Not sure where these came from, but I'm now seeing tags for generation_i_pokemon, generation_ii_pokemon, etc. I don't see any forum topics or any discussion about them. Why are these a thing now? How are we dealing with the fact that "generation" isn't an official designation for groups of pokemon, it's a fan designation, and plenty of pokemon are released "outside" of the games that define the generation (e.g. melmetal being in the Gen 1 remakes, Hisuian mons being in what's effectively the Gen 4 "remake")? Why are they using roman numerals instead of regular numbers? How are we to avoid the ambiguity of them referring to the gen 1/2/etc games?

watsit said:
Why are these a thing now?

It's a way to avoid pokémon_(species) from having 915 implications, as that makes any changes to the implication structure difficult.
Whether or not that will let us get rid of the é in the name remains to be seen.

watsit said:
How are we dealing with the fact that "generation" isn't an official designation for groups of pokemon, it's a fan designation, and plenty of pokemon are released "outside" of the games that define the generation

watsit said:
How are we to avoid the ambiguity of them referring to the gen 1/2/etc games?

We are using the Bulbapedia definitions: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation

watsit said:
Why are they using roman numerals instead of regular numbers?

Because that's the commonly accepted way to write pokemon generation numbers.
ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generation_I_Pok%C3%A9mon

bitwolfy said:
Because that's the commonly accepted way to write pokemon generation numbers.
ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generation_I_Pok%C3%A9mon

yeah, but roman numerals look terrible when written with lower-cased letters or in a sans-serif font, and our tags use both

bitwolfy said:
Because that's the commonly accepted way to write pokemon generation numbers.
ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generation_I_Pok%C3%A9mon

Um, not really, no? We use numbers themselves because trying to remember a given number would look weird when typed out when you can just type one or two keys to get the same number with less key presses.

Also, how would regional forums work in this? Like galarian ponyta, does it get both gen tags or what?

darryus said:
yeah, but roman numerals look terrible when written with lower-cased letters or in a sans-serif font, and our tags use both

+1

the_shinx said:
Also, how would regional forums work in this? Like galarian ponyta, does it get both gen tags or what?

I presume they would just get the gen tag associated with that form, not the gen tag of the normal form (same for mega and gigantamax forms, etc).

watsit said:
I presume they would just get the gen tag associated with that form, not the gen tag of the normal form (same for mega and gigantamax forms, etc).

Just to play devil's advocate, give the fact In Pokemon mystery dungeon blue/red rescue team had a lucario, Bonsly, Mime Jr., and Weavile statues came out in 2005 and gen 4 came out a year later, shouldn't they, technically be tag gen 3 Pokemon if we're going to use this system as they wasn't officially talked about until gen 4 came out?

bitwolfy said:
We are using the Bulbapedia definitions: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation

People have a hard enough time reading our own wiki, I would expect them to care less about another wiki. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see people tagging generation_9_pokemon when it depicts a character or place from the gen 9 pokemon games/movies, irrespective of what pokemon are actually depicted.

the_shinx said:
Just to play devil's advocate, give the fact In Pokemon mystery dungeon blue/red rescue team had a lucario, Bonsly, Mime Jr., and Weavile statues came out in 2005 and gen 4 came out a year later, shouldn't they, technically be tag gen 3 Pokemon if we're going to use this system as they wasn't officially talked about until gen 4 came out?

The generational delineation gets messy when you consider many pokemon appeared in the anime and movies well ahead of the games. Lucario was also featured in a movie nearly 2 years before the release of the gen 4 games, but is still considered a Gen 4 mon. Ho-oh appeared in the very first episode of the anime, over 2 years before the gen 2 games' release, Togepi appeared in the anime over a year before the gen 2 games, and Lugia was designed by and exclusively for the second movie, which released several months before the gen 2 games (and the movie's director later being surprised to see it in the games), but they're all considered Gen 2 mons. Meanwhile, meltan/[melmetal]] first appeared in Gen I remakes, about a year before Gen 9, but is considered a Gen 8 mon. Some pokemon that appear before the next generation of games are assigned to that next generation, while others are assigned to the previous generation. This is what I would expect to happen when people make arbitrary separations with no backing authority to say it's right or wrong.

