Intro
Something sinister is afoot in the world of Pokémon and its not Team Rocket or any other inept band of criminals. No, a more powerful, intelligent and competent group is at work. While we’ve only seen a few of their members since the series launched in 1996, this group appears to have vast resources and world-altering knowledge, not to mention the ability to accumulate and wield incredible power. I’m speaking, of course, about the Pokémon Professors.
You may think that the Professors are just a kind and grandfatherly bunch of researchers, but if you follow the information I’ve collected below, I think you’ll find that they are engaged in dangerous and morally questionable research. While stem cell research and human cloning are hot button issues in the world of biotechnology, I believe that the Professors have left those issues far behind and jumped directly into direct experimentation on sentient species. In fact, I believe that when gamers booted up Pokémon Red and Blue (or Green) in 1996, they got a chance to play with the first human-pokémon hybrid… and I’m not talking about Mewtwo.
The Theory
That’s right, I believe that Red and all the heroes of subsequent Pokémon generations are actually human-pokémon hybrids created by the Pokémon Professors themselves. While it’s never expressed this way in the games, the evidence is pretty clear once you take some time to examine it. Of course we can’t expect Nintendo or GameFreak to ever confirm all this, but follow along and I think by the end you’ll come to agree with me.
First, take a look at the world in which you play the game and what passes for being a “pokémon trainer” or even a gym leader. Nearly every trainer you meet along the way is only able to control a couple pokemon at a time and is in possession of common and weak species. They use basic attacks with almost no strategy, which indicates that either everyone is pretty bad at controlling pokemon or that most people just don’t connect enough with their pokémon for the monsters to grow and learn more powerful moves.
Even the gym leaders you face are often laughably weak. They devote their entire lives to training their pokémon and teaching others to do the same, but the best they can muster when they face you are vanilla strategies with almost no team variety. It seems as though having an affinity for a specific type of pokémon makes these trainers better able to control that specific type, so their power levels are even inflated past what they might be if they had to maintain a balanced team like our genetically modified heroes.
By contrast, Red and his fellow protagonists seem to be able to train any pokémon equally well, regardless of their type. Their pokémon constantly learn new moves, evolve and grow. In seemingly no time, these trainers become more powerful than others who have devoted their entire lives to this single pursuit… and they do it at 10-13 years old.
Evidence
Ok, lets pause for a moment for all the haters that are thinking “Duh, it’s a video game. Sometimes you have to swallow a conceit like scaling foes so the game can progress.” Yes. This is true. That’s the design reason, but even if we look at it like that from an in-world perspective, what does it say about what is going on here? Here is a world that seems perfectly catered to making a single child an unstoppable pokémon trainer who wields the power of legendary monsters? From an in-world perspective, why would the entire world be built specifically for this purpose? Besides you haters, there is more evidence to come!
Now, lets talk about the numerous occasions in which various pokémon react to our protagonists. In several spots across the games, you are told that pokémon react to your presence somehow. Besides the general ease with which you capture new monsters and the way you seem to connect with them throughout the games, we are told in several places that pokémon sense something special about our heroes. One time we are told that pokémon INSIDE THEIR POKEBALLS are shuddering when you come near. We’re told that legendary pokémon sense something special about you and somehow accept you, when no one else in the history of the world has been able to up until this point. Are you just special? Or are these pokemon reacting because they sense you are somehow like them? We’ve seen that most pokémon are social beings, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they could sense pokémon DNA in our protagonists.
Cynthia’s appearance in Generation 5 seems to hint at some deeper connection between you and your predecessors as well. She mentions that your eyes are strangely familiar. She says you remind her of someone from her past. This happens a few times across the games where you interact with multigenerational characters. This could just mean that you are all great trainers, but specifically mentioning your eyes in Generation 5 suggests that there is a familial or genetic link between you. In fact, this was the event that triggered this line of thought in my mind and drove me to research this topic further.
