Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Finally Confirms That Pokemon Do Kill People

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet confirms an obvious fact of the Pokemon universe that the games have skirted around for nearly a quarter of a century. The Pokemon world is an inherently dangerous one, filled with animals that can spontaneously produce flames, lightning, and stone and somehow coalesce energy into beams and other shootable forms. It's a world where ghosts suck out the life forces of the living, where sentient PokeBalls explode out of spite, and where even adorable creatures are capable of scrapping tanks like they were confetti paper. But it wasn't until Pokemon Scarlet and Violet that we finally get confirmation that people do in fact die at the hands of Pokemon.

This confirmation comes in the form of the Scarlet Book, a notebook detailing the exploration of Area Zero in Pokemon Scarlet. The book provides a description of the Monster Known as Great Tusks, detailing how the massive creature apparently attacked an exploration team in the Great Crater of Paldea, "mortally wounding" one of the explorers. That's right, we have documentation that a Pokemon (who looks an awful lot like Donphan) either gored or trampled a person to death. It's a grim fate for a person, but one that frankly probably happens a lot in the Pokemon universe. 

Given that there are typically multiple fatalities at National Parks every year, with people getting mauled to death by bears or gored by wild buffalo, it stands to reason that wild Pokemon would have no compunction about killing some snot-nosed brat who clumsily tries to capture them using a literal sentient balloon with the ability to sing them to sleep. Heck, in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, we even saw a more accurate picture of how wild Pokemon behave around humans, with even chill Pokemon like Snorlax attempting to crush a person to death when they get too close. Considering that just about every region of the Pokemon world seems rather underpopulated within the games, it seems possible that mankind has been driven to the brink of extinction by Pokemon murdering people all the time. 

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is available now on the Nintendo Switch.