Considering generation numbers have never been referred to by any official source (no, Bulbapedia is not an official source), we should prioritise readability, especially if these tags exist only for technical reasons. Roman numerals are a terrible idea if not explicitly used in the official spelling of a tag, e.g. final_fantasy_xiv.

The question of which species "belongs" to which generation is not as fraught as people make it out to be. A new generation starts each time a new core series game which introduces a new region comes out. All species introduced from that point until the next such game comes out are part of that generation, even if they did not appear in the generation's debut game. Promotional cameos (e.g. the Mystery Dungeon statues or the usual late anime season introduction of a Pokémon from the upcoming generation) do not count.

This can all be confirmed by looking at the internal index numbers used by the games, which increase to the next 100s boundary every time a new generation starts. For example, meltan uses the next number directly after zeraora, but scorbunny is about 20 numbers ahead of melmetal with the intervening numbers going unused.

wat8548 said:
A new generation starts each time a new core series game which introduces a new region comes out. All species introduced from that point until the next such game comes out are part of that generation, even if they did not appear in the generation's debut game. Promotional cameos (e.g. the Mystery Dungeon statues or the usual late anime season introduction of a Pokémon from the upcoming generation) do not count.

This is a contradiction. Ho-oh, Lugia, Togepi, and Slowking were all introduced before the Gen 2 games came out, so should be Gen 1 by this logic. Lucario, Bonsly, Mime Jr, Weavile, and Munchlax were all introduced before the Gen 4 games came out, so should be Gen 3 by this logic. The likes of Ho-oh, Togepi, and Lucario were not "late anime season" either... Ho-oh was in the anime over two years before the gen 2 games came out (so certainly wasn't a "Look for the Gold/Silver games coming next month!" promo), Togepi was over a year before the gen 2 games came out, and Lucario was almost two years before the gen 4 games came out. And Lugia wasn't even intended to be in the games at all when he was made for the second movie. Calling something a "cameo" as grounds to disqualify when it would otherwise qualify it comes across as disingenuous. If The Pokemon Company's behavior to introducing new pokemon tells me anything, it's that they don't hold the same adherence to generational groupings as fans do. Especially considering the games are far from the most profitable elements of the brand as a whole. They introduce pokemon when they intend to for the benefit of the brand, not just the next games they may or may not appear in. Lucario appearing in a movie ahead of the games isn't just "hey, lucario will be in the gen 4 games! get ready to play them!", it's also "hey, lucario's in this movie! come watch it! and buy a plush of them! and a trading card! and a lunchbox! ...". Lucario also being in the gen 4 games is just one more piece of the pie.

wat8548 said:
This can all be confirmed by looking at the internal index numbers used by the games, which increase to the next 100s boundary every time a new generation starts. For example, meltan uses the next number directly after zeraora, but scorbunny is about 20 numbers ahead of melmetal with the intervening numbers going unused.

Where do you see this? The national dex numbering doesn't fit this. It's notable that pokemon like meltan, shaymin, and darkrai, who were introduced as special events after the mainline game's release, don't have regional dex numbers for that generation's pokedex, and the regional dex numbers aren't afraid to jump around (e.g. Manaphy is 151 in the Sinnoh dex, followed by Giratina at 210). And the national dex number doesn't distinguish regional variants, so Hisuian Typhlosion has the same national dex number as normal Typhlosion.

If it's internal game data, I don't think we should be using that as a basis since there can be any number of reasons to separate them the way they do, and there's nothing stopping them from changing it up.

