Hey, Bill, what’s it like live in a world in which, for all intents and purposes, humans should be at the bottom of the food chain? How did you all make it to the top? Was it humanity’s intelligence, or just good old fashion dumb luck?

This is quite literally the exact question every pokémon researcher seeks to answer. It’s the greatest mystery of our world. After all, pokémon wield such amazing powers—mastery over electricity, psychic abilities, dragon magic, and so forth—yet these are very rarely turned on human beings.

There are, of course, legends that offer answers. Sinnohans, for example, believe that humans and pokémon were once the same species that separated at the dissolution of a vaguely defined pact between them. On the other hand, Johtonians and Hoennians both revere pokémon as holy (although we differ in our opinions of what kinds of gods and how intelligent they actually were), and it’s said that our respect for pokémon is exactly what made them respect us in return.

However, all of these are simply legends. A more accurate and modern explanation is that humanity’s ingenuity has protected them from extinction, and to be quite honest, it’s the most likely theory we have. When you think about it, it’s not just pokémon that can and have tried to kill us. The animals we also share this world with are certainly better equipped to survive and come complete with certain defense mechanisms that could very well rip us apart.

Yet we’ve managed to survive for eons thanks to our inventiveness. We have, for example, mastered architecture, agriculture, and the art of domestication, so in short, you could say we’ve survived purely by virtue of being stubborn and audacious enough to want to control the world around us and force it not to kill us. Pokémon have a tendency to respect that drive to not die, which is possibly why the more badges a trainer has, the more a pokémon is willing to listen to them. It’s really all about proving to your magical companions that if a hurricane is thrown at you, you will somehow find a way to survive it like the tenacious giant cockroach you probably are.

So to answer your main question, what is it like to live in a world where anything can kill you? Quite nice, actually. It is, in all seriousness, quite inspiring to know that our entire species survives due to a combination of being too stubborn to die off and earning the respect of creatures who control the elements purely because of that stubbornness.