The other thing I noticed about this encounter with Cynthia is that you don’t speak. In fact, your character never speaks. It would be incredibly easy to program a little speech for any of the protagonists across the games, especially when it appears that you are having conversations with people. But you never do. None of the protagonists ever speak. People just seem to understand them, just like pokémon seem to just obey them. Why? I would guess this suggests that they are telepathic in some way and either they cannot speak or choose not to. That’s why people and pokémon seem to understand what a great person the heroes are and why they mention how you REMIND them of someone else: the last trainer that communicated without speaking.
Corporate Espionage
This line of reasoning gets even stronger when you consider the very first game. Who is the ultimate pokémon in that generation? Mewtwo. Where did he come from? Team Rocket scientists. What does he look like? He looks like a Mew they tried to turn into a humanoid. He looks like a human-pokémon hybrid, only far more imperfect than Red. He can control the minds of other pokémon, just like a very special trainer seems to be able to. He can communicate telepathically, just like Red and his successors seem to be able to. Mewtwo seems to be more pokémon than human and Red is clearly more human than pokémon, but I think they are both sides of the same coin.
And guess who is in direct conflict with Team Rocket from the very beginning? The Pokémon Professors. They send Red out and help him defeat Team Rocket. Why? Well, maybe its just because they are evil. But maybe this was a case of corporate espionage. Maybe they wanted to make sure Rocket didn’t perfect the technology that the Professors were already deep into their research on.
The Hybrids
But lets rewind a moment and look at our protagonists. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use the names Red, Gold, Brendan, Lucas and Hilbert even though there are opposite trainers to pick from in these games. Whatever color or gender the player picks, the protagonists story is the same. The first thing to note about this crew is that with the exception of Brendan, none of them seem to have fathers. With our human-pokémon hybrid theory in place, this makes a lot of sense. Depending on how these hybrids were created, they possibly needed a female human to give birth to their creation, but having a father was probably unnecessary.
For that matter, being fatherless means the kid doesn’t have some kind of immediate male mentor around, which makes them more pliable to the will of the Professors. The mother’s they chose, paid or coerced into giving birth to and raising these creations seem to be resigned to their offsprings fate anyways. One mother in the series famously says that she supposes all boys grow up to leave home one day and have adventures. They actually don’t in real life, nor do they in the world of pokémon, as we see lots of young people and young adults doing other jobs who seem to have never had an adventure anything like the plots of the games. Of course, that statement makes a lot more sense if its taken in the context I’m suggesting. All of these hybrids are MEANT to go out on adventures, so one of their mothers just saying “I guess its time” seems a lot less stupid if she knew from the time the child was conceived that it was meant for some other purpose.
Brendan presents a special problem because his supposed father is a gym leader, but I can easily hand-wave that little obstacle. Suppose Brendan’s clone had a different personality than the rest. Maybe he needed a strong role model to emulate and none of the Professors were up to the challenge. It wouldn’t be that hard to pay a gym leader to pretend for you, especially one that lives several towns away and doesn’t appear to actually have anything to do with Brendan’s life.
This leads me to two more points about the Professors plots. First up: systematic brainwashing. When the games launch you meet the pokémon professor who asks you some basic questions about yourself and then indoctrinates you into the world of pokémon and becoming a trainer. He actually introduces someone who is supposed to be your best friend and rival as if you’ve never really met. Given all the other ways the professors seem to manipulate you throughout the games (more on that in a moment) it wouldn’t surprise me if this is an example of their brainwashing. They tell you everything you need to know about yourself. They feed you the propaganda you need to get started and give you the equipment you need to succeed. You don’t know any of this before the game starts because you are a clone, one that is probably mute, communicates telepathically and probably have some deep-seeded confusion about your place in the world. Fortunately the Professors are there to reveal that information to you, right?
The second thing I wanted to point out about the Professors is that they seem to always know when the protagonist needs help and everyone in the world seems to be prepared to help you on their behalf. It’s like they know where you are and what you are doing at all times. That considered, take a moment to think about the PokéDex. What is it REALLY? It already has all the pokémon in a region numbered. You aren’t discovering or investigating these pokémon. They are already known! The truth is that the Dex is just a convenient reason to send you out on your adventure and a tool the professors use to monitor your progress. Your every move is watched, recorded and analyzed by the Professors, all under the guise of collecting information about pokémon.