The question of which species "belongs" to which generation is not as fraught as people make it out to be. A new generation starts each time a new core series game which introduces a new region comes out. All species introduced from that point until the next such game comes out are part of that generation, even if they did not appear in the generation's debut game. Promotional cameos (e.g. the Mystery Dungeon statues or the usual late anime season introduction of a Pokémon from the upcoming generation) do not count.

So, should we discount Manaphy as whole when it was introduced in Pokemon Ranger games and movie? Along with the fact we should make Sylveon a gen 5 Pokemon as it was introduced during gen 5 rather then gen 6 as Sylveon shown to the world on Valentine's day and gen 6 released October of that year. And just to push the idea: We should re-class the first half of gen 2 Pokemon as the devs themselves said they wanted those pokemon part of ten 1. Reason why gen 2 Pokemon had the same art style as gen 1 pokemon.

This can all be confirmed by looking at the internal index numbers used by the games, which increase to the next 100s boundary every time a new generation starts. For example, meltan uses the next number directly after zeraora, but scorbunny is about 20 numbers ahead of melmetal with the intervening numbers going unused.

This makes little sense, more so as the dex system, both for that gen and overall Pokedex, have issues: victini being in the Pokedex for that gen being 000, or in front of the starters. Or the fact that every gen don't have 100 new pokemon, some has less and most have more then 100, so don't know how that would work.

watsit said:
This is a contradiction. Ho-oh, Lugia, Togepi, and Slowking were all introduced before the Gen 2 games came out, so should be Gen 1 by this logic. Lucario, Bonsly, Mime Jr, Weavile, and Munchlax were all introduced before the Gen 4 games came out, so should be Gen 3 by this logic. The likes of Ho-oh, Togepi, and Lucario were not "late anime season" either... Ho-oh was in the anime over two years before the gen 2 games came out (so certainly wasn't a "Look for the Gold/Silver games coming next month!" promo), Togepi was over a year before the gen 2 games came out, and Lucario was almost two years before the gen 4 games came out. And Lugia wasn't even intended to be in the games at all when he was made for the second movie. Calling something a "cameo" as grounds to disqualify when it would otherwise qualify it comes across as disingenuous.

No, what's disingenuous is all of the above. You know very well what the difference is between a promotion for the upcoming generation and an actual part of the current generation, you're just pretending not to for the sake of protesting a new tag you don't like. Next you'll be saying sprigatito should be reclassified as a Gen 8 Pokémon because it appeared in trailers before any games.

watsit said:
If The Pokemon Company's behavior to introducing new pokemon tells me anything, it's that they don't hold the same adherence to generational groupings as fans do. Especially considering the games are far from the most profitable elements of the brand as a whole. They introduce pokemon when they intend to for the benefit of the brand, not just the next games they may or may not appear in. Lucario appearing in a movie ahead of the games isn't just "hey, lucario will be in the gen 4 games! get ready to play them!", it's also "hey, lucario's in this movie! come watch it! and buy a plush of them! and a trading card! and a lunchbox! ...". Lucario also being in the gen 4 games is just one more piece of the pie.

They don't emphasise it, and I don't believe they have ever used the numbering system, but references do exist. For example, the National Dex in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire is divided into six colour-coded sections, one for each generation that existed at the time. From this we can see that Lucario is very much a part of the same generation as Dialga.

watsit said:
Where do you see this?

You don't "see" it anywhere, that's the point of internal data. I was just referencing it to prove my point that generational dividing lines are known to the developers, and are drawn in exactly the same places the fans put them.

watsit said:
If it's internal game data, I don't think we should be using that as a basis since there can be any number of reasons to separate them the way they do, and there's nothing stopping them from changing it up.

They did change it up - IIRC the separation only started around Gen 6 or 7, prior to that the internal numbers match the National Dex ones.

the_shinx said:
And just to push the idea: We should re-class the first half of gen 2 Pokemon as the devs themselves said they wanted those pokemon part of ten 1. Reason why gen 2 Pokemon had the same art style as gen 1 pokemon.

