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rabbitholeresearch · 11 months

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The Trucking Truth: Why is there a random truck in Pokemon Red/Blue?

Death can go one of two ways: Either the brain is dying or the body is dying. Now brain death is commonly caused by major injuries to the brain, be it a bullet or a concussion of some kind.

However, there are also NEAR death experiences. Doctors basically theorize that people who have “seen” the afterlife are those that, through a lack of oxygen, have some form of delusions and suffer from something called Hypoxia, which is basically the body isn’t getting enough oxygen where it needs to go. It’s one of the reasons that you start seeing black spots in your vision if you hold your breath too long.

Now, what does all this have to do with Pokemon? Well, what if, Pokemon wasn’t real? I mean, it’s obviously not real. No matter what shifting realities we try, Pokemon just isn’t real. It’s the creation of a man named Satoshi Tajiri.

Arigato, Taijiri-Dono<3

What I mean is, what if the entire world of Pokemon is the mind of a ten-year-old unraveling as he dies or is already dead?

Okay, so let’s first gather what we know about Pokemon. Let’s go off of Gen1’s Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue (maybe Yellow if you squint) because... it’s the beginning why not?

Pokemon is a game about a ten-year-old boy going out of his home Pallet Town in order to compete in a league of PETA-infuriating dogfighting. You win against eight major challenges (The Gym Leaders) and go on to the Elite Four and the eventual champion who is your rival. You beat the game. That’s it. It’s pretty simple. 10/10. Gen1 remake when?

The premise on its own is pretty easy to understand. I mean, a child can play this game and feel nothing, except maybe have to ask why there’s a ghost in the Lavender Town’s Pokemon Tower and try and understand what all the stones are.

Okay, so, a ten-year-old boy. So, why a ten-year-old boy, well because that’s what we get in Pokemon Red and Blue. We get a young lad who is ready to go out into the world and catch creatures that strangely look like creatures from our world. Now, this is where it gets weird.

In the original Red/Blue, the PokeDex entry states the following for the Pokemon, Parasect: “A host-parasite pair in which the parasite mushroom has taken over the host bug. Prefers damp places.”

Alright. Pretty easy. The entry for Yellow says “The bug host is drained of energy by the mushrooms on its back. They appear to do all the thinking.” That’s mildly horrifying actually. Pretty sure we found the inspiration for The Last of Us Clickers.

But then there’s Pokemon Stadium. Think of Pokemon Stadium as the original Pokemon Go. Basically, you were able to transfer your Pokemon from RBY to this Nintendo 64 game to battle them with friends.

That...actually sounds like a lot of fun. My brother has a 64 and a penchant for collecting games. I might be able to convince him this could be a fun game night.

Now, Pokemon Stadium, the entry states that again the bug host is controlled by the poisonous mushrooms on its back that scatter spores. These same spores are used for medicinal purposes in China.

That’s where my idea starts to come into light. We see references to our world all the time in Pokemon, even dating back to the reference Brock makes on the Minnesota Vikings in the original Pokemon movie, Mewtwo Strikes Back.

The point is: Our world is SOMEHOW connected to the world of Pokemon. And how is that? The unraveling dream of a child. How could that be possible? How else would a person think to look at a mouse and wonder what would happen if it were able to zap you? A child would have that level of creativity.

A child’s imagination is astounding. Kids are generally pretty absorbent for information. You teach a kid how to ride a bike and it doesn’t matter how many years pass, that kid will always remember how to ride said bike.

Children are incredibly creative! Kids can look at something and create their own stories, and THAT is the tragedy that is Pokemon.

Let’s take a look at such Pokemon: Magnemite and Voltorb. A pile of magnets and a Pokeball. Now let’s say maybe kiddo had just a regular ball in his room, like one of those rubber, or maybe some silicone balls from Wal-Mart. You know, the ones that are in that weird cage.

This ball, for all intents and purposes, is red and white. Actually, thinking about the way it looks, it could very well be one of those gatcha balls from those vending machines. You know, the ones you pinch open and get some cheap ring?

Wait, actually, that could be a theory too, I’m going to write that for later.