Oh, and lets talk about starters for a moment. According to the games, everyone gets a starter pokémon when they reach a certain age, but how many trainers do you encounter that have one of the starting species across any of the games? Maybe one in five hundred trainers has one. These are incredibly rare and special species that evolve in three stages and seem perfectly suited for the protagonists’ adventures. I would guess these might actually be specially designed species, meant to be partners for the hybrids and their compatriots.
Rivals
So what about the rivals, you ask? Where did they come from and why are they out there racing with you? I believe they are some kind of control group used to compare our protagonists against. They are a human being or potentially another hybrid, sent on the same adventure with the purpose of comparing results. Perhaps Red was a Human-Mew hybrid and Blue was hybridized with Articuno and the Professors needed to know which DNA was stronger when mixed with a human. Perhaps Lucas was a new and improved hybrid and Dawn was a human child raised to be the ultimate human trainer, as a test to see if the hybrids were staying ahead of other advances in pokémon training techniques. Maybe Silver is just being a jerk as a tool to drive Gold to succeed.
“But doesn’t that violate your observation about weak human trainers?” I can already hear the haters grumbling. Yes and No. Perhaps it suggests that given the right conditioning a human being can be nearly as good as the hybrids, but it also might suggest something that takes this theory for an even more ominous turn. What if close proximity to the hybrids can make humans better, just like it makes pokémon better? What if being exposed to them, working alongside them and partnering with them makes a human as much better than others as it does for the hybrid’s trained pogeys?
Escalation
Think about it for a minute. After defeating a gym leader and returning to re-battle them, what’s different? They are always stronger and so are their monsters. Each time you face your rival or one of the games villain bosses, that character seems to have grown in power in significant ways. Shoot, after defeating the Elite Four, it seems as though the whole world gets powered up. Random trainers in cities and along roadsides suddenly have more powerful pokémon at their disposal and new species appear in the wild. It’s as if the mere presence of the hybrid makes everyone more powerful and dare I say… more violent? High-level moves like Sheer Cold or Close Combat are certainly more violent than Scratch or Growl. So if the Professors learned that this happened with Red, or presumably, whoever was Red’s predecessor in this chain of experimentation, why are they continuing the experiments? Why make entire regions wilder, more dangerous and more violent?
More ominous than that is that the Professors keep at it. Pause for a moment to consider that after the events of Red/Blue, Red the trainer leaves the civilized world and hides in the mountains to train his pokémon. The result? He manages to get his pogeys up to levels 75-82 but no higher after three full years of training. It seems he’s reached his theoretical limits. But then when Gold comes along as the new Pokémon League Champion he defeats Red! Just a few years after Red reached his limits, the Professors’ next experiment defeats him and even then, they continue to build better hybrids.
These better and better hybrids eventually tame even greater powers along the way. While Red might be able to defeat the evil Mewtwo in battle, Lucas eventually captures the creators of the pokémon universe, bending time and space to his command and crossing over into other dimensions. These hybrids are accumulating godlike powers and unleashing stronger and stronger pokémon upon the world as they do and still the Professors keep pressing for newer and better versions.
Conclusion
So forget about the petty thefts of Rattatas perpetrated by Team Rocket for a moment and think for a moment: What are the Pokémon Professors up to? Why would they throw all medical and scientific morality aside, engage in human-pokémon hybridization experiments, brainwash and control their subjects and then ultimately direct them to capture and control godlike creatures with immense powers? Is it just for the sake of knowledge? Is it to stop renegade organizations like Rocket, Magma or Galactic from taking over the world? Or is there something more sinister afoot?
The story you are playing in Pokémon games is just propaganda viewed through the eyes of a naïve child, directed by secretive and dangerous forces. The Pokémon Professors are not kindly old grandfathers who need help researching critters they could learn about by taking a walk or calling someone two town away. If Red and all the subsequent protagonists are these hybrids, then that pretty neatly covers all the game lore, mechanics and plot points you encounter along the way and reveals why all the adults seem like idiots throughout the games. They aren’t. They just have a purpose for their created hybrid and in the mind of the 10 year old protagonist, their actions and explanations seem perfectly valid. Just don’t expect Nintendo to ever confess to any of this. They are clearly part of the conspiracy.