Now you're just being silly. And that claim isn't even correct - we know thanks to a combination of the Satoshi Tajiri manga and the various gigaleaks that none of the 40 scrapped designs from Gen 1 were ever brought back. Gen 2 has the closest art style to Gen 1 because it was designed closer in time to Gen 1 than any subsequent generation, nothing more nefarious than that.

the_shinx said:
Or the fact that every gen don't have 100 new pokemon, some has less and most have more then 100, so don't know how that would work.

Aside from what I said above, you don't know how to count from 151 to 201?

wat8548 said:
No, what's disingenuous is all of the above. You know very well what the difference is between a promotion for the upcoming generation and an actual part of the current generation, you're just pretending not to for the sake of protesting a new tag you don't like.

No, I'm pointing out that "generation" isn't the focus. They introduce pokemon to promote the brand. The games, anime, plushes, TCG, all of it. Introducing a pokemon isn't promoting the next game any more than it is promoting more merchandise and media. The mainline games just have a habit of introducing many pokemon at one time, and as a consequence, fans have a habit of focusing on those games and structuring their view of the franchise around them, but I guarantee The Pokemon Company has a much wider view of these things.

Either way, though, I still wonder how Ho-oh could be classified as a promotion for Gen 2 since it appeared in the first anime episode that aired April 1, 1997, while the first public showing of Gold/Silver was November 1997. Did people magically know it was a new pokemon for a game that wouldn't even be shown for another 7 months? (I remember discussions about it when the show started airing in the US, and "the next games" was not at the forefront of our minds; couldn't have been very good promotion if they weren't promoting it). Or how Lugia could have been a Gen 2 promotion when it was created by and intended exclusively for the second movie, and it was only after the movie was finished that it was put into the game, surprising the person who created it and wrote the movie. Did he subconsciously work to promote the next game with Lugia's creation and write the movie's story to include it?

I would hardly call Togepi a cameo too, since it was a constant presence in the show after its reveal (in the 50th episode, until Misty left the show in the 273rd episode) and had relevance to the show's own stories separate from the games. It was in the show longer than most of Ash's pokemon.

wat8548 said:
Next you'll be saying sprigatito should be reclassified as a Gen 8 Pokémon because it appeared in trailers before any games.

Well, the main thrust of my argument is the generation numbers are an arbitrary fan classification, not something that actually exists in the franchise. So officially it's as much a gen 8 pokemon as it is gen 9 -- as in, it's not at all. That's my point. Many fans split each generation at each mainline game, but it's not universal. Some separate pokemon by the region it appeared in or they're canonically from (e.g. kleavor isn't a gen 8 or gen 9 pokemon, it's a Hisuian pokemon). I tend to go for the latter, because it seems off to me to include Meltan/Melmetal (who was created for Pokemon GO and have a tie in with Let's Go (gen 1 remakes)) in the same generation as Rowlet. Or that Wyrdeer is the same generation as Obstagoon.

In regards to that comment though, sprigatito was revealed with Scarlet/Violet, not before or separate from it.

wat8548 said:
They don't emphasise it, and I don't believe they have ever used the numbering system, but references do exist. For example, the National Dex in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire is divided into six colour-coded sections, one for each generation that existed at the time. From this we can see that Lucario is very much a part of the same generation as Dialga.

Game Freak have said they don't consider how the anime and spinoffs do things when making their games. The mainline games first had lucario in diamond/pearl/platinum, so it would make sense for the developers to have lucario with the other pokemon in those same games, even if it may have shown up earlier in other parts of the franchise.

wat8548 said:
They did change it up - IIRC the separation only started around Gen 6 or 7, prior to that the internal numbers match the National Dex ones.

And they can change it again, so you shouldn't use it to mean anything beyond being helpful for development. They're internal after all, not something intended for us to see or to say anything about their official place in the franchise as a whole.

For the generation tags it only matters when the first appearance in a mainline pokemon game was. Ho-oh is a gen 2 pokemon because that was the first mainline Game appearance.