Voltorb is a ball of some kind. And Magnemite is magnets. Weirdly enough this would also explain why Ekans is just Snake but backward. Okay? Got it? GREAT. Now, let’s get to the worst part of this whole thing. This child is dying and is possibly in a coma that is slowly unraveling.

Comatose is usually described as sleeping, which yeah. It looks like that, but only from the outside perspective. Dreaming happens in the REM-Stage of sleeping. Dreaming itself is usually based on events and things you’ve seen, which is probably why I have horrible nightmares every time I play Resident Evil despite knowing they’re not real, they feel pretty real to me in my dream as it is the only thing my brain has consumed for the last 10 hours and I will happily do it again for Karl Heisenburg.

Where was I? Oh right. Comatose.

So what a comatose is actually is basically being unconscious for long periods of time. Not like passing out and waking up a few hours later, mind you, but more like being out for days or even months at a time. What it means to be conscious is to be both awake and aware. Or at least, one of two things. I’m pretty sure there was an episode of House MD that I saw a clip of that the comatose patient was actually awake the whole time, but just couldn’t respond or anything. Like the patient was just trapped in their own head, which let’s be honest is even more terrifying than falling into a full comatose state. This I found out is called locked-in syndrome and it’s not actually a coma because only one stage of consciousness is disrupted rather than both, and that is awakeness.

The brain is where the comatose theory falls out of place actually. See when in a coma, the brain uses about 10-20% less energy than it would in the deepest part of REM sleep, which is crazy considering in REM Sleep, the Neuron Firing Rate, or NFR, drops down almost 30%! Take into consideration that, when entering NREM, that’s non-rapid-eye-movement for those at home, your energy consumption drops to 85%. Take all that into consideration, just falling asleep uses 45% less energy than your normal life. Now, in a comatose state alone, your brain is using up to 60% less energy than it does just by sleeping. This means those movies about comatose dreams are all FALSE. CASE CLOSED. THEORY DEBUNKED but not entirely. Because that means something much, much worse. The child, or The Player, is dying, but not in a coma.

The conditions of this death are obviously varied, purely because we only have Pokemon to go off of. The Player doesn’t eat or drink anything, so we can rule out starvation, actually, because the child has never experienced true hunger or thirst. Which is honestly kinda relieving, we can rule out neglect at the very least! But what does that mean then? How is this child dying? And that, my friends, is a car crash.

Child Passenger Safety is a big deal, as it should be! I mean, it’s a tiny human with almost zero autonomy! They don’t know life or death scenarios! They’re too busy playing their GameBoy!

According to the CDC website’s page on child safety (which by the way surprised me that the CDC had that information, but hey! I’ll take it!), in the United States alone in 2018, 636 children, ranging from ages 12 and under, died in motor vehicle crashes, with 97,000 injured. Without knowing the state of those injuries, that could mean anything between a small booboo and a literal amputation needed. That’s frightening! It also states that 33% of those deaths were due to the child not being buckled up. Click it or ticket it, or in this case, click it or get thrown so far out of the vehicle that you literally start pulling a Buzz Lightyear and fall with style to your death!

Now, this is the part where it will get really bad actually. Like, after this research, I actually had to sit down and just hug my Mimikyu plush because this really, really affected me. Alright. Still here? Okay, let’s just take a deep breath to brace ourselves...and go.

Ejections happen in one of two ways, they happen during a rolling vehicle incident, which is pretty self-explanatory. The vehicle rolls in just the right way and whoop! You’re no longer in that vehicle! In this case, I’m guessing you’re more likely to fall out of the vehicle than you would be practically YEETED out. The second way is the lack of a seat belt. So, let’s say the child was in the passenger seat, mindlessly playing Nintendogs then ahhhh...we’ll say Dad was driving. Dad is speeding down the street, probably to a friend’s house, not that far to get there in a drive, but far enough that walking with a ten-year-old seemed tedious.

The Dad is probably going to buckle up out of reflex, but rolled his eyes when his child decided, “Eh. Seatbelts are for nerds.”

There’s a crash, let’s say, he did a rolling stop at an intersection, not thinking anything of it, and is T-Boned on the driver’s side or even the tail end. That’s not enough to actually completely eject the father or even the child. I told you. This is gonna get a bit crazy here. A T-Bone wouldn’t do it.