Something sinister is afoot in the world of Pokémon and its not Team Rocket or any other inept band of criminals. No, a more powerful, intelligent and competent group is at work. While we’ve only seen a few of their members since the series launched in 1996, this group appears to have vast resources and world-altering knowledge, not to mention the ability to accumulate and wield incredible power. I’m speaking, of course, about the Pokémon Professors.
You may think that the Professors are just a kind and grandfatherly bunch of researchers, but if you follow the information I’ve collected below, I think you’ll find that they are engaged in dangerous and morally questionable research. While stem cell research and human cloning are hot button issues in the world of biotechnology, I believe that the Professors have left those issues far behind and jumped directly into direct experimentation on sentient species. In fact, I believe that when gamers booted up Pokémon Red and Blue (or Green) in 1996, they got a chance to play with the first human-pokémon hybrid… and I’m not talking about Mewtwo.
The Theory
That’s right, I believe that Red and all the heroes of subsequent Pokémon generations are actually human-pokémon hybrids created by the Pokémon Professors themselves. While it’s never expressed this way in the games, the evidence is pretty clear once you take some time to examine it. Of course we can’t expect Nintendo or GameFreak to ever confirm all this, but follow along and I think by the end you’ll come to agree with me.
First, take a look at the world in which you play the game and what passes for being a “pokémon trainer” or even a gym leader. Nearly every trainer you meet along the way is only able to control a couple pokemon at a time and is in possession of common and weak species. They use basic attacks with almost no strategy, which indicates that either everyone is pretty bad at controlling pokemon or that most people just don’t connect enough with their pokémon for the monsters to grow and learn more powerful moves.
Even the gym leaders you face are often laughably weak. They devote their entire lives to training their pokémon and teaching others to do the same, but the best they can muster when they face you are vanilla strategies with almost no team variety. It seems as though having an affinity for a specific type of pokémon makes these trainers better able to control that specific type, so their power levels are even inflated past what they might be if they had to maintain a balanced team like our genetically modified heroes.
By contrast, Red and his fellow protagonists seem to be able to train any pokémon equally well, regardless of their type. Their pokémon constantly learn new moves, evolve and grow. In seemingly no time, these trainers become more powerful than others who have devoted their entire lives to this single pursuit… and they do it at 10-13 years old.
Evidence
Ok, lets pause for a moment for all the haters that are thinking “Duh, it’s a video game. Sometimes you have to swallow a conceit like scaling foes so the game can progress.” Yes. This is true. That’s the design reason, but even if we look at it like that from an in-world perspective, what does it say about what is going on here? Here is a world that seems perfectly catered to making a single child an unstoppable pokémon trainer who wields the power of legendary monsters? From an in-world perspective, why would the entire world be built specifically for this purpose? Besides you haters, there is more evidence to come!
Now, lets talk about the numerous occasions in which various pokémon react to our protagonists. In several spots across the games, you are told that pokémon react to your presence somehow. Besides the general ease with which you capture new monsters and the way you seem to connect with them throughout the games, we are told in several places that pokémon sense something special about our heroes. One time we are told that pokémon INSIDE THEIR POKEBALLS are shuddering when you come near. We’re told that legendary pokémon sense something special about you and somehow accept you, when no one else in the history of the world has been able to up until this point. Are you just special? Or are these pokemon reacting because they sense you are somehow like them? We’ve seen that most pokémon are social beings, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they could sense pokémon DNA in our protagonists.
Cynthia’s appearance in Generation 5 seems to hint at some deeper connection between you and your predecessors as well. She mentions that your eyes are strangely familiar. She says you remind her of someone from her past. This happens a few times across the games where you interact with multigenerational characters. This could just mean that you are all great trainers, but specifically mentioning your eyes in Generation 5 suggests that there is a familial or genetic link between you. In fact, this was the event that triggered this line of thought in my mind and drove me to research this topic further.
The other thing I noticed about this encounter with Cynthia is that you don’t speak. In fact, your character never speaks. It would be incredibly easy to program a little speech for any of the protagonists across the games, especially when it appears that you are having conversations with people. But you never do. None of the protagonists ever speak. People just seem to understand them, just like pokémon seem to just obey them. Why? I would guess this suggests that they are telepathic in some way and either they cannot speak or choose not to. That’s why people and pokémon seem to understand what a great person the heroes are and why they mention how you REMIND them of someone else: the last trainer that communicated without speaking.
