>>42578409A pokemon's type describes three things in order of importance:
1. Its constitution. Electrics are electrically charged, informing
2. its vulnerability. Electrics suffer grounding, which threatens
3. its innate competence to use electrical powers or resist, by its charge, electric, flying, or steel moves.
Let's apply with the sound non-type, which is unpopular because it is hard to identify its vulnerabilities:
1. Sound types are very sensitive to sound, informing a vulnerability to
2. the interruptions of ground, bug, psychic, and, sound moves, which
3. deafen the pokemon that depends on its ears to accurately use Noise in combat offensively, or defensively, against, e.g, fighting/dark/and ground Pokemon. The gestalt hereof seems common with every other type: "sound" is a vital force that opposed weakens a sound pokemon in every way; this is shown by a loss of HP
Really the problem is developers not making enough of an effort to define what each type means for attack and defense by defining 'type' as a concept. Consider Ground -- that seems to just be a category of Pokemon that live in soil, but which are not necessarily made of soil. Why should Pokemon like Swampert take neutral damage from water when the reason for its weakness to water is not supported by its design? Well, you might say Ground actually incorporates Sound type, and describes Pokemon and moves that relate to vibrations. Swampert, being sensitive to vibration, might plausibly suffer extra damage from water whereas it muffles its sensitivity to sound or compromises its ability to attack with sound. Still, you can see the problem with types being ill-defined. Even if they were, there is not a consistent basis for super-effectiveness -- rock's advantage over ice imagines a literal interaction of ice and rock, whereas dark's advantage over psychic is actually more meaningful because the essence of dark (deception) is contemplated as overpowering the essence of psychic (sight).
