The Secret Mythology of Pokémon: Pokémon Origins and Legends from Generations I through IX

By Miguel Carvalho Abrantes

Are you ready to uncover the mysteries behind your favourite Pokémon species?
Written by a college researcher on Classics and Comparative Mythology, this fascinating book delves into the origins and legends behind over 700 creatures from the Pokémon universe, including all the first 251 and most of those from generations III-IX. With captivating stories and curiosities about each entry, this book is essential reading for fans of the original games and Pokémon GO. Discover the fascinating world of Pokémon in a whole new way and catch'em all by ordering your copy today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miguel Carvalho Abrantes
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9791222097381

Book preview

The Secret Mythology of Pokémon

Second Edition

Miguel Carvalho Abrantes

Preface to the Second Edition

At first, this new edition of The Secret Mythology of Pokémon was planned with just the basic intention of updating multiple entries with recently found information, and in an attempt to improve the overall quality of the text while preparing for an entirely new book on this subject. However, across time it evolved in an admittedly unplanned and unexpected way, never with the intention of really writing a book on all the 1000+ forms of beings from the games, but in order to create a work on the myths and legends behind as many Pokémon as possible. So, this edition expands the original number of 251 in-game forms to one that goes way over 650, but in order to do so some concessions had to be made, and they deserved to be presented here:

As before, the first and second chapters go through all the Pokémon from the initial two generations and attempt to explain, in brief detail and in a way fit for all audiences, their individual connections with our real-world. If you haven’t read it before, overall people seem to have enjoyed that content in the first edition of the work; but if you did read it before, this new edition improves the text for some entries and adds some additional research, now even explaining, for example, why Machamp has four arms.

The third chapter briefly reports on some of the creatures that were originally going to be in the first or second series of games, but which ultimately did not make it into the final version. In this new edition at least one additional creature was added, because I truly felt it was a very noteworthy one.

The fourth chapter, the first entirely new one of this book, goes through all the creatures from the third, fourth and fifth generations of Pokémon and briefly tries to explain their underlying myths and legends, when they actually have ones. In it, you will find some very short entries, usually for forms which did not seem that noteworthy (e.g. Barboach is simply described as a catfish), but also some more extended ones. Although I can acknowledge that this may disappoint some readers, since I did not follow the same level of detail as in the previous chapters, this flaw has a good reason behind it – if I still played those games, I never explored them as much as the previous ones, and so the research I conducted across the years on each of the creatures they present was never as detailed. For that reason, what you will read in this chapter are essentially my quick personal notes on all those beings.

The fifth chapter briefly presents some of the creatures which were eventually withheld from the third generation of games (as of today, I have yet to locate any completely confirmed beings left out of the fourth or fifth generations). What is currently known about them is extremely limited, usually just the result of 1-3 Pokédex entries, but I felt fans of the series could also be interested in the topic.

The sixth and final chapter goes through some of the Pokémon from generations VI through IX and attempts to present the stories behind what I considered to be the most notable ones. They were generally selected based on at least one of three criteria:

1- Their direct connection to the first two generations (e.g. Sirfetch'd and Cursola);

2- Specially interesting beings (e.g. Cutiefly and Dachsbun);

3- Particularly strange beings (e.g. Wugtrio and Flamigo).

Admittedly, this selection was a purely personal one, and your favourite Pokémon may not be included there at all, but I should note that I never directly played those games, and so writing about them was essentially a journey of complete discovery, in the sense I was repeatedly confronted with some completely new creatures and had to find some way to interpret them before I could briefly write on their connections to our real world.

All things considered, this second edition of The Secret Mythology of Pokémon resulted from an attempt to try and present as many creatures – and their stories – to readers, but seeking to do so required an increasingly imperfect approach to the subject, and I feel that I personally have to apologize for it. In an ideal world I would have now played all of the newer games, one by one, and researched all of their creatures for as many hours as it took to completely get them, but for basic reasons of health, time and money doing so is not possible for me any more. And so, what I attempt to present here is, most of all, a pure labour of love designed to invite and challenge players of this famous series into thinking more about their favourite digital creatures, which I hope that at least some readers will end up enjoying – and, in all honesty, if I also inspire them to continue their own research on this entire subject, even better!