Corporate Espionage
This line of reasoning gets even stronger when you consider the very first game. Who is the ultimate pokémon in that generation? Mewtwo. Where did he come from? Team Rocket scientists. What does he look like? He looks like a Mew they tried to turn into a humanoid. He looks like a human-pokémon hybrid, only far more imperfect than Red. He can control the minds of other pokémon, just like a very special trainer seems to be able to. He can communicate telepathically, just like Red and his successors seem to be able to. Mewtwo seems to be more pokémon than human and Red is clearly more human than pokémon, but I think they are both sides of the same coin.
And guess who is in direct conflict with Team Rocket from the very beginning? The Pokémon Professors. They send Red out and help him defeat Team Rocket. Why? Well, maybe its just because they are evil. But maybe this was a case of corporate espionage. Maybe they wanted to make sure Rocket didn’t perfect the technology that the Professors were already deep into their research on.
The Hybrids
But lets rewind a moment and look at our protagonists. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use the names Red, Gold, Brendan, Lucas and Hilbert even though there are opposite trainers to pick from in these games. Whatever color or gender the player picks, the protagonists story is the same. The first thing to note about this crew is that with the exception of Brendan, none of them seem to have fathers. With our human-pokémon hybrid theory in place, this makes a lot of sense. Depending on how these hybrids were created, they possibly needed a female human to give birth to their creation, but having a father was probably unnecessary.
For that matter, being fatherless means the kid doesn’t have some kind of immediate male mentor around, which makes them more pliable to the will of the Professors. The mother’s they chose, paid or coerced into giving birth to and raising these creations seem to be resigned to their offsprings fate anyways. One mother in the series famously says that she supposes all boys grow up to leave home one day and have adventures. They actually don’t in real life, nor do they in the world of pokémon, as we see lots of young people and young adults doing other jobs who seem to have never had an adventure anything like the plots of the games. Of course, that statement makes a lot more sense if its taken in the context I’m suggesting. All of these hybrids are MEANT to go out on adventures, so one of their mothers just saying “I guess its time” seems a lot less stupid if she knew from the time the child was conceived that it was meant for some other purpose.
Brendan presents a special problem because his supposed father is a gym leader, but I can easily hand-wave that little obstacle. Suppose Brendan’s clone had a different personality than the rest. Maybe he needed a strong role model to emulate and none of the Professors were up to the challenge. It wouldn’t be that hard to pay a gym leader to pretend for you, especially one that lives several towns away and doesn’t appear to actually have anything to do with Brendan’s life.
This leads me to two more points about the Professors plots. First up: systematic brainwashing. When the games launch you meet the pokémon professor who asks you some basic questions about yourself and then indoctrinates you into the world of pokémon and becoming a trainer. He actually introduces someone who is supposed to be your best friend and rival as if you’ve never really met. Given all the other ways the professors seem to manipulate you throughout the games (more on that in a moment) it wouldn’t surprise me if this is an example of their brainwashing. They tell you everything you need to know about yourself. They feed you the propaganda you need to get started and give you the equipment you need to succeed. You don’t know any of this before the game starts because you are a clone, one that is probably mute, communicates telepathically and probably have some deep-seeded confusion about your place in the world. Fortunately the Professors are there to reveal that information to you, right?
The second thing I wanted to point out about the Professors is that they seem to always know when the protagonist needs help and everyone in the world seems to be prepared to help you on their behalf. It’s like they know where you are and what you are doing at all times. That considered, take a moment to think about the PokéDex. What is it REALLY? It already has all the pokémon in a region numbered. You aren’t discovering or investigating these pokémon. They are already known! The truth is that the Dex is just a convenient reason to send you out on your adventure and a tool the professors use to monitor your progress. Your every move is watched, recorded and analyzed by the Professors, all under the guise of collecting information about pokémon.
