Game Theory: Your Shiny Pokemon is DOOMED to Die!

Well, that's getting ready for its big flex. I trained Pokémon in years past. Now look in Oz. I show you my Pokedex. Read it and cry. My Pokémon are

shiny

. A red pika and a bunch of yellow pigs. It's divine. You know everyone is brilliant. I have strange colors in my wazoo, it's very true, don't you know? I went and caught them all with my different types of pokeballs, look at them shining, my Pokémon are

shiny

. Hello Internet, welcome to

game

theory

, today we are going to talk. how all

your

shiny Pokémon are

doomed

to die if you're not familiar yet.

Shiny Pokémon are the rare variants of

your

favorite adorable pocket monsters that have a different color palette than the other members of their species. Black charizards. Blue Ponyta's Golden Magikarps. Because let's be honest. Anything honest to make this useless fish even remotely cool is a welcome change, but catching these guys comes with, well, a catch, finding shiny ones has really increased the difficulty of catching them all, considering it's been reported that their spawn rates are between 1 and 500 to 1 in 8 192. when I say these guys are rare I mean they are rare now it's tempting to just write this off as yet another way to make Pokémon sticky for the player, give them more things to chase, more weird things to deliver. a satisfying shot of dopamine in the brain, yet another badge of honor that you can lord over all your poke friends, and most importantly, more things to love, hug, and buy as merchandise at your local Spencer's, but here's what which are the friends' shiny Pokémon. real or to put it more correctly, this is actually a place where Pokémon reflect real world biology throughout the animal kingdom, there are rare cases of real world shinies of animals appearing in unusual colors and understand why your favorite shiny is

doomed

to suffer a tragic death, well, we have to dig into the science of what's really going on when it comes to real-world shiny animals.

You're probably familiar with some of the most common examples like the black sheep, oh dying we are two misunderstood souls, all the others are fake, but while you probably already knew that your dark colored glowing wulu was based on reality, some others are so rare that not even the Pokémon fandom pages have made the connection, for example, did you know that Clauncher is probably most directly inspired by the blue lobster, such a rare animal? The fact that it has about a 1 in 4 million chance of appearing makes the

game

's 1 in 8,000 chance of having a shiny encounter seem pretty good, a little less dramatic than the blue lobster.

They are mammals like the black-backed jackal, which usually looks like this note. black fur on its back, but there are shiny variants that look like this with reddish fur. The same goes for giant pandas, where you would normally expect them to be seen in black and white. There is a known panda that was born with reddish fur or brown fur and similarly you have badgers or more commonly black but very rarely you will see one with reddish brown fur of course it's not just shellfish and mammals that will appear with unusual pigmentation, such as the ball python, which normally appears brown. and black but occasionally appears with white fur covering most of its body, a rare variant that, like a shiny

pokemon

, is highly sought after by collectors, which brings us back to our original question: what makes these animals appear in unusual colors and why?

It's so rare that it all comes down to a genetic mutation, whether it's a mutation that causes extra proteins like in the lobster, a mutation that causes a deficiency in enzymes like the Jaclyn badger, or mutations that affect melanin production like the snake and others. animals like sea turtles. Whales, moose and zebras, real-life shinies and, by proxy, Pokémon shinies, are caused by genetic mutations that don't normally occur in nature, but that's only half the story, The other factor at play here and the other thing that makes them so rare is the fact. While most of them do not survive to adulthood, often the same genetic mutations that cause them to have different colors also affect crucial abilities such as the ability to see, for example, a high level of boldness, which is the official name of the pattern. of coloration that we saw in that snake.

It is genetically similar to albinism a condition that affects both humans and animals in albinism the body is unable to produce enough melanin in most places this does not make a significant difference however it also includes a lack of melanin in the eyes where There are lower amounts of that pigment can actually affect your ability to see, as a result a large number of people with albinism are legally blind due to how highly photosensitive their eyes are. Lower levels of melanin also mean paler skin, which in turn greatly increases the risk of sun damage, but unlike humans in the animal kingdom, albino and piebald animals do not have the option of going to the sun. local tesco to buy some sunglasses in a spf 50 tube.

It's not just humans who have to worry about things like skin cancer and radiation burns. too much sun exposure, these things happen to animals too, but unfortunately a melanin deficiency makes these animals less likely to survive and that's not even mentioning how being bright white makes you much more likely to stand out to predators Compared to their much more camouflaged brethren, zebras have stripes. because vertical lines allow predators to be confused when moving as a group, which makes it more difficult for a lion to identify a target, but if you look different from the rest of the pride, it will be easier for that lion to track you, which makes it much more likely that you will become the next meal before you can pass on your genes to the next generation and the more unusual you are, the harder it will be to survive to adulthood to pass on those genes, so having an unusual color on grasslands is not a great idea.

