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Dreams Have No Consequences

Portraying Dorothy’s time in Oz in a dream makes all the stressful things she has experienced, and all the choices she has made (minimal as they were; she is largely passive in Oz) simply meaningless because they were inconsequential. Moreover, the fact her journey was specifically a dream just worsens how inconsequential it was and makes extracting any meaning from it weaker and less believable.

For comparison, consider the alternative of Dorothy’ journey in Oz just being her playing through a video game. When people play video games, they often have agency on the course of events in a game, or at least the order, speed, and style they use to explore its world and meet their goals. A video game also often requires skill (e.g., organized button pressing, memorizing elemental types to maximize damage in RPGs), and so victory is achieved by one’s own conscious effort, and rarely by happenstance. Furthermore, while a dream is a singular experience created from an unconscious jumble of brain activity that usually makes little if any sense and quickly fades away, a video game is something millions of people can experience and appreciate firsthand. Its characters may not be real, but they can be loved, and visited repeatedly, and people may bond with others over a love for the characters.

Dream Characters Don’t Matter

The premise of Dorothy’s journey being a dream re-contextualizes all the people she has met and cared for, and who cared for her in turn, as not real. Of all the ways her companions could have been portrayed as not real, this is the worst: as dream characters, they don’t in any way exist independently of Dorothy, and they exist in some rudimentary, transient state for only a few hours of Dorothy’s life, at that. In contrast, had Dorothy’s companions been, for example, robots, self-aware illusions, or AIs within a virtual world, then at least they would have existed beyond Dorothy, continued to exist after Dorothy’s journey, and so would have had the potential for a purpose beyond helping Dorothy.

The meaningless of Dorothy’s experience as a mere dream is further worsened by the movie introducing three farmhand characters who were clearly remixed into her companions: not only were her companions not real, but they weren’t even original.  In sum, her traveling companions were, at best, mere tools her troubled semi-conscious self generated, all for the apparent purpose of learning the lesson “there’s no place like home”, and it is only by happenstance that her companions appear to be coherent, likable, and believable people.

Self-Centered Premise

The idea of Oz-as-a-dream overemphasizes Dorothy’s importance to Oz to a narcissistic-seeming degree. Dorothy is not simply an especially important, perhaps super-powerful or prophesized protagonist. Rather, the entire world of Oz does revolve around Dorothy, in the sense her semiconscious mind not only created it with ease, but continually generates it, and it cannot be separated from Dorothy herself. By not existing outside of Dorothy’s dreaming mind, Oz appears to exist specifically for the protagonist, the only real, important person within it, to learn “lessons” of some sort.

It’s worth comparing The Wizard of Oz (1939) to The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005), which has a somewhat similar starting premise, dream elements, and portal fantasy genre. The protagonist, Max, created an entire dreamworld-planet and all its inhabitants by bringing his dreams to life via de facto reality warping superpowers, but understandably others initially doubt his dreamworld is real. However, the planet and its people do exist independently of Max’s dreams and Max himself, and can make their own decisions. This is made especially clear in the film’s climax, where one of the other planet’s villains wreaks havoc in the “real world” in a way that is clear to everyone.

Conclusion

Spikemuth's houses are all very close together, so upgrading its electrical transmission would require fewer materials. On the other hand, they are crammed so close together that there's less operating space, so homes might need substantial drilling or remodeling to install new cables, if the internal systems need upgrading.

Spikemuth's dense population, limited walking space, and crowd of people attending Piers' concerts could also make it useful for pilot studies of piezoelectric panels, like the Watt Nightclub in the Netherlands. Whether this would be viable as anything but a mildly tourist-attracting novelty depends on the Pokemon world's technology. Most likely, it would be a supplemental source of energy to keep the lights on if there's a problem with the wind turbines for a few days (barring excellent energy storage), or simply to emphasize Spikemuth as an town of renewable energy.

Specialty Agriculture

The fact the whole city is enclosed could also make it potentially useful for growing flowers sensitive to cold temperatures, although the market for this would be limited and subject to competition from better-prepared areas. To optimize this use, Spikemuth's roof would also have to be replaced with glass, or some other transparent material. Perhaps a more valuable and distinctive product is taking advantage of Spikemuth's dim environment to grow high-value blanched vegetables, such as white asparagus, and blanched cardoon, endive, leeks, and sea kale. Spikemuth's enclosed, dim, controlled conditions could be useful for growing mushrooms, and the existence of mushrooms as a camping ingredient suggests there's some market for it. Paras's tochukaso is evidently very valuable, and Paras tend to live in low-light environments or caves, so if Spikemuth can import Paras, it could cultivate tochukaso.

