#type studies

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META - Type Specimen Video

If you remember my post about Fire types a little while back, I mentioned a sort of psychic control over the heat their bodies project that helps protect the environment around them!  Ice-types, it appears, have a similar mechanism!  After all, extreme cold is as dangerous as extreme heat, so that kind of protection can be vital! Something that this property allows them to do is construct personal body armor!  You don’t see this virtually ever in trained Pokémon because the armor strictly protects against physical damage which trained Pokémon don’t usually face, but occasionally it’s seen in the wild!  What they do is use wood pulp and water and freeze it around their bodies to form pykrete, which offers a good amount of protection against claws and fangs (or even bullets)!  Because the armor is on their bodies, they can keep it frozen around them even in hotter temperatures! Some Ice-type Pokémon have ice-looking structures on their body (or composing most of their body in some cases)!  I got curious about those - do they heal like regular wounds if they’re damaged, or are outside resources necessary to fix them?  Strangely enough, it appears that the answer is both - they’ll heal well enough on their own, but if they freeze water over the damaged area it recovers more quickly!  It makes me wonder if their cellular structure doesn’t have some resemblance to ice crystals in some way, that their bodies take to it so readily!

It probably comes as no surprise to you that Grass-types have an affinity for plants!  But I doubt many people are aware of just how strong that affinity is!  The impact these Pokémon have extends beyond that of perhaps any other type we know of! Grass-type Pokémon are by nature expert gardeners!  They have an internal sense of exactly what particular plants need in order to flourish - whether they need more or less sunlight, or water, or nutrients, the best places to plant, and so forth!  It’s thought that they’re capable of picking up signals from plants in the environment that can tell them about their health and needs!  While not all of them may necessarily enjoy gardening, they’ll perform exceptionally well if they have to get involved!  Any large gardening operation involves lots of Grass-types - it’s essential for the successful proliferation of the plants and their output!  A Grass/Poison typing seems to be even more effective - you’d think having the added Poison-typing might be dangerous, but the combination actually provides extra feedback on chemicals that can be safely used and the levels of toxic compounds that can be applied to the plants to remove pests and diseases without causing significant harm! I’ve heard humans who do gardening, or other hard work, say that they put their blood, sweat, and tears into their work.  Well, Grass-types do that too - quite literally, in fact!  Their bodies contain lots of chemicals that are extremely good for plant growth, and it’s far from uncommon for bodily fluids to be willingly shed so that the gardens can grow above and beyond what you normally see!  We’re talking sizes well above typical for the species, hardiness to withstand the worst of conditions, in some cases even restoring plants from apparent death!  It sounds pretty impossible at times, but I’ve watched some gardening first-hand and damn if they don’t at least make it look like that’s what happens! They also seem to have an uncanny knack for genetic splicing!  Hybridized plants created by Grass-types seem to survive and thrive better than those created by humans, even professional scientists!  In fact there are a lot of plant varieties out there that were created by Pokémon, and some Pokémon even have monopolies on specific plant types!  I’ve met one Sceptile who actually owns a pretty sizable corporation based on demand for varieties of plants and their outputs - definitely a rare thing to see!  Included among them are a ton of berry types that aren’t grown anywhere in the wild, some of which have pretty appealing properties to trainers and Pokémon alike! I’ve heard rumors that some Grass-types even splice some of their own genome into plants...I have my doubts about that because Pokémon DNA isn’t the same as most plant DNA...though, to be honest, I think no one’s actually ever looked at the genome of Berries before...that makes me curious...

There’s a lot to wonder about Electric types!  How do they gather electricity? (Answer: they gather charge from the air as well as static from contact with others, and can also draw it in from man-made sources!)  How do they store it? (Answer: specialized cells and tissues in their body!)  Can they use it to power electronic devices? (Answer: yes, if they have enough touch and control to not overload them!)  But I’m sure there’s one question on everyone’s mind that hasn’t been obviously answered: Why the hell are so many of them cute and cuddly rodents? It’s a question that has baffled every scientific mind that has considered it (so, uh, one I guess)!  What would cause the appearance of so many eerily similar creatures?  I mean, there has to be something natural, it can’t have just happened by chance and it’s not like it was driven by market forces looking to cash in on the popularity of a single creature and unearth a modern profit-driving mascot!  Banish such silly thoughts from your mind, if you have them! So, this is a lot more speculative, because I can’t say anyone’s ever actually done any study on this - it’s kind of a tough thing to study, I suppose!  But if I had to wager a guess, I’d say that it’s an evolutionary adaptation to get at a premier source of sustenance - namely, electricity!  By taking on an appearance that appeals to humans, they are more readily welcomed into modern society, where sources of electricity are abundant!  After all, you don’t see a lot of power plants in nature!  So they’re naturally more inclined to hang around places where there are a lot of humans!  But being with humans requires coexistence - they don’t want to be driven away by humans, but they can’t drive them out or the electricity will be cut off!  So adapting to appeal to humans is a nice little trick - the humans are more likely to welcome their presence, allowing them access to all the electricity they could ever want! Eh, if it works for them, it works for them, but I’d rather be a big strong beast than a tiny little rodent!  I’ve got my own ways of appealing to people without sacrificing that!  (It involves a very different means of pleasure delivery!)

Fun fact: despite all my inquiries, I still have no idea where the water comes from.  It drives me crazy, it does! But Water types do have something in common: they can all breathe underwater, and stay under pretty much indefinitely!  How they do it is rather interesting!  Water types have specialized lung structures that allow them to draw in water and gain oxygen from it rather than just filling the lungs with water like would happen if you or I did the same thing!  While the more fishy-looking Pokémon may have gills which work towards this, even the ones that don’t have internal structures!  I’m not really sure what happens to the water that gets breathed in - maybe that has something to do with where the water comes from?  (That isn’t leaving my head, ever!) So Water-types are good in water, but what about land?  Well, while it’s not ideal for them, they can usually function just fine!  None of them have trouble breathing - their anatomy allows for them to gain oxygen from air just fine!  However, surely you can see that they’re not all designed for land movement!  However, they’ve developed an intriguing adaptation to get around this - essentially, it’s like a this bubble of water surrounding them that puts them in a state like they’re swimming, only this bubble is maintained by their natural hydrokinetic abilities!  this allows them to move around pretty well!  If they faint, they don’t have the energy to maintain this bubble, so they’ll fall to the ground!