SPOILERS! Mysteries and Conspiracies of Pokemon

[R_N]

Ok, if we wanna really cut this up you can interpret the statement "Why are there examples of Mega Evolution only in the Kalos region?" to mean "Why do certain Mega Evolutions only happen in Kalos?" I'm sure there have to be a few Pokemon who could Mega Evolve in XY but didn't appear in the ORAS or SM dexes...

eh who am i kidding this is just crappy foresight lul

In explicit fairness to Alola, it may as well have not existed prior to us beating the game. The only users of it are foreigners: Red, Blue & Dexio. Dexio gives you the key stone, even. All the mega stones except Alakazite are bought at the Battle Tree, which is run by Red & Blue. SM likely takes place after XY anyway. I honestly wouldnt be surprised if they did this on purpose (both are "Team A" productions iirc), with it on their minds as they shifted from one game's development to the next.

e: Actually I was misremembering. Your initial battles with Red & Blue don't use Mega Stones at all! They can use them in the Battle Tree proper though, as can anyone within the tree.

ORAS is an oopsies and by Let's Go they no doubt just dont care any more since Megas are part of the series now (even if they're on hiatus with SWSH).

 

[Pikachu315111]

While it is a retcon it's easy to try and handwave it away as Rayquaza was the true birthplace but it was mostly lost to time. Like Rayquaza itself, really. So byt the time Mega Lucario came around, that was the more colloquially known one since it was still held in reverence in Kalos.

Though honestly even if they say Kalos is the only place in the world to have Mega Evolution, well, so far as retcons go let's remember that this same series has claimed:
-the 100 new gen 2 pokemo nwere "newly discovered" by Oak in the span of 2 years. Despite them being native to Johto, which is literally across the mountain and has a strong deep lore for several of them.
-Steel, Dark & Fairy are all similarly explicitly stated to be "newly discovered" at their onset which is especially laughable with Fairy typing
-With Let's Go, Red & Blue apparently already had their journey before Chase & Elaine, and as such did not get to do any of the things they actually did and also i guess never became champions??

You're right that, even with the retcon, Rayquaza being the first Mega Pokemon was probably largely forgotten due to happening in ancient times. Also with a rampaging super Kyogre and Groudon no one probably knew what was happening and just glad Rayqauza stopped them whatever it did. Also with how Rayquaza is able to Mega Evolve without a Mega Stone it's a special case anyway and so Mega Lucario could be counted as the first Mega Evolution (in modern history)(with use of a Mega Stone).

As for the other retcons, let's see if we can't come up with an explanation for those:

1. Call it a fanon theory, but I write new Pokemon being considered "newly discovered" is so because the region just joined Oak's "Pokedex Project". Thus all the Pokemon in that region that haven't showed up in another region which joined the "Pokedex Project" before then are considered "newly discovered". It's a weak excuse for sure, but makes sense on a technical level and even a meta level since this is the first time players are experiencing these Pokemon.

2. Yeah, the new Types are hard to justify especially for the Pokemon that get re-typed. "Hey, why is my Magnemite suddenly weak Fire & immune to Poison"? "Why is Normal-type Gym Leader Whitney's Gym in a shape of a pure Fairy-type Pokemon"? Though Dark-type did things right as no Gen 1 Pokemon was re-typed as Dark, lol. But, let's see, how was Steel- & especially Fairy-type suddenly come into existence? Well, if I were to pull the fanon theory twice, I have this fanon theory known as "time ripples" to explain such inconsistencies. Basically, Arceus or whatever power that be decide to add a new "universal fundamental" (UF for short) into effect (like a new Type) but not to just spring this suddenly upon an unsuspecting universe instead it applies this new UF in the far past. Just like throwing a stone into a center of a pond, the entire pond doesn't splash but rather a ripple spreads across out it interrupting the surface in a smaller & subtle way. As these time ripples pass through time it changes the past and thus the present and future so that the new UF had always been effect, what do you mean Arceus just created Fairy-type when Kalos joined the Pokedex Project, are you nuts?
This could also go for the Mega Evolutions outside of Kalos. Originally they were, but Arceus quickly time rippled that away and now Sycamore is looking through his notes confused why he's been only focusing on the Kalos Mega Pokemon and not on any of the Hoenn which is considered a sister region with Kalos.

3. D'oh! You're right, Let's Go is a 3rd continuity. So we have the Original Timeline, Mega Timeline, and the GO Timeline. Heck, other side games probably take place in their own timeline like Pokemon Conquest.