Nobody is going to search for generation 1 pokemon expecting to see a solid yellow ho-oh as a result.

As for the Roman numerals, we're planning on adding aliases for the Arabic numbers once everything is done so people can search for both.

notmenotyou said:
The mods reasoning

I, in all honest, feel like the whole using the 'generation' thing should be a lore tag more then a specie tag as it make little sense in of itself. Mainly due to the fact using 'generation' kind of implies gen one pokemon gave birth to gen two pokemon, etc. I have no real idea behind this change, and the one given early, honestly, feel like tossing the fans under the bus for someone's call and blaming them for it. More to the point, if someone is going to look up a given pokemon or when they appear, they'd use their typing or their name, not what gen they appeared in. Only doing such when using the wiki and pretty much that's it.

watsit said:
Game Freak have said they don't consider how the anime and spinoffs do things when making their games. The mainline games first had lucario in diamond/pearl/platinum, so it would make sense for the developers to have lucario with the other pokemon in those same games, even if it may have shown up earlier in other parts of the franchise.

Wait, so why did you write three paragraphs insisting that the often freakish way the anime treats the franchise is super important to the discussion?

watsit said:
And they can change it again, so you shouldn't use it to mean anything beyond being helpful for development. They're internal after all, not something intended for us to see or to say anything about their official place in the franchise as a whole.

I never said the internal numbers were the sole reason you should accept my explanation for generational boundaries. I explained how and why the boundaries are drawn, and then gave an example of something that can be proven to follow them.

notmenotyou said:
Nobody is going to search for generation 1 pokemon expecting to see a solid yellow ho-oh as a result.

No one's saying fans would search "generation 1 pokemon" expecting to find Ho-oh, because fans have long classified it as a generation 2 pokemon. But the point is that "generation" is not an official classification system. It's unofficial and arbitrary, it can't be proven or disproven, and not everyone likes to separate them that way because it ends up with weird groupings, as I explained.

wat8548 said:
Wait, so why did you write three paragraphs insisting that the often freakish way the anime treats the franchise is super important to the discussion?

Because I'm saying the games aren't the end-all-be-all, they're certainly not the most profitable to TPC or what they seem to put the most effort and care toward, and that the anime and other things are just as relevant to the franchise. That the mainline games are sometimes delayed in featuring certain pokemon doesn't invalidate their earlier appearances. The games aren't the franchise's gospel.

wat8548 said:
I never said the internal numbers were the sole reason you should accept my explanation for generational boundaries. I explained how and why the boundaries are drawn, and then gave an example of something that can be proven to follow them.

Do you have a link to where I can see these numbers? I'm having a hard time finding them with DuckDuckGo searches (the terms get conflated with a pokemon's personal ID, or the national dex numbers).

What's extra annoying now is when people inevitably mistag mega or regional forms, there's extra tags that need to be cleaned up. E.g. when someone tags mega_charizard_x and mega_lopunny ("generation 6 pokemon") as normal charizard and lopunny, when removing charizard and lopunny we also need to remember to remove generation_1_pokemon and generation_4_pokemon with it. And we need to watch for posts that have generation_?_pokemon tags that don't actually have a pokemon from that generation, either due to improper cleanup or because someone explicitly tagged the wrong generation. And there are certainly pokemon that are commonly misattributed to the "wrong" generation.

watsit said:
Do you have a link to where I can see these numbers? I'm having a hard time finding them with DuckDuckGo searches (the terms get conflated with a pokemon's personal ID, or the national dex numbers).

https://twitter.com/JoeMerrick/status/1081899002361270272

https://twitter.com/JoeMerrick/status/1195336836509511682

Example of asset numbers in use: https://twitter.com/Kaphotics/status/1061481009336606720

Update: The tags have now been changed to generation_1_pokemon through generation_9_pokemon, with conventional numerals and also without the accented é. Currently, only generation_1_pokemon implies pokémon_(species), and none of the later generations do. That implication has been removed from all the individual species tags, meaning the only new posts in the pokémon_(species) tag are Gen 1, Mega Evolutions or regional forms (which imply it through their umbrella tags), or have had it added manually.

wat8548 said:
Currently, only generation_1_pokemon implies pokémon_(species), and none of the later generations do. That implication has been removed from all the individual species tags, meaning the only new posts in the pokémon_(species) tag are Gen 1, Mega Evolutions or regional forms (which imply it through their umbrella tags), or have had it added manually.

