Memetics 101

On the dirt paths north of Pallet, conversation stays light until Leaf asks Red to explain his quarrel with the type charts, and he reframes it through memetics. Borrowing from Professor Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, he calls "typing" a meme — an idea that self-replicates and adapts to selective pressure like a gene — and warns that an idea's popularity and resilience are no evidence of its truth, the way nearly everyone mislabels pokemon metamorphosis as "evolution." Typing spread so universally, he argues, because it flatters human appetites: to sort things into boxes, to pick favorites and identify with them, and above all to feel the world is fair, since every pokemon gains balancing strengths and weaknesses.

Leaf pushes back, and Red walks her Socratically through the cracks. What does it mean for a pidgey to be "Flying/Normal"? Each strength she names — strong against grass and bugs, hurt worse by a fall — turns out to describe what the bird does, not what it is; a Flying type with a broken wing is still called Flying. Why is a poliwrath readily "Water/Fighting" while a machop is just "Fighting," never "Fighting/Normal," when almost every bird gets "Normal" appended? The system conflates ability and essence, and it was inherited whole-cloth from a culture that coined it over three thousand years ago, before anyone knew of cells or chemistry. Names shifted with fashion — "Lightning" became "Electric" once it was harnessed, magnemite and klink dragged "Steel" into being — but the rigid one-or-two-type skeleton never got re-examined. The classification, Red concludes, simply isn't rational.

The debate breaks when grass rustles and a rattata nest erupts around them. Red and Leaf, reaching to shove each other clear, end up pushing off one another's palms like dancers cut off mid-step. Squirtle withdraws and water-guns; bulbasaur tackles and vine-whips; charmander intercepts with scratch and tail whip, Red unable to risk ember amid the dry grass. Bitten through his reinforced mesh, Red bashes the rodent off and the three fight a running retreat, counting eight of the creatures before they break free and potions close their wounds. The terror gives way to giddy laughter and a fist-bump — the first time the journey's danger has been real rather than simulated, and the first time the three feel like a team.

Duty reasserts itself: Red flags the likely nest to the Coordinated Ranger Response Network (CoRRNet) at low priority, Leaf estimating the run's distance from speed and time in her head, and a nearby Ranger pair is dispatched. When the rattata bulbasaur downed stirs, Blue waves Red on to the capture. Muscle memory from hours of throwing rocks at cans serves him; the ball strikes true and chimes. But the pokedex lists his first catch as female, and the entry's note that rattata colonize fast from a single pair leaves Red uneasy — he may have just orphaned a nest by capturing its mother.