Game Theory - Why Flying Pokemon CAN'T FLY!

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he ruins Pokemon for you by explaining why flying Pokemon CAN'T actually fly! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

internet welcome to game theory the show where you just gotta catch them all all the episodes that is how else are you gonna stand top of fnaf lore or the science of mario or whatever insanity the dream smp is going on this week so one of the longest running discussions in the pokemon franchise is with the move fly i mean if youtube had somehow existed back in nineteen ninety nine i'd probably be doing a gen one theory trying to come up with some ridiculous explanation for how do duo can use fly despite the fact that it has no wings come to think of it how dodoo can fly. And of course, even for Pokemon that do have wings, there's still the utter absurdity of a tiny Pidgey being able to carry an 11-year-old kid around. Yeah, that deserves mentioning. Ritt's canonical age in the games is 11, according to the official game manual. Contrary to the anime saying that Ash is age 10. I don't know why they made it a difference. Anyway, an average 11-year-old kid is 81 pounds or 37 kilograms, which means that poor little Pidgee at 4 pounds or 1.8 kilograms has to carry over 20 times his own body weight. Ain't gonna happen. So, to solve this logical inconsistency, and to prevent players from having to waste party and move slots on HMs, thank Arseus.

Recent generations have moved away from the old model of using HMs to teach your Pokemon to fly, surf, or rock smash their way through the world, and replace them with pokey rides, where Pokemon outside of your party function as rentable service vehicles able to be summoned when you need them. Kind of like the Pokemon world's equivalent of hiring an Uber. A Uber, I guess? In the case of flying, it started with the Charazard service. But in the latest gen, Sword and Shield, the entire region is covered by a flying taxi service of giant Corvanites who'll carry around in a cab like the world's scariest cable car.

But does the world building here really hold up? Sure, a giant armored bird hauling you around makes a lot more sense than a four-pound pigeon, but would it actually work? I mean, this thing is holding up multiple people. We're shown both in the games and in the anime's Twilight Wings miniseries that the Sky Taxi has both a passenger and a human cabby. Besides that, in the game, we know that flying taxi cab driver is a profession from the existence of the cabby trainers who fittingly use all flying Pokemon. So could a Corvanite, based on the physical characteristics we know about it, actually carry that much weight? Or are we better sticking with our Charzard mounts like they do over in a Lola?

Probably the best way to start getting a handle on how much weight a bird can carry is to look at examples. In the real world, the record for weight carrying capacity is held by a bald eagle that managed to lift a deer that weighed 15. pounds, or 6.8 kilograms. Bird of prey? More like bird of prey that he doesn't see ya. You may have also seen videos of eagles trying to snatch up human kids, like a wedge-tailed eagle who became the subject of a viral photo when, according to the park, the eagle, quote, made contact with an audience member. Yep, sink in your two-inch talons into a small child and calling it making contact. That, my friends, is what you call some PR spin. There was even a New York Times story about an eagle who tried to carry off a Scottish baby from its mother. This was

back in 1926. Apparently eagle snatching was just a lot more common back in the day. But all of that being said, a 15-pound deer lift may be impressive for a bird the size of an eagle, but it's a far cry from carrying around an 80-pound, raspy-voiced preteen. The eagle has an impressive wingspan of 6.6 feet or 2 meters, and at 3 foot tall, 0.9 meters, roughly the size of a toddler, the eagle is certainly a massive bird. However, it is teeny when you compare it to the massive Corvonite, which is reportedly 7 foot 3 inches tall, 2.2 meters, over double the size. But size is only one factor here. What I really want to know is what I call the ant ratio. You know that piece of knowledge that everyone seems to have that ants are really small

but can carry anywhere between 50 and 5,000 times their own body weight? Well, we want to know which birds are capable of doing similar feats. And when you look at it this way, the Great Horned Owl is the winner, able to lift around twice its own weight. That's a bird with a 4.1 foot or 1.25 meter wingspan and weighing in at 5.5 pounds, 2.5 kilos, able to carry about 11 pounds or 5 kilos. So again, double its own weight. Looking at data from these and other birds, there seems to be a rough correlation that for every one foot of wingspan, a bird can carry around 4 pounds, including both the load it's carrying plus its own body weight. Or if you use the much cooler metric system, it winds up being a ratio of 6KG per meter of wing. But that doesn't quite tell us the full story, because remember, birds generate lift by. flapping their wings, ergo the larger the area of your wings, the more lift you generate.

And if you double the length of a wing, you're probably also increasing its width as well. Remember, basic geometry tells us that if you double the dimensions of a square, you're actually quadrupling its area. What this tells us is that if Corvinite is 2.4 times the heightened wingspan of a bald eagle, its wings aren't just 2.4 times as big, they're actually 5.76 times as big, and therefore, capable of lifting 5.76 times as much weight. This means that if an eagle is capable of lifting 29 pounds, picking up a 15 pound deer plus its own body mass of 14 pounds,

then a Corvonite should be able to lift a mass of, drum roll please, 167 pounds, 75.75 kilos, which is a lot. Until you consider that the flying taxi service is expected to lift a giant metal car, along with two human-sized passengers. And that's without even factoring in Corvonite's own weight. According to the Pocodex, Corvonite, the blackluster of its steel body could drive terror into the heart of any foe. It has a steel body, which makes it one super thick bird.