Oh, and lets talk about starters for a moment. According to the games, everyone gets a starter pokémon when they reach a certain age, but how many trainers do you encounter that have one of the starting species across any of the games? Maybe one in five hundred trainers has one. These are incredibly rare and special species that evolve in three stages and seem perfectly suited for the protagonists’ adventures. I would guess these might actually be specially designed species, meant to be partners for the hybrids and their compatriots.
Rivals
So what about the rivals, you ask? Where did they come from and why are they out there racing with you? I believe they are some kind of control group used to compare our protagonists against. They are a human being or potentially another hybrid, sent on the same adventure with the purpose of comparing results. Perhaps Red was a Human-Mew hybrid and Blue was hybridized with Articuno and the Professors needed to know which DNA was stronger when mixed with a human. Perhaps Lucas was a new and improved hybrid and Dawn was a human child raised to be the ultimate human trainer, as a test to see if the hybrids were staying ahead of other advances in pokémon training techniques. Maybe Silver is just being a jerk as a tool to drive Gold to succeed.
“But doesn’t that violate your observation about weak human trainers?” I can already hear the haters grumbling. Yes and No. Perhaps it suggests that given the right conditioning a human being can be nearly as good as the hybrids, but it also might suggest something that takes this theory for an even more ominous turn. What if close proximity to the hybrids can make humans better, just like it makes pokémon better? What if being exposed to them, working alongside them and partnering with them makes a human as much better than others as it does for the hybrid’s trained pogeys?
Escalation
Think about it for a minute. After defeating a gym leader and returning to re-battle them, what’s different? They are always stronger and so are their monsters. Each time you face your rival or one of the games villain bosses, that character seems to have grown in power in significant ways. Shoot, after defeating the Elite Four, it seems as though the whole world gets powered up. Random trainers in cities and along roadsides suddenly have more powerful pokémon at their disposal and new species appear in the wild. It’s as if the mere presence of the hybrid makes everyone more powerful and dare I say… more violent? High-level moves like Sheer Cold or Close Combat are certainly more violent than Scratch or Growl. So if the Professors learned that this happened with Red, or presumably, whoever was Red’s predecessor in this chain of experimentation, why are they continuing the experiments? Why make entire regions wilder, more dangerous and more violent?
More ominous than that is that the Professors keep at it. Pause for a moment to consider that after the events of Red/Blue, Red the trainer leaves the civilized world and hides in the mountains to train his pokémon. The result? He manages to get his pogeys up to levels 75-82 but no higher after three full years of training. It seems he’s reached his theoretical limits. But then when Gold comes along as the new Pokémon League Champion he defeats Red! Just a few years after Red reached his limits, the Professors’ next experiment defeats him and even then, they continue to build better hybrids.
These better and better hybrids eventually tame even greater powers along the way. While Red might be able to defeat the evil Mewtwo in battle, Lucas eventually captures the creators of the pokémon universe, bending time and space to his command and crossing over into other dimensions. These hybrids are accumulating godlike powers and unleashing stronger and stronger pokémon upon the world as they do and still the Professors keep pressing for newer and better versions.
Conclusion
So forget about the petty thefts of Rattatas perpetrated by Team Rocket for a moment and think for a moment: What are the Pokémon Professors up to? Why would they throw all medical and scientific morality aside, engage in human-pokémon hybridization experiments, brainwash and control their subjects and then ultimately direct them to capture and control godlike creatures with immense powers? Is it just for the sake of knowledge? Is it to stop renegade organizations like Rocket, Magma or Galactic from taking over the world? Or is there something more sinister afoot?
The story you are playing in Pokémon games is just propaganda viewed through the eyes of a naïve child, directed by secretive and dangerous forces. The Pokémon Professors are not kindly old grandfathers who need help researching critters they could learn about by taking a walk or calling someone two town away. If Red and all the subsequent protagonists are these hybrids, then that pretty neatly covers all the game lore, mechanics and plot points you encounter along the way and reveals why all the adults seem like idiots throughout the games. They aren’t. They just have a purpose for their created hybrid and in the mind of the 10 year old protagonist, their actions and explanations seem perfectly valid. Just don’t expect Nintendo to ever confess to any of this. They are clearly part of the conspiracy.
