Ahhhh Pokemon. I'm willing to bet at least 87% of us have fond memories of the franchise. Whether you were hunting for that shiny mew card, battling friends on the hand held, or religiously watching the show; it played a great part in our development and some of us may still enjoy it to this day. Now, like many Pokemaniacs, I've pondered and theorized the nature, past, and other intricacies of the Pokemon setting. When a thought struck me, what if scientists in the Pokemon world developed transhumanist theories like our own? What kinds of solutions would pokemon offer to some of the problems that are holding us in the world back? The sentiment isn't entirely alien to the setting itself actually. Remember the Red Gyarados? In the show, Team Rocket had built an Evolution Inducement Ray, which, while still in development, was able to not only make a Pokemon evolve, but apparently raise it's abilities to peak performance. Of course, whether it was because it was Team Rocket or because the writers succumbed to another bout of franchise hypocrisy syndrome that plagues Nintendo staff writers; the whole process was deemed "evil" and "unnatural!" So Ash, Misty, Brock, and especially Lance (who should've gotten his own spinoff) destroyed the facility. In their defense, the process was shown to be quite painful to the affected Pokemon, but rather than see if the machine could be reproduced and perfected by Pokemon League scientists, Lance just opts to blow the incredibly valuable piece of technology to smithereens. Another instance is fossil Pokemon, which are explicitly brought back to life via cloning. Not to mention Pokemon are often stored on PCs, infomorph style. (Albeit through straight matter to energy conversion. The same thing they use for Pokeballs.) Mewtwo himself might actually be comparable to an transhumanist experiment. He does appear more human-like than his predecessor, which might indicate some human DNA was used in the cloning process, he's far more intelligent than a human and far more powerful than most Pokemon, and though he has "legendary" status, he's not a legend. You see, most legendary Pokemon are almost like extensions of the world, personifications and exemplars of the forces that make up reality. They are almost akin to naturalistic deities and indeed many have been worshipped as such by humans. Mewtwo is of human origin yet commands power comparable to gods. Sounds an awful lot like an A.G.I. on soft takeoff to me. That's not even counting the number of totally artificial pokemon that have been created in canon. Consider even, you know how people create original Pokemon all the time online? Who's to say Pokemon stored on PCs and transferred out need not have been initially put IN? What do you guys think? What ways could transhumanist themes be applied to Pokemon? E.g. Splicing humans with Pokemon genes. Augmenting Pokemon with cybernetics.