 

[Hematite]

Oh, speaking of "new" types from an in-world perspective!
This is 100% baseless headcanon, but I'm partial to the idea that Xerneas and Yveltal are directly responsible for the existence of the Fairy and Dark types.

For one thing, we know that their Abilities power up their respective types - given their existing potential to increase the effect of those types not only in themselves but in other Pokémon, it makes some amount of sense that their own activity could serve to "activate" those types in other kinds of Pokémon.
For another, we know that they awaken and rest on cycles of up to a thousand years at a time, and we know that they were dormant for several centuries before their recent reawakening in X and Y. However, since we never see them in their resting places in X and Y (Team Flare has already captured them), we don't actually know how long they've been active before the climax of those games. They're already being actively drained by the time we see them, so I don't think "they're a tree/cocoon in the moment" necessarily equates to "they hadn't been awake in the first place?" It might, of course - emphasizing that this is totally headcanon and might not be accurate.
Both of the types in question were acknowledged as newly discovered even in-world at the time of their release... so is it possible that Yveltal woke up some time in between RBY and GSC, while Xerneas woke up very shortly before X and Y?

Since we know of a bunch of ancient Pokémon that were already Dark- and Fairy-type, even pure Dark- and Fairy-type, they can't actually be "new" ... but I wouldn't be surprised if both types had been "dormant" for a few centuries and been lost to myth (if the last time we know both Pokémon were awake was 800 years ago, would the type chart really have been studied with any rigor by that point? or - if it had been - would more modern studies not just have thrown out the bits they consistently "proved false" after the duo went back to sleep?). This is why the idea of "fairies," even the theme of fairies slaying dragons, is something that seems to be totally familiar to the Pokémon world - things like Clefairy and Snubbull being recognized as "fairy Pokémon" even when they were considered Normal-types may well be a relic of this older time when they actually were Fairy-types. But since the type disappeared, it was eventually dismissed as myth or fantasy and forgotten - I mean, there are plenty of modern takes on old legends that suggest the same kind of thing ("dragons/fairies/magic/insert fantasy trope here was real - it's just buried in the past"), so making that the actual in-world explanation doesn't seem too implausible.

I know this is kind of a stretch, but it helps to handwave some of the other obvious issues.

also we DO happen to have a Steel-type that conveniently disappeared 3,000 years ago and was rediscovered in the present shortly after the type itself
(Melmetal doesn't have an Aura Ability, though - that part is more of a joke!)

 

[R_N]

With the gen 2 retcons they did at least decided to not do it again until Fairy came around. While marketing always goes on about "newly discovered" pokemon, that isn't actually in the games (well, there's a few exceptions here and there, but it's relevant) after gen 2.
HGSS slightly rewrote the dialog for the discoveries of pokemon, typing and breeding to in order not being right, not mentioned (i think) and my favorite is Elm all but rolling his eyes at Mr Pokemon bringing him another "mysterious" egg.

Hey, listen. I have an acquaintance called Mr. Pokémon. He keeps finding weird things and raving about his discoveries. Anyway, I just got an e-mail from him saying that this time it's real. It is intriguing,
-------
"This? But... Is it a Pokémon Egg? If it is, it is a great discovery!

became

"Hey, listen. I have this acquaintance that people call Mr. Pokémon. He keeps finding weird things and raving about his discoveries. Anyway, I just got an email from him saying that this time it's real. It's probably another Pokémon Egg, but we're still so busy with our Pokémon research...
----
"Huh? This is an... Egg, isn't it? This Egg may be something I've never seen...still it's just an Egg. Mr. Pokémon is always fascinated by Eggs. Well, since he gave it to us, we might as well find out what secret it holds. I'll keep it for a while to find out about the Egg."

(though it is a little silly he's seemingly never seen this egg, but in HGSS it is meant ot be a special Kimono Girl plot and it does have extrasensory so I'll let it sllide)

The Fairy thing well...I just have to assume it's because it was the first new type in 16 years and they wanted to make sure you knew about it in the most direct manner and then just ignore every single instance of what that would entail after that up to & including XY themselves.

 

[Ironmage]

Theory relating to the timeline between games:

The legendary birds and mewtwo are not catchable in the original GSC because it was assumed that they were unique and Red caught them to fill out his pokedex. They can be caught in HGSS because it is no longer assumed that Red catches and holds on to legendaries.


Off-topic speculation: Magearna was built for war. This comes from a combination of it being skewed towards battle over support compared to most other mythicals, and the fact that a large-scale battle with casualties on both sides would ensure it would pretty much always be at +6 even if it used Fleur Cannon liberally. As an extension, Magearna was designed off of technology from Kalos' ultimate weapon directly, since they are both based on using other mons' life force as a destructive power source.

