So I’m about to make a completely insane post. Excuse me.
So I got this comment on Peaks and Valleys the other day, on the chapter where Blue is in the airport and has to put all his Pokemon in holding.
Grabs this anon’s shoulders. I thought about this. I thought about this a lot. I went back and forth on it during this chapter so much.
And I actually concluded that the airline security does not necessarily imply this. While a lot of our real-world flight security was considerably tightened and comes as a direct result of 9/11, I don’t think that’s the case here.
I think this is actually much more mundane safety concerns. Even an incredibly well-trained and well-behaved Pikachu, if surprised by a bout of turbulence, might let off some static. That’s going to interfere with the equipment and make things unsafe.
What about the incredibly variable size and shape of pokemon - what happens if some kid releases Mom’s Nidoqueen or Wailord in the middle of a flight? That’s a big and heavy pokemon to suddenly have in an enclosed space where weight of cargo has to be well accounted for.
Even if you bring a small Pokémon, evolution could happen really suddenly - especially due to environmental effects. Imagine someone’s got their cute little Tyrunt next to them on the flight, it sneaks a rare candy or something, and next thing you know there’s a massive 600lbs Tyrantrum to deal with.
What about the effects on the pokemon themselves - moving quickly at high altitudes between different places and weather patterns is probably going to make a Castform kind of sick and out of sorts.
Pokeball locking, enforcing Everstone use, or having specific regulations about what Pokémon can go on flights and what can’t. Those could be feasible solutions but would also require a lot of overhead. There’s hundreds of different Pokemon, the average flight holds about 200 people, every single person could carry up to 6 pokemon with them. That’s a LOT of SOPs and guidelines to write, a lot of things to check, potentially a lot of things for passengers to get done (I didn’t consider this at the time because it was pre-Scarvio, but Everstones can only be bought in ScarVio at 3000 yen a pop - otherwise they have to be found in the wild. That’s an expensive and annoying thing to source for either passengers or the airline).
The most effective solution - short of forcing everyone to put their pokemon in boxes to get on the other end (and box software varies by region potentially causing complication, a lot of people would really resist this, etc), is just to securely hold all Pokémon in the same way apart from the human passengera until the end of the flight.
In conclusion: never think I didn’t excessively think about the implications of Pokemon air travel in my gay fanfic. I am insane and I did.
