🏴‍☠️ GUZMA 🏴‍☠️

Bonjour! As you may all know, my name is Professor Augustine Sycamore, I am the regional professor for Kalos and much of my specialization is in evolution, more specifically mega evolution. I am also in possession of a few of the parts of the most important collections of text for ancient kalosian history, and much of the foundation for our understanding of the kalosian ecosystem today. We do not know the name of their author, however much of the scientific and historic community calls him Jehan Sr., after the name of his pawniard who he talks about affectionately in depth in various pieces of the text.

Sir Jehan Sr.

We do know quite a lot about Jehan Sr., he was a well respected knight and was deeply close to the royal family. However Jehan Sr.’s views on the war and royalty are very cynical (rightfully so) and actively complains about it through his texts. He used six Pokemon—an astonishing amount of Pokemon a kalosian could have in the era, as that was largely unheard of back then—who he carried large amounts of affection towards.

Jehan Sr. also has one of the (recovered) oldest, in depth accounts of various Pokemon species, their behaviors, their diets, and their role in their kalosain ecosystem. Much of Jehan Sr.’s writings hold up even today, and Jehan Sr.’s specific text on how bisharp evolve and why his wouldn’t are still actively regarded as some of the most accurate texts on the pawniard evolution line. Which, if you know how much science can change in even a few decades, is absolutely mind boggling at how that can even be possible!

Needless to say, with so little we have on Kalos 3,000 years ago, Jehan Sr. provides a much needed look into the war that wrecked our region.

Translation Issues

However, we do not even have a sliver of Jehan Sr. Collection of entries and texts, and even then, translators have a hard time decoding much of it. The old kalosian is easy, but Jehan seems to bounce between languages, feasibly for the purposes of hiding it. (Not with malicious intent, my historian colleagues presume it was due to the fear of the texts being destroyed, in some capacity. Jehan Sr. appears to take a lot of care in the preservation of his works.) Several of these languages are dead, with translators being few and far between, or completely extinct. (You can find modern relatives, and they have!) A lot of times, Jehan Sr. appears to write specifically in a certain dialect, or his writing of the language is broken. This was for the longest time the case for his collection of writings for kalosian’s now extinct wimpod.

Convergent Evolution, and Wimpods.

From here on out, when I speak about evolution we are talking about the long form evolution, not the sudden change between one pokemon to another. This is not my speciality, mind you! I work with short form. I received much of my information for this phenomenon from my colleague in Paldea, Jacq.

Convergent evolution is when two species of pokemon overtime evolve similar traits, usually to fill a similar ecological niche in their ecosystem. For example, Paldea has wiglett, a pokemon with similar features to diglett, the most striking feature is their face, and their notable nature to burrow and keep most of their body obscure beneath the dirt.

Wimpods are a very interesting case—fossil records show that the extinct kalosian wimpod and alolan wimpod shared a common ancestor a very, very long time ago, before diverging, and then converging again! My colleagues aren’t quite sure as to why this divergence happened in the first place, as we don’t fully know the circumstances of their environment back then. Regardless, 3,000 years ago, wimpods and their (short form) evolved counterpart—golisopod—were a thriving part of Kalos. Their role in the ecosystem was unimaginably important, acting as scavengers, although writings show that wimpods were largely regarded as pests. Kalosian wimpods have been depicted with an extra set of tail-like appendages—or bristles—on their backs, and seem largely more tenacious than the wimpods of Alola, being written frequently as being known thieves who do not have the same amount of fear as Alola wimpods do. We do not have a lot of knowledge on the kalosian golisopod, however we do know it was used in the war 3,000 years ago, albeit sparsely. It seems the kalosian golisopod was hard to handle, usually desiring to be left alone, and thusly leaving war zones on their own terms without many ways to retrieve them.

The (messy) Extinction of the Kalosian Wimpod

Somewhere, supposedly after the war, the Kalosian wimpod went extinct. While the details of this have been largely vague, most writings (after the war) specifically state that the predators of Kalos were too much for the wimpod to catch up, thusly their numbers ran sparse and they eventually went extinct naturally. This has been a mostly accepted claim for a very long time. It’s not a very reliable claim when you peer into it, but there was not a lot of support for any other claim up until very recently.

Which is where Jehan Sr. returns!

Jehan Sr.’s essay ‘My Distaste—and Admiration—for the Pest of Western Kalos’ (a very rough translation, on my end.) has been incredibly hard to translate due to Jehan Sr.’s frankly (and not to insult him) odd ways of switching between languages, which is usually quite jarring as it can be quite difficult to comprehend when it’s done within the same paragraph. (Like I said before we do have a reason, but in hindsight I wish he could make it easier.) Recently however, my friend, and co-worker, Mr. Pinel (who would not like his full name listed until the paper is out) has finally been able to completely translate the piece of text! I really cannot explain to you how…I can barely read kantonian. But translating the title immediately lets us know that the Wimpods lived on the west coast. Of course that doesn’t particularly disprove Wimpods living anywhere else, it just gives us a point to know where they lived. We also learn, so, so, much more about these beautiful creatures, such as.