165.3 pounds, or 75 kilograms, thick. Meaning that it can carry a mere 1.7 pounds extra before the payload gets too heavy for Corvinite's wings to carry. Forget carrying a Pokemon trainer. this thing can barely lift a football. But I can already hear you say, and Matt Pat, how can that be right? If an owl can carry an object that's twice its body mass and an eagle can pick up an object that's nearly equal to its body mass,

then why can't Corvinite do the same thing? Well, loyal theorists, it all comes down to one of my favorite scientific principles, the square cube law. Here's the quick explanation. Earlier, we established that when you double the size of an object along a single dimension, you actually get quadruple the area. A 1 by 1 inch square increased to a 2x2 inch square will have an area of 4 square inches.

However, while the area increases as the square of the length, the mass increases as the cube of the length, which is to say, a 1 by 1 by 1 inch cube increased to a 2 by 2 inch cube will suddenly have 8 times the volume and therefore 8 times the mass. What this means is that if you take a bird and double its wingspan, you're increasing the area of its wings and the weight that it can carry by a factor of 4, but you're also increasing the bird's weight by a factor of eight. The bigger the wings are, the more musculature the bird needs to be able to flap those wings,

and the weight of the bird's own muscles increases faster than the weight the wings are able to carry, which is exactly what we're seeing happening with Corvinite, with the weight that is just at what it should be able to carry. So, well done Game Freak on keeping scientifically accurate with your Pokemon, but also, shame on you, game freak, for not keeping scientifically accurate with your Pokemon world. By the way, this also explains some basic facts about nature, like the reason why most birds are small, and why the heaviest flying birds on Earth, the quarry Bustard of Africa, weighs in at only 40 pounds, 18 kilograms. If birds get too big and massive, their bodies literally can't support their own weight due to basic laws of physics.

And you see, that's the real twist here. This video isn't so much about which Pokemon can and can't be flying taxis, it's more about which Pokemon can and can't actually fly. Corvonite is actually one of the few flying Pokemon that would actually be able to fly based on its Pokedex stats. Let's compare with our other flying taxi service Pokemon Charazard. Using everything that we just covered, Charazard's wings should be able to support a weight of 103.5 pounds, or 46.9 kilos. And what's his weight in the Pocodex?

Nearly double that. Almost 200 pounds. Forget given people rides around Alola, Charazard shouldn't even be able to take off for itself. In fact, what we've discovered here isn't just a problem with the Sky Taxi Service. It's a problem with flying poli service. Flying Pokemon in general. Flying Pokemon are much more accurately classified as ground Pokemon. Or should I say grounded Pokemon. All thanks to the Square Cube Law.

So once we saw this, we went through the weight and size data for every single flying Pokemon in the Pokedex. Based on that, I've compiled a list of flying Pokemon that, scientifically speaking, should never be able to get their talons off the ground. Note here that I'm only including Pokemon that have wings. I'm not including Pokemon that just seemed to mysteriously levitate or fly through the air like Giridos and Raqweza, which presumably have their own non-wing way of keeping themselves in the air. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, your non-flyable flyers. Scarmory, aerodactyl, Tropius, Charazard, Saliments, Dragonite, Togekicis,

Hoot, Hoot, and Lugia. And by the way, the megaforms also apply here. In other words, one-tenth of the game's flying Pokemon can't physically fly. Maybe there's some in-universe explanation for why some of these Pokemon can fly despite the fact that scientifically speaking Their wings shouldn't be able to support their own weight Maybe legendary Pokemon like Ho-O and Lugia have ways of controlling air currents Maybe Charzard can do something where he heats the air around it to create convection currents Maybe dragons and fairies have mysterious air controlling powers or maybe I'm just making excuses for game freak at this point

Go figure rock and steel types aren't the best candidates for creatures that are expected to fly also well most of the Most of these examples go toward my point that flying is a lot harder as you grow more massive. The weirdest example on the list has to be Hoot Hoot. I normally think of Hoot Hoot as being a pretty small bird Pokemon. But in terms of physical size, it is, a mere 2 foot 4 inches tall or 71 centimeters. But apparently it weighs 46.7 pounds, 21.2 kilos. For comparison, a human toddler of that height would only weigh about 21 pounds. 9.8 kilos. I mean, what's up, Hoot Hoot?

You've been pounding down one too many Chipotle burritos? Sorry, little bud. those tiny little wings ears just aren't enough to handle your incredible girth. So how could we possibly fix Pokemon's transportation problem? Well, if you really wanted to create a Pokemon taxi service, paradoxically, the solution isn't to go bigger, it's actually to go smaller. As we noted, one of the birds renowned for carrying multiples of its own body weight, the horned owl is actually quite small.

So the answer seems to lie in looking at the smallest and lightest flying Pokemon. The humble Pidgee, based on its wingspan, should be able to carry a weight of seven pounds, which is actually three pounds greater than its own weight of four. In fact, if you look at the Pokemon in the category I like to call the Pidgey Clones, the tiny little bird Pokemon that always seem to appear early game, Talo, Starly, Piedov, Fetchling, Rookadee. The one that actually stands out here more than all the others is Fetchling, which, like most of the other Pidgee clones, is one foot tall,

but weighs in at just 2.6 pounds. That means that in addition to its own weight, Fetchling can carry an additional capacity of 4.4 pounds. Obviously, that's not enough to lift a person. But if you get a flock of a hundred fetchlings, each with their own little harnesses, suddenly you've got yourself a carrying capacity of 440 pounds, which is now approaching territory where you'd actually be able to transport a small sky vehicle and some human occupants.

Or you could just recreate this iconic scene from Hey Arnold. Always wash your berries before you eat them and fly toward the sun. And if that sounds like more work than just having a single giant flying Pokemon, well, you're not wrong. Maybe the Pokemon universe should finally bite the bulletin, you know, just invest in more. airplanes. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.