Thank you very much for reading,

Miguel Carvalho Abrantes

Preface to the First Edition

The story behind this book began in early 2021. At the time I had recently published a book titled The Secret Mythology of Final Fantasy, where I tried to explain where many real-world mythological elements present in the famous series of games came from. Many people seem to have enjoyed it, a few thought it was a bit simplistic and too quick of a read, but its purpose was the one of trying to present to all kinds of audiences a very large set of mythological informations that they would likely not be aware of. A sequel soon followed, about the origins of the weapons and items from the same game series. A few months later, while talking about that whole subject at an international conference, someone asked me about Pokémon. Specifically, since I had written these other books, they suggested I write one where I explored the origins behind each of the creatures that appear all across the famous series from Japan. The whole prospect seemed absolutely daunting – there are now almost 1000 different forms for those beasts – and I hadn’t been playing any of the newer games, and so I quickly admitted that perhaps I would not be the best person to research for, and eventually write, such a book.

But then, when I talked to friends about the whole idea of a book on the origins of Pikachu and its famous companions, everyone seemed absolutely fascinated by it. Conceptually, it would be a book where each creature would be briefly presented, its image would be shown, and the individual elements composing it would be explained in detail. However, when I tried to contact the Pokémon Company for direct permission to follow through with such a work, which clearly would require their collaboration due to such an intense image usage, I never got any answers back. And so, since (legally) I could not use an enormous number of images from each of the species they had created, I felt it would be impossible to continue the project in its original complete form, since I wasn’t even familiar with any of the newer creatures, their respective lores or even how they looked like. But, at the same time, the whole concept still felt like a very interesting one, and so I decided to readapt it to include absolutely no copyrighted images, along with just the 251 creatures I was familiar with from back in the day, since the last game I had played, at the time, was Soul Silver, a remade version of my second experience with the series, following my initial experience with the western Red version.

For such a project, I started by compiling the English names, the elemental types, and the Japanese names for those 251 creatures. Then, slowly going through them one by one, I wrote notes on what I felt were their respective origins – although a large majority of them simply come from an exaggeration of real animals, a significant number also have mythological stories behind them, and I felt those explained obscure aspects of beings such as Magikarp, Jynx, Girafarig, or Tyranitar (among many others). I followed by comparing my personal findings and theories with three online resources, specifically Bulbapedia, the Pokémon Wiki, and Serebii, eventually realizing how my own information compared and contrasted with the one gathered by other people. And so, you can find all the information I compiled in the first two chapters, along with some occasional jokes here and there, to lighten the mood and make it equally interesting for much younger readers.

However, when I finished all that research, I felt that something was still missing. Some specific creatures, such as Slowpoke or Girafarig, had clearly incomplete stories, which could not be fully understood even after resorting to their respective Pokédex entries across multiple games. And so, I felt

a third chapter had to be added to my research and this book, one about the creatures you have likely never seen before, because they were once proposed internally, but are not accessible in the final version of the games – and yet, here and there, their former existence explained significant elements behind the species we did end up getting. It is naturally a short chapter, given the very limited information we have about each of them, but I have never seen that kind of content in a book before, and my hope is that including such additional content may inspire others to conduct further research on those beings – and perhaps even inspire the Pokémon Company to publish an official work on the history and evolution of their famous series. I would instantly buy it on day one, and I am sure so would you. This book is completely unofficial, but we can all hope that a fully official one is released one day!

To complete this introductory chapter, I hope you enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed researching for it, trying to figure out why each Pokémon species was first conceived and later readapted the way it was. It is a book designed for all kinds of audiences, from young kids to all those people who remember these creatures from back in their youth, and I truly hope each reader finds here at least some kind of trivia they did not know before, and that may help them enjoy the games, shows and comics even more.

