori saw Pokémon as animals so he used real life ones as the main inspiration. Things like that open a lot up and the things Shudo says and the Guide says start to make sense. If real animals were done away fairly early, and if the guide has certain guidelines for a specific reason and you consider what Tajiri biography says it all starts to work in unison. There's a reason people perceive Pokémon as animals more often than monsters.