I know that being an unusual color is useful in captivity and this again is where we see video games imitating unusual colors from real life. They make an animal a prize for collectors, which is not that different from shiny Pokémon. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing that screams. Throw a To me the pokeball is more like being a rare color, there's a reason why people work for hours to catch a shiny umbreon because it's rare because it's a trophy, it's an achievement and damn it's cute like that little brown panda, so even though it's a rare color, it makes you much more likely to die a horrible, gruesome death on a wild Pokémon or else it also means you're much more likely to die from an impressionable 10-year-old. years saved you from that horrible death by throwing his balls in your face, especially when compared to I don't know the million pidgey he encounters, which brings us to a final and very unexpected comparison between the brilliance of video games and the biology of the world real, since we just discussed that many of the color variants we see in nature are genetic. meaning they are hereditary and passed from parents to children and therefore to some extent the likelihood that you will end up with a different coat or skin color depends on who your parents are.

That's not entirely true in the Pokémon universe, two shiny Pokémon parents getting together doesn't increase the chance of having a shiny baby unless you count generation 2 where Pokémon's shine was determined by something called dv's in a way which hasn't been a part of the Pokémon games since, however, if you are looking to breed a shiny Pokémon, there is one thing you can do to increase the chances of you raising a special egg using two parents from different regions and I don't mean to different regions of the Pokémon world, such as breeding a lowland raichu with a Galerian pikachu to have a higher chance of obtaining a shiny pichu, that is, trapped in different regions of the real world or, more accurately, in different languages ​​of the game, if you take a pikachu that was caught in an English version of the game and breed it with a pikachu that was caught in a Japanese version of the game, your resulting pichu is five times more likely to be shiny than if you simply distributed two Pokémon caught in the English versions.

This shiny hunting method is informally known as the masuda method, named after the game's director, Junichi Masuda, who programmed the mechanics into the game starting in Generation 4 and documented it on his blog. It's a lesser-known mechanic that was designed to bring international Pokémon communities together, encouraging you to not only trade Pokémon with your friends, but also make new friends with people who play. I play in different languages ​​and exchange a pro tip with them, by the way, if you have a friend who has a version of the game in a different language than yours, get them to exchange you a ditto specifically for brilliant streaming purposes, the masuda method seems to suggest that Pokémon that are more different from each other are more likely to produce a shiny Pokémon than a Spanish Charmander and a Japanese Charmander have a special chemistry that makes them five times more likely to produce shiny Charmander offspring, but it turns out that that squares with reality .

No, in fact, it's quite the opposite, many real-life shiners are the result of inbreeding, for example, remember the brown panda I mentioned earlier, according to scientists who talked about the brown panda in Nature magazine, one of the most plausible explanations for the brown panda. the origin is inbreeding a lack of genetic diversity as pandas become rarer and rarer there is less and less variety in the gene pool and that is why it is increasingly difficult to find pandas to breed with that are not in some way related to you a few generations ago The complete lack of genetic diversity that leads to strange coloration is actually something that happened in humans.

The Runaways are a family that lived in the hills of Kentucky and were commonly known as the Blue Runaways or the Kentucky Blue People because of many members of their family. their skin was literally blue no this is not photoshopped no this is not distorted in any way this is the real color of their skin you see they have a rare genetic trait that leads to the disease methymoglobinemia which causes blue skin, the cause of this genetic anomaly Well, for a period of about 200 years, the escaped family was largely isolated from the outside world in a remote part of the Appalachian Mountains, leading to a predictable lack of genetic diversity.

Let's say your family tree seems a little more vertical and less wide than you. As we have already discussed, it is to be expected that unusual pigmentation is usually the result of an adverse genetic mutation and, as you probably already know, birth defects become more common when the parents are very closely related, in short, runaways are a real world example of humans being brilliant it is actually a lack of genetic diversity that causes the type of mutations that result in unusual colors if the masuda method tried to be biologically accurate crossing a japanese squirtle with a french one would probably have a reduced chance of producing shiny offspring, luckily this is the only part of the Pokémon game mechanic that isn't true to real life, so if you're a shiny hunter it might be worth starting to make some international friends, if not, let's say you'll end up. blue d but hey that's just a

theory

game theory thanks for watching I don't know how it's been for you guys but this winter has been brutal I mean sure maybe it's the fact that this is my first real winter in almost a decade since then.

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