>>50164682The real issue isn't if they're animals, monsters, critters or something else entirely. The single issue of real concern is, do they have human like intelligence and are they capable of providing affirmative consent? The concept of "legal consent" doesn't matter because ultimately the laws around what pokemon are capable of legally agreeing to are going to vary from region to region and aren't universal in any way. This brings the issue down to a matter of what are they capable of consenting to as non-human persons, and do they understand the consequences of their consent to the same extent that an adult human would.
According to their behaviour in the anime and manga, most pokemon at least have the intelligence of teenagers or low intelligence adults. Given that it's perfectly legal to fuck a moron so long as they're of legal age, then there's no reason that pokemon couldn't consent to sex. The games are where things get more complicated. In main series games, Pokemon are frequently shown behaving like animals, effectively being kept as pets or livestock but some are also shown as capable of speech like zoroark or rotom. Then you've got the mystery dungeon games where all the pokemon are capable of speech and are shown to be little different than humans in terms of capabilities.
As a final variation, we have the detective pikachu movie, the only "realistic" depiction of pokemon. Here all pokemon are capable of speech but in their own language and behaviorally they act like people, even reacting in similar ways and showing similar facial expressions. In short, I think they only complete answer is that it's going to depend on which reality you're in and even then it's going to be case by case, contingent on the cognitive and communicative ability of the specific pokemon.
I can't believe I spent 10 mins writing this autism 