Approving too many implications at once can overwhelm the site, causing stuff like the search results to lag behind.
You might have seen that happen a few days ago – I'm trying to avoid that.

Just the generation_1_pokemon -> pokémon_(species) implication took about 7 hours to finish processing.
The rest should go faster, though – not as many posts.

Pokemon fans have collectively understood and fully utilized the idea of Generations without issue for years and years. It's really not as complicated as you're making it out to be, Watsit. Like, not even close. A pair of mainline games is released, and 100-some Pokemon come along with it. This be generation, QEF.

Pokemon GO has National Dexes that accurately sort the Pokemon into the same Generation groupings that the fans do (Which, surprise, is based on their first mainline game). If you go to Pokemon GO and click on the "Sinnoh Dex", it will show every Pokemon considered to be a Gen 4 Pokemon, yes even mythical event Pokemon that aren't in Diamond & Pearl's "National Dex".

sexygriffon said:
Pokemon fans have collectively understood and fully utilized the idea of Generations without issue for years and years. It's really not as complicated as you're making it out to be, Watsit.

I didn't say it was complicated. Just messy, and (to the uninitiated) not obvious. Though even still, there have been pokemon whom fans disagreed on which gen it belonged to (such as Meltan/Melmetal, with some saying it was Gen 7 and others saying it was Gen 8, and it was only after looking at the internal asset ID was it shown to be grouped with the other pre-Sword/Shield pokemon as "Gen 7", as the aforementioned tweet indicates Joe's presumption was right and he could gloat about it).

sexygriffon said:
Pokemon GO has National Dexes that accurately sort the Pokemon into the same Generation groupings that the fans do (Which, surprise, is based on their first mainline game).

Using the games to show the games group pokemon a certain way, when I'm saying non-game media handles some of them differently and is at least as relevant to the franchise as a whole, doesn't mean anything.

bitwolfy said:
Approving too many implications at once can overwhelm the site, causing stuff like the search results to lag behind.
You might have seen that happen a few days ago – I'm trying to avoid that.

Just the generation_1_pokemon -> pokémon_(species) implication took about 7 hours to finish processing.
The rest should go faster, though – not as many posts.

I'm not that knowledgeable about websites but i never new sites worked kinda like computers, where overworking something breaks something else/everything else. But i suppose it should work like that, with them being stored in servers and all.

watsit said:
Using the games to show the games group pokemon a certain way, when I'm saying non-game media handles some of them differently and is at least as relevant to the franchise as a whole, doesn't mean anything.

The anime, and other non-game media, are based off of the games. They are derived from the games. Without the base work of the games, none of the other media would exist. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the games are where everything begins and everything is based off of (Except Lugia, that was a weird outlier)

sexygriffon said:
The anime, and other non-game media, are based off of the games.

It may have started out that way, but there are definitely elements that were created outside of the games that the games later incorporated. Focuses and priorities can shift over time, just because the games kicked the franchise off doesn't mean they're still on the forefront of everything behind the scenes.

sexygriffon said:
I don't think it's a stretch to say that the games are where everything begins and everything is based off of (Except Lugia, that was a weird outlier)

And Jessie and James, who were created for the anime and later appeared in Pokemon Yellow and Let's Go. A number of other elements from the anime have made it into the games, like Ash's Greninja (which technically makes Ash canon to the games too), and Pikachu and Eevee's cry (which has since been changed back apparently), for example. There's also no reason to think Riley_(pokémon) was created first for the games before Sir Aaron appeared in Movie 8 with Lucario's first appearance, and even though Riley isn't Sir Aaron, there are unmistakably purposeful similarities. There's no reason to think the core games are where TPC puts all the focus and anything outside of it is to prop up the games.

watsit said:
It may have started out that way, but there are definitely elements that were created outside of the games that the games later incorporated. Focuses and priorities can shift over time, just because the games kicked the franchise off doesn't mean they're still on the forefront of everything behind the scenes.

