Pokémon: They’re so much more than a child’s first introduction to gladiatorial bloodsport. They’re complex, diverse, fantastical creatures, adapting to intricate biomes across imagined continents and untold eons. They’re bugs, and sea monsters, and dragons and rocks and birds and ghosts and living ice cream cones. To devoted fans of their incredible world, they are deities and lap dogs, superweapons and fish. They are, in short, everything, personified, coded, and carried in a ball on your belt.
But do they poop?
Fair question. Here’s what Google has to say:
‘Pokémon don’t poo or pee because their waste byproduct is expelled through use of their special moves.’
It’s okay. Breathe. We’re going to get through this.
Step Number One: Don’t Panic
In a just universe, it would be obvious that this assertion was speculation, misinformation, or pure urban legend. We — and more importantly, the human beings of Kanto, Johto, et al. — do not live in a just universe, but in a vast and nightmarish world where there’s an entire species of Pokémon whose whole deal is that it wears its mom’s skull as a hat.
Still, the idea that Charizard’s Fire Blast is just a column of combustible berry farts coming out of its mouth seems canonically sketchy, even by the standards of richly imagined Japanese video games. So I did some digging.
The good news is that no, you don’t have to take a shower and file a police report if a strange Shelder in the park jumps out and hits you with Water Gun. The assertion that waste is expelled through their “special moves” goes back to a fan theory from a 2019 Reddit thread, and it seems like the algorithm said “good enough” and made that its default answer. In truth, Pokémon, like so many other living things, poop. So that’s the good news.
The bad news is that everything gets so much worse from here.
Step Number Two: Number Two
A comprehensive collection of Pokédex entries logged on the community website Bulbapedia shows that there have been five occasions where Pokémon scholars, given two lines’ worth of text with which to describe a species, decided to focus in on their poops instead.
Sure, it can be innocuous enough at times. In Pokémon Moon, Diglett’s Pokédex entry states plainly that the subterranean burrower is a favorite of farmers “because its droppings enrich the soil it lives in.” Simple enough. Harmless enough. Fertilization is a magical thing. Pokémon Shield, meanwhile, warns players that the bowel movements of Turtonator are “dangerously explosive,” a fact that will make a generation of dads almost instinctively mutter “same.” Players are told to look out for Pidove droppings in Sword and Shield. Pretty standard stuff. Nothing terribly eyebrow-raising.
Then there’s the mid-range weirdness, like how Galarian Weezing is said to “expel clean air instead of droppings,” like a can of Febreze made out of the back nine of a small intestine. Guzzlord’s entire Pokédex entry in Moon reads:
“A dangerous Ultra Beast, it appears to be eating constantly, but for some reason its droppings have never been found.”
That means that some zoologist in the Pokémon universe was sent into the field to study this creature for work, then came back with nothing but “I couldn’t find any of his turds.” It just says more about the guy than it does about the Pokémon, that’s all I’m saying.
Finally, the most deeply upsetting detail that you’ll read about Pokémon leavings today, at least if there’s any sort of mercy in the world.
Presented for your consideration, Darumaka, a Gen V fire type that’s roughly as cute as any given button. In its debut appearance, this species was described as follows:
“Darumaka’s droppings are hot, so people used to put them in their clothes to keep themselves warm.”
For the cheap seats, that’s an in-universe scholarly article claiming that there’s a living creature which derives its lifeforce from a raging, organic, 1000-degree furnace inside of its torso, and that the most notable thing about it is that people like to pick up its dookie and carry it in their pockets for warmth. What’s more, they kept the Pokédex entry exactly the same for Pokémon X and Pokémon Omega Ruby, which is some wildly four-thirty-on-a-Friday behavior, even for a Pokémon researcher whose whole job is “write two sentences about every animal you see and clock out at quarter to Beer o’clock.”
Also, if we’re doing notes, learning that the people of the Pokémon universe sometimes get cold and think “Eureka! I’ll just fill my jacket pockets with animal feces!” is enough to make you question whether or not it was wise to let everyone drop out of school at nine years old and make them fend for themselves.
Pokémon: Gotta catch ‘em all. And by “‘em,” I mean pink eye.