>>47062025A lot of suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy Pokémon, and not just in the obvious ways.
Generally, Pokémon are shown to understand human speech. They can follow complex commands and respond to questions. Their inability to speak themselves (with notable exceptions) helps maintain the illusion of them being beasts, but internally they’re clearly more cognitively sophisticated than any earth animals. You can see this sometimes when Meowth interprets for other Pokémon and reveals that even some of the more seemingly beast-like Pokémon are actually articulating some fairly reasoned and self-aware thoughts in their own “language”.
What’s even more significant is that Pokémon (again, generally) seem to understand human culture and social norms. They’re intelligent enough to integrate into human society and observe its customs, when they want to.
This all points to Pokémon being not only sentient, but conscious, self-aware, reasoning beings comparable to higher primates at worst and equivalent to humans (or better) at best.
So then endless questions arise such as, why do these intelligent beings live like simple beasts wandering around in the wilderness when left to their own devices? Why do they not build cities and technology of their own? Why do they allow humans to subjugate them and pit them against one another for status/amusement? When Pokémon kill and eat other Pokémon in the wild, is that instinct or murder?
There are no answers to these questions, besides “just don’t think about it”. The internal logic of the franchise is fleshed out only just as much as is necessary to keep you entertained, but not enough to hold up to even minimal scrutiny.