Minor Uses

Spikemuth is built as if it was originally a massive warehouse: it has thick walls around it and a roof. Theoretically, it could be retrofitted into a small indoor city: a novelty in the winter. Alternatively, the stabler weather conditions inside the city itself could provide plenty of room to create electronics sensitive to dust or fluctuations in temperature. They would have clean rooms, of course, and decotamination foyers, but the enclosure of the city itself could provide an additional layer of protecton.

Combination:

But, somewhere along the line in this story, someone probably bought a Togepi.

And how much did that someone pay?

Caveats

The following will assume there are not dedicated breeding operations for Pokémon for export to Orre, and will not be considering monetary inflation in the Pokémon world. These are all rough calculations.

Some Trainers probably too young for a job have Togepi. These can be presumed to be gifts, or a suggestion that the labor cost of obtaining Togepi is lower than calculated. As it is impossible for the player to breed a Pokémon in Pokémon XD, it is unclear whether there are breeding operations in Orre.

Base Labor Cost

The price of chucking six Pyukumuku back into the ocean is 20,000 P2, or, logically, ~3,333 P per Pyukumuku. Notably, one also has to find them, not just chuck them, so there's a search cost involved.

Pyukumuku weighs 2.6 pounds. A baseball, which will be used as a proxy for a Poke Ball, weighs about 5 ounces. There are 41.6 ounces in 2.6 pounds, so it would be, very roughly, 8.32 times harder to throw a Pyukumuku into the ocean than to throw a Poke Ball the same distance. So the labor cost of finding a Pokémon and throwing a single Poke Ball is, at minimum, roughly 401 P (or 400.6 P not rounded up) which converts to $3.14. The material cost of a single Poke Ball is 200 P ($1.56), so the total minimum capture cost would be roughly 601 P, or $4.70.

But, if all one is doing is throwing, not battling, one would want a stronger Poke Ball: an Ultra Ball, for example. That's 1,200 P in Johto and Kanto (outside of Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee), so the equivalent of $9.39.

Therefore, the minimum cost of obtaining a Togepi from the wild would be about 601 P ($4.70) if using one Poke Ball with a lucky shot, or to 1,601 P ($12.53) if using an Ultra Ball.

Cost Checking

With the exception of the Magikarp salesman, who’s a con artist, it is not generally legal to buy Pokémon directly. It is, however, possible to buy coins at Game Corners and use those coins to buy Pokémon. The coin conversation value is 50 coins per 1000 P, so 1 Coin is Worth 20 Pokédollars. Pokédollars are based on yen. Therefore, the coin cost of Pokémon sold indirectly through Game Corners can provide a rough proxy of the market prices.

Celadon Game Corner Prizes (as of Generation III Abra = 180 C (3,600 P/$28.18) Clefairy = 500 C (10,000 P/$78.27) Dratini = 2800 C (56,000 P, $438.31) Scyther = 5500 C (110,000 P, $860.97) Porygon = 9999 C (199,980 P, $1,565.24) Note: they're all different levels, which makes it hard to figure out their prices if they were equivalent levels.

These prices make sense, as they correspond to the Pokémon being increasingly hard to find and catch.

Abra: Found in two routes; encounter rate of 15%; hard to catch because it uses Teleport, although multiple strategies can reduce this risk or eliminate it entirely. It's possible to combine Ultra Balls with other trapping strategies, so it's not that hard to catch if one's prepared. Clefairy: Found only in Mt. Moon; low encounter rate of 1-6%. Unlike Abra, it doesn't require unusual techniques, though it is harder to find. Dratini: Only in the Safari Zone, can't be legitimately obtained by battling; can't use Ultra Balls; low encounter rate (15%), high base flee rate (35%). Scyther: Only in the Safari Zone, can't be legitimately obtained by battling; can't use Ultra Balls; low encounter rate (4%); high base flee rate (45%). limited number of steps allowed in the Safari Zone. Sweet Scent is a workaround against the step count, but they still have to go through quite a lot of non-target Pokémon first. Porygon: an artificial species that doesn't exist in the wild and can only breed with Ditto. Its exclusivity likely explains its high price.

