User:Tangent128/Headcanon

Some are drawn from other's headcanons, some come from WAAPT or PEFE, some are made up on the spot.

Legendaries

Arceus, Dialga, Palkia, Giratina, the Lake Trio, and the Unown collective are the only "divine" Legendaries; they are unkillable, as they are embodied metaphysically. Their avatars only follow physics as much as they care to.
Arceus delegates its power to the above Legendaries, as well as Groudon, Kyogre, Rayquaza, and Jirachi. Ho-oh, Lugia, and the Kami Trio are granted a lesser level of power too. These Legendaries have mortal bodies, and thus may in theory be slain, though they would eventually be reincarnated. Only one of each exists.
Some other Legendaries serve as attendants of higher-rank Legendaries. Celebi serves Dialga, who set up the Time Ripple system for its use. Mew serves ???. Celebi may be plural. Mew certainly is.
The rest are just really powerful/elusive species.
The Regis are the product of ancient human sorcerers.

The Pokéworld doesn't share a universe with "our" Earth, but it is similar to Earth in many respects.
It is the third planet of a solar system structured like our own, with equivalents of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto/Charon.
- Pluto is considered a planet. Some cosmologists dislike the designation, but evidence suggesting Pokémon might live on Pluto leads most to conclude classifying it otherwise would be rude.

The world map follows the anime's continent configuration. Vague as it may be.
Global history is severely different from our world, though local history may have some parallel events.
In particular, WWII has no parallel. Nuclear weapons exist, and have proliferated more than in our world, but have luckily never been used in war. Legendary encounters at nuclear test sites may be a factor here.
Kanto and Johto have a few of the more famous aspects of Japanese culture, though a fortunately less workaholic attitude among business.
Unova has New York City culture, though spread out over a larger area; probably around the size of BosWash.
Hoenn is actually more Hawaiian in culture. Groudon is seen as a female volcano deity, and Kyogre her rival sister.
Sinnoh is Canadian, eh?
Kalos is France.

Pokéballs and teleporters operate through spacial-warping principles:
- Pokéballs maintain extradimensional bubbles of comfortable size for Pokémon.
- Teleporters have two or more endpoint devices linked to the same bubble, used to shunt objects from one to the other. Cross a Pokéball and an Ender Chest to get the idea.
- The extradimensional space causes a nausea effect in humans that Pokémon do not experience; teleporter tiles have technology that can mitigate this for short-range hops, but long-range teleportation (whether by this tech or Psychic mons) is not a comfortable experience to humans, thus planes and trains are still well-used.
"Boxes" are an game abstraction; the PC system just tracks whose mons are being kept at which labs. Most trainers do not have relationships with labs, and just cart around their mons or send them home.

Humans are capable of many special abilities exhibited by Pokémon, but only with difficulty and rarely of any impressive power. Psychic abilities are most common (most people will have a friend who can levitate Pokéballs), with Aura abilities not uncommon. Some Firebreathers can actually do it naturally.
The in-game gender ratios are bunk.
"Species" is a messy concept for mons; "Egg Group" is closer to the RL definition of species, but even then they form a ring. Hormones determine which parent's genes are expressed, which is usually the mother's, but can be sex-linked instead. For instance, a Hitmonchan father's male children will often be Tyrogue.
Yes, Nidorina can breed. As can Nidoqueen, if they evolve before menopause.

When Pokémon die, their spirits continue on haunting whatever human or Pokémon they lived/died "for".
- the target may not be sensitive to their presence, but that varies.
- this continues recursively when the target dies, with ghosts haunting ghosts haunting ghosts. The more levels deep a ghost is, the more sensitive they are to the levels above.
- Cubone live and die for the tribe, and as such everybody haunts everybody.
- if a Pokémon didn't really make anything meaningful of their life, they don't have anybody to haunt, and end up as a Ghost-type to find somebody to properly haunt.
When humans die, their souls go to a "proper" afterlife usually.
- Perhaps the "human ghosts" we see are humans with "Pokémon souls", perhaps something else is going on. Spirit world's pretty mysterious to us mortals.
- One motivation Pokémon have for joining a human's team is that they and any spirits haunting them can follow their trainer to said afterlife instead of sticking around Earth.

The Pokéworld is future Earth.
A biotech Von-Neuman probe from a far-distant alien race landed in 2XXX, and began an exoforming project. This probe was Arceus. Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina were its hyperdrive. Proto-Unown formed a psychic subspace ansible communications array.
Subprobes, in the form of proto-Mew, were sent to the planet to analyze any pre-existing life, with the aim of generating counterparts to outcompete them while converting the biosphere to the origin planet's biology.
Intelligent life in the form of humans was not accounted for in the exoforming procedure; the generated lifeforms, though able to outcomplete Earth animals easily, ended up developing intelligence far greater than engineering parameters dictated.
Humans managed to start domestication of many of these new, increasingly intelligent, lifeforms. After a messy struggle that reshaped civilization as we know it; alien invasions are chaotic.
With this development, the Pokémon soon lost their initial purpose.
This corruption in the exoforming system went entirely unnoticed by the aliens, as the Unown have retuned themselves to human language and thought patterns, isolating them from their origin network.