Index

Pokémon Generation I.............................1

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Pokémon Generation II...........................75

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Forgotten Pokémon from Generations I and II........129

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Pokémon Generations III, IV and V................153

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Forgotten Pokémon from Generation III.............243

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Some Pokémon from Generations VI, VII, VIII and IX.247

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A Final Note..................................276

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Copyright © 2023 Miguel Carvalho Abrantes

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

The Pokémon series is copyright © The Pokémon Company International.

Pokémon Generation I

[1-3] Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, Venusaur

Japanese Name(s): Fushigidane, Fushigisou, Fushigibana

Type: Grass + Poison[1]

This species is essentially a frog-like being with an evolving plant appendage on its back, beginning with a simple seed which, across time, blooms into a complete flower – based on the English name one could assume that is a Venus Flytrap, but the Japanese name simply seems to call it a hana, which is a flower of no specific species, an idea which can be further supported by the fact the final form’s flower looks completely different from what its western name seems to suggest. A potential alternative is that Venus was used here as a reference to the goddess of love and beauty among the Romans, as if to say that the final form, with the open flower, is specially pretty.

Although this creature does not have a specially mythological origin, if you pay close attention to the Japanese names they all contain the word fushigi, which means strange. It is likely its strangeness comes from the fact it is a being composed by a mixture of plant and animal, unlike anything we seem to be aware of in our world today.

Across the years, the final form of this species got two additional new forms, Mega Venusaur and Gigantamax Venusaur. They appear to add nothing too significant to this lore, but the second of these deserves to be noted for the fact that its flower petals become so huge that it even covers the entire creature, which then has to attack with two vines, like Bulbasaur was frequently shown doing in the TV show.

[4-6] Charmander, Charmeleon, Charizard

Japanese Name(s): Hitokage, Rizardo, Rizaadon

Type: Fire + Flying

The Japanese name for this creature’s basic form makes it clear it is a fire lizard (hi plus tokage), following through with the basic idea of composing the three starters out of (potential) house pets. However, you may have certainly noticed that regardless of its form, this species’ tail is constantly on fire. Chances are that this is a reference to a western legend, dating all the way back to the Classical Antiquity, which states that Salamanders – either all of them, or just a very specific species – can live among fire without ever burning themselves. At least the English translators seem to have been familiar with this ancient legend, alluding to it in the name of this species’ basic form. The remaining names, in both languages, seem to refer to different kinds of reptiles, with the final form clearly resembling a western dragon[2], although, most ironically, it was not explicitly attributed a Dragon type.

This changed in recent years, with the addition of three new forms to Charizard. Mega Charizard X, coloured black and blue over a different kind of flame, finally gained that natural dragon status, while Mega Charizard Y makes its basic dragon features more noticeable. Specially interesting for the lore presented above is Gigantamax Charizard, where this being also gains horns and wings made out of literal fire, further establishing its connection with the Salamanders of European Legends.

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[7-9] Squirtle, Wartortle, Blastoise

Japanese Name(s): Zenigame, Kameru, Kamekkusu

Type: Water

This third starter is also a potential pet, a turtle, or kame in Japanese. The strange look of its tail in the first two forms is certainly a reference to the Minogame, a legendary creature from Japan which has seaweed growing out of its tail and supposedly lives for 10000 years – a very unusual characteristic, but one which is nonetheless associated with Wartortle in some Pokédex entries. But why hasn’t the final evolution got the exact same tail, which would here make perfect sense? At one point it actually did, but this species’ original final form was eventually substituted for one from another entirely different creature (whose initial one was also completely removed from the game), leading to a final evolution which is now significantly different from its previous two portrayals.

Eventually, the final form of this species got two additional forms, Mega Blastoise and Gigantamax Blastoise, which make its weaponry even more noticeable. Doing so finally cut the entire cord to the two younger forms, which have no weapons on their back, while also assuring that we will likely never get to capture the initial being the final evolution came from.

Finally, to dispel an idea once and for all, I’ve heard multiple people stating that