Market Cost of a Togepi

Eevee is a suitable proxy for a Togepi: throughout most of the games, it is only possible to get an Eevee as a gift or trade, making Eevee similar to Togepi in how it can be obtained. An Eevee, which is worth 6,666 C, is worth 133,320 Pokédollars. If Pokédollars are equivalent to yen, the yen value of an Eevee converts to 1,043.57 US dollars as of May 20, 2022.

If using the price of an Eevee as a proxy for a Togepi, a Togepi is worth 133,320 P, or 221.8 times the minimum cost of just catching it. This surely attests to its rarity and high demand.

Criminal Surcharge

It’s likely selling Pokémon is illegal or frowned upon. The strongest evidence for this is the fact that, in the games, Team Rocket's focus is stealing or catching strong or rare species of Pokémon to sell. In Red & Blue and its remakes, the Celadon City casino is secretly run by Team Rocket, suggesting an association of some sort between selling Pokémon as casino prizes and criminal activity. The Celadon Game Corner could very well be a front for selling Pokémon Team Rocket has stolen or captured. Of all the Game Corners which can be visited, only the ones in Goldenrod City and Celadon City in Johto and Kanto, respectively, allow the sale of Pokémon by means of coins, which may imply selling Pokémon is not universally legal. Furthermore, even if selling Pokémon indirectly is legal, it may be frowned upon: the citizens of the Celadon Game Corner also think the casino is bad for the city’s image, and it’s possible the casino’s sale of Pokémon is part of this complaint.

To determine the different prices between legal and illegal Pokémon-derived things, it it is useful to consider Slowpoke Tails. A Slowpoke Tail from Johto, where it is only sold by Team Rocket, costs 9,800 P, while the camp cooking ingredient Smoke-Poke Tail in Galar is 2,200 P, which is surprisingly inexpensive, particularly since Slowpoke is not native to Galar's populated core. Slowpoke Tails are apparently not even a rare and expensive delicacy, at least not universally: in Alola, simmered Slowpoke tails are sold in convenience stores. Notwithstanding the food processing to smoke Slowpoke tails, we can presume selling something illegally makes something cost about 4.45 times more.

So what if a Togepi, or some other Pokémon, can only be imported by dubiously legal means? Assuming a 4.45x crime multiplier to the base Game Corner price for an Eevee (proxy for a Togepi), the price of a Togepi would be 593,274 P, or $4643.8865.

Shipping Cost

Lava Cookies (a local specialty made only in Lavaridge Town, Hoenn) cost P 1000 (7.76 US Dollars) in Unova, and only 200 P (1.55 US Dollars) in Hoenn, so the cost in Unova is five times greater than the original cost. This part of Unova, Nimbasa City, is based on Midtown Manhattan, according to the Pokémon world in relation to the real world article on Bulbapedia. Lavaridge is based on Taketa City in Ōita Prefecture, Japan. Using a quick Google check, the distance between these two locations is 7,087 miles.

The difference between 1000 and 200 is 800. 800/7087= ~0.11 P per mile. Distance between San Felipe (proxy for Gateon Port) and Chiba City (proxy for Vermilion City) is 5,742 miles, which is actually shorter than the estimated distance between Lavaridge Town and Nimbasa City. 0.11 * 5,742 miles = 631.62 P, or an extra cost equivalent to...$4.90.

What about Five Island Meadow, which has a Team Rocket headquarters with Pokémon in cages? Mukojima Islands (proxy for Five Island Meadow, with the Team Rocket warehouse) to San Felipe is 5,943 miles away, and so has a cost of 653.73 P, or $5.08. Unless purchasing Pokémon illegally is cheaper, it would actually be less expensive to order it from Vermillion City. These calculations do not consider shipping costs within the region itself from warehouses to ports because it is likely extremely low: the Pokémon world has technology allowing one to trade across vast distances within the same region, or deposit a Pokémon in one computer and take it out from another computer.

Total Calculation

If selling a Togepi is legal, the base and shipping cost of importing a Togepi would be 133,952 (rounding up) P, or the equivalent of $1,038.9. If selling a Togepi is not legal, and furthermore it must be sourced from Five Island Meadow to better hide the transaction, then it would cost 593,927.73 P, or $4,645.87.

For comparison, 9,999,999 Pokédollars is the maximum amount of money that can be held in the Orre region games, so the player could theoretically pay for importing a Togepi.

Affordability

Let’s assume, based on cursory financial advice from N263, that the payout from Trainers is no greater than 30% of their hourly wage. There are likely many exceptions to this, but this will work as a rough calculation.