So what if we assume that Dad took a turn way too fast and the vehicle does roll, resulting in that ejection? An adult MIGHT survive, a child, not so much, but we also have to consider the vehicle itself which brings me to the famous truck in Red and Blue! You know THE truck! The truck that supposedly had Mew hiding under it! Why? Why is this here!? Why is this the only vehicle ever in this game that doesn’t actually get used but SS Anne will sail away shortly after you leave it?

That is because the truck is Dad’s truck. It’s why it doesn’t move anymore. It’s just scenery. The Player doesn’t have to do anything with it, except seeing it, because The Child doesn’t want to interact with it.

The reason I bring up the truck is that, honestly, a pick-up like that isn’t too safe for kids. They’re meant for moving massive things. They’re meant for durability in tugging things like boats, trailers, and even construction equipment. They aren’t meant to protect anything but the driver, and even then, they’re not strong enough to do so.

If Dad gets in a head-on collision, he’ll be lucky if he survives WITH his seatbelt on! In a head-on with no seatbelt, an adult would be ejected. That’s because the kinetic energy in your body is still going at the speed that you were going prior to that collision.

Which, by the way, is why when you are asked for your weight for your driver’s license don’t FREAKING LIE. YOU NEED TO TELL THEM YOUR EXACT WEIGHT AT THE TIME AND NOT TELL THEM “Oh well I’m actually 130 but I’ll tell them I’m 120” NO NO NO NO ABSOLUTELY NOT. If you do that, the math the responding people on the team might not be able to find you after your ejection. Why? Because your weight and your speed are the way they can calculate how far you were launched.

What we see is the Child trapped in the afterlife, fighting his way through with his imagination in order to beat the Pokemon League and become the Champion. In this case, the league is the anchor of Life, and becoming a Champion would be passing on. That’s why there’s not a whole lot to do post-game in Pokemon Red and Blue. There’s not really meant to be anything more. That’s why, when we DO see ghost children, they’re all little girls. For the Child, a young boy, seeing a ghost boy would be too much of a shock for him. It’s almost like he knows he’s dead, but hasn’t quite accepted it yet, which is why you, The Player, are given the option to help those ghost girls in later games.

And actually thinking about it, that’s why you have to tell Professor Oak your name and your rival’s name. The Child is losing his sense of reality and thus himself, so he’s essentially forgotten quite a bit, which adds to the idea of it being some type of injury to the brain, but then also naming your rival Butthead or FARTS is funny. You’re ten. Who cares. It’s funny.

But it’s also why things like the REAL world are referenced, the most notable references being China and the Minnesota Vikings. They were things the child has heard or maybe even seen in day-to-day life. I played Pokemon Blue in the living room during Super Bowl season while my parents cheered on the Dallas Cowboys. I don’t get the sport, but I heard about and saw enough games with my family that I could see their logo and know it immediately, even as a kid, and enough toys that I had were “Made in China” so it could work. It would also explain why all the professors are named after trees! One or maybe even both parents were into botany of some kind.

There’s a possibility that, while The Child was playing whatever, Dad got in a wreck and the kid doesn’t remember any of it. Just that the truck was there, and his imagination.

｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆　　｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

Research Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n7eDDAYCrE What happens to the brain as you die?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KquuVq2Pok What happens to the brain during a coma?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GGzc3x9WJU Why do we dream?

https://www.dw.com/en/the-science-of-dying/a-48372592 The Science of Dying

https://pokemon.neoseeker.com/wiki/Mewtwo_Strikes_Back_(transcript) Mewtwo Strikes Back Script

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5732842/ Brain Energetics During the Sleep-Wake Cycle

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/child_passenger_safety/cps-factsheet.html#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20636%20children%2012,can%20make%20a%20lifesaving%20difference. Child Passenger Safety

https://www.rguajardofirm.com/blog/how-vehicle-ejections-happen-in-an-accident.html Vehicle Ejection

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Parasect_(Pok%C3%A9mon) Parasect Information

#pokeblogging #pokemon #pokeblog #pokemon theory #theory #tw: death #tw: car crash #tw: car accident #research essay

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