The pokemon franchise has always had a foundational element of pokemon being converted into data. This is how they fit in the pokeballs, this is why you store them in a PC, and this is the in-universe explanation for how they can be traded through cables, wireless signals and over the internet.
Obviously this element is only possible because pokemon is a franchise set in the digital era… Which is how the canon-keepers ran into a problem when they made Pokemon Legends Arceus, a game set well before the digital era.
The game dances around it alright enough, you store the pokemon in a pasture instead, and trading is instead represented as the physical pokeball launching into the sky like a rocket…. But the pokeball itself remains an issue. How do they explain the pokemon fitting in there in an era before digitization?
They straight up say pokemon can just shrink. All of them can just do that.
This is the most confusing line in the pokemon franchise and it breaks 25 years of canon.
The consensus on this line among the fandom seems to be “Laventon is stupid and wrong” which is valid I think
Heres the thing though:
Have they not been called “Pocket Monsters” from the very beginning?
In Sword/Shield wild area even, when Pokemon walk around, when they spawn do they not just suddenly get Huge from the grass? They dont just poof into place, they grow very quickly
and when you beat them, they shrink back down again
AND
the Dynamax phenomenon was stated to be an enhancement, a super charge of what Pokemon can already do
make themselves bigger and smaller, and now make themselves REALLY big in certain spot areas of the game
Do Totem Pokemon in Sun and Moon not exist?
Even the Alphas in Legends?
They all got bigger because theyre able to use different sources of energy to energize and supersize themselves
Don’t run from the truth, don’t spit on the wisdom of elder’s past
How else do you explain the seemingly infinite number of bidoofs coming out of a small patch of grass next to a lake? You can catch hundreds in the span of minutes.
The ancient legends of sinnoh say that one day, all the pokemon suddenly disappeared from the world because of one dude with a sword, that they hid from him, how did they do that?
Pokemon exist most of the time running around the grass in their little itty bitty forms, they only “Pop Out” when humans are nearby, and when they fear humans enough to a great degree, they simply remain little and hide
apricorns were used to make storage capsuls for pokemon centuries before pokeballs were created.