For a more fine-grained approach of how easily people can afford a variety of Pokémon, one would use the 2005 data for Arizona construction workers, scientists, average pay for a secretary in Phoenix, Arizona, and the mayor of Phoenix. These correspond to the Worker and Cipher R&D Trainer classes, Cipher Peon Exinn (pretending to be the secretary of Trest, mayor of Phenac City, which corresponds to Phoenix, Arizona), and Mayor Es Cade/Evice, who was the former mayor of Phenac City.

However, for the sake of concision, we’ll use construction workers as a baseline for affordability of importing Pokémon, since construction workers are generally not paid as much as, say, mayors, secretaries and scientists. Using the national employment and wage data of the U.S. in 2005, the mean (average) hourly wages for a construction worker in national data in 2005 is $18.39. In Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, there's one Trainer of the Worker Trainer class who's dressed as a construction worker and has specific prize money information. Worker Dobit's prize payout in the second match with him is 1,000 P, equivalent to $7.82 USD. Apparently, he's paid more than the national US averages for construction workers in 20054; 30% of that would be ~5.517 (or $5.52 in real money). We can assume he’s paid the equivalent of about $26.06 an hour: substantially greater than the average in real-world equivalent data, and greater than the 75th percentile in real-world equivalent data.

Worker Dobit’s yearly wages (assuming no tax) would be: $46,240.00. The minimum import cost of a legal Togepi is $1,038.9, or about ~2.25% of Worker Dobit’s income. or comparison, consider a large purchase a person of significant income but frugal preferences is likely to buy: a used car. A reasonable proxy is the price of a used Honda Civic (2001) in 2005: the Honda Civic model is considered safe, affordable, reliable, and long-lasting, so it would appeal to someone of frugal preferences. The average price of a used Honda Civic (2001) in 2005 was $16,226.34, of 34.1% of Worker Dobit’s yearly wages.5 In comparison, a Togepi is 6.40% of the price of the Honda Civic.

But what about Worker Dobit’s living expenses? People save money to buy and maintain things like cars, homes, college funds and educational debt, and medical savings and medical debt. However, the Pokémon world seems very affordable compared to equivalent real-life locations, with a few oddities, such as the ludicrous price of a bicycle in Kanto. One should note, though, that people very rarely own cars in the Pokémon world, and when they do, they’re very rarely actually used, suggesting low fuel, maintenance, and insurance costs. Homes also seem affordable, as there’s only a few depictions of people who are likely homeless, and the only two unambiguous cases occur in unusual circumstances.6 With the possible exception of elderly people (as some use canes), it seems there’s virtually no physical disability in the games’ depiction of the Pokémon world: even the people of excess weight (whether they are overweight or obese is hard to tell in the art style) do not seem significantly physically impaired, despite the near-absence of mobility aids. Research on Bulbapedia has not revealed any information about college in the Pokémon world being difficult to afford.

One may wonder how the Pokémon world can afford such a utopia. Most likely, the labor of Pokémon makes life easier and more affordable, but let’s assume Swedish tax rates, just to make things a little more realistic. Worker Dobit’s income is $46.240.00 a year, which converts to to 454,705.66 Swedish kroma. (rounding up to 454,706) Using the calculator from Investomatica7 and using the calculator’s default municipality tax rate of Sweden (Stockholm), Worker Dobit’s income after tax would be 323,347 kr, or $32,873.01. Under Swedish tax rate conditions, importing a Togepi has a minimum price of 3.16% of Worker Dobit’s income. However, given the lack of public amenities (e.g., public transit, schools) in Orre, the tax rate may very well be lower than this.

It may be that when people in Orre import Pokémon, the Pokémon are regarded as one might regard a car, as a means of self-expression, societal expectations, and achieving greater convenience or participation in society (i.e., in car-dominant communities). Most Pokémon, however, would be much cheaper to obtain than a Togepi, with a tiny fraction of the cost of a relatively inexpensive used car.

On the whole, it seems plausible even someone in Orre working in a low-paying job could import several Pokémon, even expensive ones.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Hordel ↩︎

https://www.polygon.com/2016/8/23/12608544/pokemon-sun-and-moon-pyukumuku-throwing ↩︎

https://n26.com/en-eu/blog/50-30-20-rule ↩︎

https://www.bls.gov/oes/bulletin_2005.pdf ↩︎

https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/car/heres-much-car-today-would-cost-year-were-born/ ↩︎

Namely, there's Emma and Blaine in Generation II. In Generation IV, his situation was apparently retconned to losing only his Gym in the volcanic eruption, not becoming homeless. ↩︎