And Jessie and James, who were created for the anime and later appeared in Pokemon Yellow and Let's Go. A number of other elements from the anime have made it into the games, like Ash's Greninja (which technically makes Ash canon to the games too), and Pikachu and Eevee's cry (which has since been changed back apparently), for example. There's also no reason to think Riley_(pokémon) was created first for the games before Sir Aaron appeared in Movie 8 with Lucario's first appearance, and even though Riley isn't Sir Aaron, there are unmistakably purposeful similarities. There's no reason to think the core games are where TPC puts all the focus and anything outside of it is to prop up the games.

Jesse and James are not Generation 1 Pokemon. A specific instance of a Pokemon is not going to be tagged as a different generation than its base species. I feel like you're diving into the deep end of the "What if" pool. Sure, you could go "What if in the future there's a fan competition to design a new Pokemon and the winner was from a boy who wants his Pokemon in the next game which would make it a Gen 10 Pokemon but they couldn't get it in on time so it's in the next game as a Gen 11 Pokemon but his original intention was to design it for Gen 10 so what do we tag it as?" and a thousand other questions about what may or may not happen in the future.

But right now? Pokemon are designed for the games FIRST, and a full set of Pokemon comes out alongside a new region and a new generation of games. (Meltan and Melmetal didn't follow this trend, but their sorting in the GO Pokedex should be good enough for our purposes) Yes, Pokemon can debut in a number of other forms of media first, such as in the anime, but they were not designed FOR these other medias. The writers of the anime did not invent Kecleon to put him in the show before Ruby/Sapphire, the game devs working on the THIRD generation of games allowed his use as a teaser for audiences. As it stands now, and as the mods have implemented, we have a very simple, cut-and-dry organization of Pokemon based on which mainline game they debuted in. And if some weird situation happens in the future that brings this into question, we'll deal with it then.

sexygriffon said:
Jesse and James are not Generation 1 Pokemon.

But they are characters from the anime. They started in the anime and then became part of the games. So it's flat-out incorrect to say "the games are where everything begins and everything is based off of", because not everything begins with the games.

sexygriffon said:
But right now? Pokemon are designed for the games FIRST, and a full set of Pokemon comes out alongside a new region and a new generation of games.

The point is the claim that any appearance of a pokemon before their debut in a core game is nothing more than a "promotional cameo" for that upcoming core game (even when the game hasn't been showcased yet and no link is made to the game). Their design origin is inconsequential to whether or not a pokemon's appearance prior to its first game is to just be a cameo to advertise the game, rather than to also advertise the show, plushes, and other merch. The games are only a piece of the pie, they aren't the core of it that everything else revolves around.

sexygriffon said:
Yes, Pokemon can debut in a number of other forms of media first, such as in the anime, but they were not designed FOR these other medias.

They're designed for the brand as a whole. If TPC doesn't think a pokemon design is fit for the brand, it doesn't matter if it fits the game or not. And at the end of the day, we don't know what the internal processes and thinking is that went into each pokemon, so we can't say they're not designed with those other medias in mind. What we do know is that some pokemon are featured in other media sometimes years ahead of their game debut, and the games are hardly the most profitable or important part of the franchise, so it's not a valid assumption that all pokemon must be created solely for the games and all early non-game appearances are just for the purpose of promoting future games (rather than the anime, or plushes, or other merch alongside the games).

watsit said:
The games are only a piece of the pie, they aren't the core of it that everything else revolves around.

Counterpoint: yes they literally are.