Pokéballs!

Today I'll discuss one of my favorite topics: Pokémon! Well, just one aspect of Pokémon, really-- and not necessarily my favorite one, at that: pokéballs. (please note: my only source material will be the games, not the anime, manga, or card game, as they are what I am most familiar with)

To be fair, pokéballs are pretty incredible gadgets. They are able to store sentient matter intact; they can shrink in size; they can be stored as data in the Pokémon Box System. How is this?

I suspect pokéballs use a technology similar to Star Trek's transporter technology. In particular, the Next Generation episode "Relics" comes to mind, in which Montgomery Scott is able to survive intact for 80 years-- without aging!-- by keeping himself in a shuttlecraft pattern buffer.

Still Pokémon didn't start out terribly technologically-advanced. From the myths and legends and folk-tales gathered from across the five regions (Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova), we learn that at first, pokémon and humans lived separately, but that pokémon came and helped humans occasionally. Some humans even managed to befriend pokémon. Though I don't recall it ever being explicitly stated, I'm fairly confident that these first "trainers" didn't use pokéballs; that the pokémon stayed of their own free will; and that battling between such "trainers" was uncommon at best. Sure, I imagine there were farmers who raised Mareep and Flaafy for wool and Miltanks for milk; ranchers broke and raised Ponyta, Rapidash, and Tauros for transportation; people who placed Goldeen and Seaking into ponds as part of a park; ...you get the idea.

In Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal, we learn that seeds called apricorns were used as some of the first-- if not the first-- pokémon "capture" devices. When hollowed out in a certain way, apricorns could hold pokémon, with each apricorn being especially effective against a specific kind of pokémon: heavy, fast, able to evolve with a Moon Stone, etc. It's unclear whether they used technology similar to the modern pokéball, but they definitely pre-date the current models by quite a bit!

From the first generation of games, we learn that the box system was recently invented (by Bill), so people either could not have more than 6 pokémon at a time, or they had to carry all their pokémon around with them; though I suppose it's possible pokémon could be stored in physical locations, such as a research facility or at home (and when you needed a pokémon in storage, there was a Poké Postal Service in place).

This brings us to modern innovations: the specialty pokéball. Interestingly, these new pokéballs are inspired from apricorns. They are a sort of revival, much like our own (Western) history of medicine-- where we started by using roots, moved on to synthric medications, and are now at a point where there's a bit of a return to herbal medicine. (this is not to say synthetics re going anywhere, just that we now have these specialty pokéballs as an option)

And there you have it! Some ruminations on the pokéball. There are related topics, such as pokémon capture (relevant to the Pokémon Ranger series); those will be for a later time. For now, I leave you with these images of "Hunson Is Groovy" 's take on the pokéball: http://www.halolz.com/2012/01/25/wtf-is-a-pokeball/