 

[Merritt]

As usual, adding more timelines fixes all the issues.

it is a little silly he's seemingly never seen this egg, but in HGSS it is meant ot be a special Kimono Girl plot and it does have extrasensory so I'll let it sllide)

Not that silly honestly. The Togepi line, despite being Johto Pokemon, aren't found wild on the Johto-Kanto continent. It's entirely possible that Elm has never seen a Togepi egg before.

 

[R_N]

Theory relating to the timeline between games:

The legendary birds and mewtwo are not catchable in the original GSC because it was assumed that they were unique and Red caught them to fill out his pokedex. They can be caught in HGSS because it is no longer assumed that Red catches and holds on to legendaries.


Off-topic speculation: Magearna was built for war. This comes from a combination of it being skewed towards battle over support compared to most other mythicals, and the fact that a large-scale battle with casualties on both sides would ensure it would pretty much always be at +6 even if it used Fleur Cannon liberally. As an extension, Magearna was designed off of technology from Kalos' ultimate weapon directly, since they are both based on using other mons' life force as a destructive power source.

Let me build off this: it wasn't built for war, but it was altered for war. All the dex entries mention this thing was made to please a king's daughter. It's a very dainty design, it understand human speech, it has a colorscheme the daughter liked and it can synch with your emotions. It was a big hit!

But time passes and war happens and hey here's an automaton pokemon whose heart literally powers itself on the energy of the fallen. Now it's decked out in an arm cannon and given (among other moves) a new attack that's so powerful it recoils.

you can even draw similarities in this theory to AZ's Floette. A beloved gift brought into a war.


not that gamefreak is especially interested in doing anything with it, i suppose.

As usual, adding more timelines fixes all the issues.



Not that silly honestly. The Togepi line, despite being Johto Pokemon, aren't found wild on the Johto-Kanto continent. It's entirely possible that Elm has never seen a Togepi egg before.

Sure but Togepi's a known quantity in the world by this time. And all the eggs look the same in-game (except Manaphy) which is...a little surprsiing now that I think about it. I can see why they wouldn't make special eggs for every single Pokemon for in-game purposes (though I know some fans who have done just that) but you'd think they would've made a special exception for the pokemon explicitly designed around the mechanic.
Well whatever so far as these things go it's fairly easy to let slide regardless, maybe he did indeed never see a togepi egg or whatever. Who knows what that egg truly looked like!

 

[Yung Dramps]

Off-topic speculation: Magearna was built for war. This comes from a combination of it being skewed towards battle over support compared to most other mythicals, and the fact that a large-scale battle with casualties on both sides would ensure it would pretty much always be at +6 even if it used Fleur Cannon liberally. As an extension, Magearna was designed off of technology from Kalos' ultimate weapon directly, since they are both based on using other mons' life force as a destructive power source.

This reminds me of a personal theory I've had for a decent while: Magearna was originally intended to be a Gen 6 Pokemon. Admittedly this assertion is mainly based on circumstantial evidence, but hear me out:

-Its signature move is literally called Fleur Cannon. No localization flukes here as the name is the exact same in Japanese.

-The dex entries for the original color form mention being built to please a king's daughter. Nowhere in Alola's lore to my knowledge is a king mentioned (oops it is, really gotta get my alola lore fax str8, can't be the main gen 7 stan without it), and considering the kind of ancient architecture you see around the region and even its current state technologically I seriously doubt the ancient people of the region would've been able to build it.

-The many suspicious parallels to AZ's Floette and the Ultimate Weapon other posters here have mentioned. Hell, even the signature move; Fleur Cannon, Flower Cannon. Kinda like Floette. Eh? Eh?

-We already have an example of a potential Pokemon Z/XY2 remnant that found its way into Gen 7 in the form of Zygarde's new forms and presence in the region. Who's to say that Magearna couldn't be in the same camp?

 

[DrPumpkinz]

But time passes and war happens and hey here's an automaton pokemon whose heart literally powers itself on the energy of the fallen. Now it's decked out in an arm cannon and given (among other moves) a new attack that's so powerful it recoils.

Wh... why the hell would you build a non-combat robot that powers itself with deceased souls?

 

[R_N]

Wh... why the hell would you build a non-combat robot that powers itself with deceased souls?

Sometimes you just really want to do a blasphemy to impress your liege's daughter!

