12-30-2016, 08:54 PM
Technologically very much yes. I started thinking about it one day and I realized that the Pokemon universe bears all the hallmarks of a post-apocalyptic civilization. They have advanced technology, especially medical, but at the same time there's no infrastructure to support its development. Cars are almost unheard of; people get from town to town on unfinished paths. Sometimes there's a road built to make biking easier. Yet they have devices that shrink pokemon, teleporters, ways to store physical objects in digital space, etc.
So my headcanon (in very brief form) is that WWIII starts but is averted before the world is completely wiped out, although the United States, Korea, and the Middle East are pretty much gone. Just as the world is catching its collective breath, massive earthquakes occur planetwide, demolishing much of the remaining infrastructure. The worlds fault lines crack open into yawning rifts, and energy starts flowing through them. This energy alters all life it touches (into pokemon, although that name doesn't exist yet), so people have to start dealing with fire-breathing hedgehogs and such. People attribute it to all kinds of things including God's punishment. Some groups hold that humanity is a plague, and one of them builds a superweapon intended to destroy all humans where several fault lines meet (the Ultimate Weapon from X/Y). They manage to stop this, but about ten years later, a similar group uses magnemite (which were created in a lab in an energy experiment) to hijack a rocket launch and redirect an asteroid into the earth. Ground pokemon are used successfully to avert an extinction-level event, but it punctures the earth's crust (again in North America, which gets no breaks in my story). This event creates almost all the legendary pokemon in a final burst of energy (they're found afterward in the crater). Some of them go on rampages, but after a few years they're all dormant, hidden, or contained.
The world starts recovering again, although things like the internet are still basically out-of-commission. Several technologies have been developed based on pokemon energy (for example, a treatment for cancer, as it seems to mitigate radiation). The energy itself stops flowing after the asteroid incident, and the geographically rather separated remaining regions of the world start to form their own governments. Big infrastructure is globally rejected and sustainable communities (with the help of pokemon, who can replace a lot of heavy equipment and such) become the norm. Gangs are a problem, since pokeball technology more or less allows someone to carry an army with them, so proto-League groups form in opposition to them and become the de facto governments until they're formalized into the various Leagues.
Samuel Oak's grandfather Corey is in the middle of all this; pre-war he had a Master's degree in biochemistry and a Ph.D in theoretical physics, post-war he became one of the leaders in pokemon research. He and most of the other researchers hide or destroy most of their work in the wake of the two global catastrophes it's brought on, but sometimes Corey tells his grandson stories about the old days.
So my headcanon (in very brief form) is that WWIII starts but is averted before the world is completely wiped out, although the United States, Korea, and the Middle East are pretty much gone. Just as the world is catching its collective breath, massive earthquakes occur planetwide, demolishing much of the remaining infrastructure. The worlds fault lines crack open into yawning rifts, and energy starts flowing through them. This energy alters all life it touches (into pokemon, although that name doesn't exist yet), so people have to start dealing with fire-breathing hedgehogs and such. People attribute it to all kinds of things including God's punishment. Some groups hold that humanity is a plague, and one of them builds a superweapon intended to destroy all humans where several fault lines meet (the Ultimate Weapon from X/Y). They manage to stop this, but about ten years later, a similar group uses magnemite (which were created in a lab in an energy experiment) to hijack a rocket launch and redirect an asteroid into the earth. Ground pokemon are used successfully to avert an extinction-level event, but it punctures the earth's crust (again in North America, which gets no breaks in my story). This event creates almost all the legendary pokemon in a final burst of energy (they're found afterward in the crater). Some of them go on rampages, but after a few years they're all dormant, hidden, or contained.
The world starts recovering again, although things like the internet are still basically out-of-commission. Several technologies have been developed based on pokemon energy (for example, a treatment for cancer, as it seems to mitigate radiation). The energy itself stops flowing after the asteroid incident, and the geographically rather separated remaining regions of the world start to form their own governments. Big infrastructure is globally rejected and sustainable communities (with the help of pokemon, who can replace a lot of heavy equipment and such) become the norm. Gangs are a problem, since pokeball technology more or less allows someone to carry an army with them, so proto-League groups form in opposition to them and become the de facto governments until they're formalized into the various Leagues.
Samuel Oak's grandfather Corey is in the middle of all this; pre-war he had a Master's degree in biochemistry and a Ph.D in theoretical physics, post-war he became one of the leaders in pokemon research. He and most of the other researchers hide or destroy most of their work in the wake of the two global catastrophes it's brought on, but sometimes Corey tells his grandson stories about the old days.