- The wimpod population was absolutely thriving, perhaps booming during the war with how much they were able to scavenge.

- Much of the predators that have been described as the culprits behind the wimpod’s extinction were already present, but again, with how much the wimpod thrived there was no speculation as to if these predators were causing any dent.

- The (short term) evolution between wimpod to golisopod was actively forced in both armies. Thusly this may contribute to the sudden disappearances of these golisopods. (Which is fair! And makes sense! And the more I read about this the more I get quite frustrated!)

This immediately puts the claim of wimpods getting hunted to extinction naturally into question, if the threats presented as being what caused their end were always there, and seemingly largely unchanged after the war, then what could cause the sudden extinction of an entire, thriving species?

The End of the War.

Near the end of the war, the first king of Kalos fired a weapon which caused mass destruction and death throughout Kalos. It was, in simplest terms, a completely avoidable massacre only desired by one man guided by emotion and given far too much power to act on it. We are not sure where this machine was fired at precisely, however we do know it caused mass destruction throughout several points of Kalos.

This, combined with what’s been said prior, leads us to another possible conclusion on what happened to the Wimpods. The machine eradicated all of them, and if there were any left their population must’ve been so sparse that they were either picked off or simply could not reproduce.

But why isn’t this implied anywhere else in historical text?

The Erasure of History (To Save Face)

This is a much more common occurrence then it should be.

We see this very consistently when it comes to historical pieces written after the war. Mostly, these texts do not write about the machine, and most pieces about the war seem to simply say the war died out on its own—somehow, that both sides grew exhausted and thusly found some whimsical common ground. It seems the texts written about the war were heavily curated by some power, and thusly, this is where our information about the Kalosian wimpod mostly came from.

Because of the conflicting truths presented, it’s hard to tell from these primary sources were actually influenced by this power or not, making an accurate telling at this point in time incredibly hard to do. Jehan Sr.’s work, however, is our best shot at interpreting an uninfluenced view on the war. (None of Jehan Sr.’s works seem to be curated, most likely it’s because Jehan Sr. died before the Kalosian governing power at the time could get to his work.)

This means there is a chance that the idea of wimpods having gone extinct due to natural causes is false, and that their extinction was a result of the atrocities of the war prior.

This seems quite obvious, so why aren’t you saying it’s outright fact?

As much as I believe in this idea, that’s not a call one scientist, even someone who’s ‘respected’ such as myself can make on her own. We’re not dealing with just science here but history and the biases of the historical documents we’re looking at. That’s, ultimately, not my line of work. Even if the documents we have contradict with one clearly being more biased than the other, Jehan Sr. was not a perfectly unbiased figure himself, and also did not have the same tools, time, or education to do a thorough research on a single species of pokemon. We, unfortunately, do not even have any reliable physical traces of the wimpod to work off of. Thusly anything about this species is elusive, as sad as it is to know.

Why is this important?

The story of the wimpod in Kalos is not one small exception, but rather a symptom of a reoccurring issue in Kalos’ history. An issue which erases the history of our region for a more sanitized one, ignoring the lived experiences of the people who went through it, the turmoil, just to deny their existence in the name of a completely fine and impossibly flawless history Kalos carries.

This is wrong, and I hope I do not need to tell you why this is wrong. But because of our forefathers’ (or really, the people who held power over our forefathers) attempts to erase the awful things that have happened throughout Kalos, we are left scrambling to try and piece what really happened, why it did, and the ruin its left in its wake. There are possibly countless of species who were affected by the ultimate weapon in some way, but until we find genuine proof of that…we’re simply going off assumptions, and the controlled writings our ancestors left us.

This is not to say there was not anyone out there willing to speak on the truth, no, but if we can find anything at all from that time, it would be few and far between, simply due to time and how much can be lost in that amount of time.

With this new information about the wimpod I do, genuinely hope we can uncover more of what was lost, or that we can look back on the science we simply accepted as fact and peer at it more through a skeptical lense, rethinking the bias both they and we carry ,

Conclusion

That was so much more lengthy and…oftentimes redundant than I thought, ha ha ???? It’s not particularly good, looking back at it, but I think I got my thoughts out, wrong as some may be. My thoughts will be so much more concise once I actually write this professionally! I’m rather ill, though…so perhaps that may be awhile.

A special thank you to my colleagues, Mr. Pinel, and a certain wimpod expert on this site for correcting some of my facts on alolan wimpod behavior.