-The dex entries for the original color form mention being built to please a king's daughter. Nowhere in Alola's lore to my knowledge is a king mentioned, and considering the kind of ancient architecture you see around the region and even its current state technologically I seriously doubt the ancient people of the region would've been able to build it.

Well I can't comment on the other parts of this but Alola has had several kings, they get mentioned in the library & things like the Cosmog dex entries. Acerola is explicitly from the royal line.

Which makes sense as I am fairly certain that real life Hawaii had a monarchy for a time. There's like a really famous song that's about a queen having ot hand over their land to colonizers?

 

[Ironmage]

Oh, speaking of "new" types from an in-world perspective!
This is 100% baseless headcanon, but I'm partial to the idea that Xerneas and Yveltal are directly responsible for the existence of the Fairy and Dark types.

For one thing, we know that their Abilities power up their respective types - given their existing potential to increase the effect of those types not only in themselves but in other Pokémon, it makes some amount of sense that their own activity could serve to "activate" those types in other kinds of Pokémon.
For another, we know that they awaken and rest on cycles of up to a thousand years at a time, and we know that they were dormant for several centuries before their recent reawakening in X and Y. However, since we never see them in their resting places in X and Y (Team Flare has already captured them), we don't actually know how long they've been active before the climax of those games. They're already being actively drained by the time we see them, so I don't think "they're a tree/cocoon in the moment" necessarily equates to "they hadn't been awake in the first place?" It might, of course - emphasizing that this is totally headcanon and might not be accurate.
Both of the types in question were acknowledged as newly discovered even in-world at the time of their release... so is it possible that Yveltal woke up some time in between RBY and GSC, while Xerneas woke up very shortly before X and Y?

Since we know of a bunch of ancient Pokémon that were already Dark- and Fairy-type, even pure Dark- and Fairy-type, they can't actually be "new" ... but I wouldn't be surprised if both types had been "dormant" for a few centuries and been lost to myth (if the last time we know both Pokémon were awake was 800 years ago, would the type chart really have been studied with any rigor by that point? or - if it had been - would more modern studies not just have thrown out the bits they consistently "proved false" after the duo went back to sleep?). This is why the idea of "fairies," even the theme of fairies slaying dragons, is something that seems to be totally familiar to the Pokémon world - things like Clefairy and Snubbull being recognized as "fairy Pokémon" even when they were considered Normal-types may well be a relic of this older time when they actually were Fairy-types. But since the type disappeared, it was eventually dismissed as myth or fantasy and forgotten - I mean, there are plenty of modern takes on old legends that suggest the same kind of thing ("dragons/fairies/magic/insert fantasy trope here was real - it's just buried in the past"), so making that the actual in-world explanation doesn't seem too implausible.

I know this is kind of a stretch, but it helps to handwave some of the other obvious issues.

also we DO happen to have a Steel-type that conveniently disappeared 3,000 years ago and was rediscovered in the present shortly after the type itself
(Melmetal doesn't have an Aura Ability, though - that part is more of a joke!)

I think its possible that we may not yet have seen the "primordial Steel," or that it's a combination of factors or something natural like a geomagnetic reversal. This is because, if we run with this, there is a good chance Steel's reemergence is still ongoing. Of the 26 evolutionary lines that have always been Steel, 12 are Legendary (three artificial, five extraterrestrial, one that was absent for some time, Dialga, heatran, and cobalion), and one more that mentions it only recently evolved its Steel armour (durant), for a total of 13 standard lines that have been always Steel for as long as we know. By contrast, there are 14 standard lines that are either a regional form of something that is not Steel, or evolve from a mon that is not Steel (plus Necrozma-DM, and the Crowned forms of the two wolves). Finally, there's magnemite, the only line to have become fully Steel.

For reference, Fairy is 12 always: 10 sometimes (counting both Ralts and Mr. Mime families): 7 pure retcon (not counting those two)
Dark is 20 always: 13 sometimes: 0 pure retcon

 

[Pikachu315111]

Which makes sense as I am fairly certain that real life Hawaii had a monarchy for a time. There's like a really famous song that's about a queen having ot hand over their land to colonizers?

It's Aloha 'Oe. It's heard in many films which take place in Hawaii, in and out of context. The most famous (in context) example I can think of is in Lilo & Stitch where Nani sings it to Lilo on their possible last night together before Lilo is taken away by Child Services.

 

[Yung Dramps]

Sometimes you just really want to do a blasphemy to impress your liege's daughter!


Well I can't comment on the other parts of this but Alola has had several kings, they get mentioned in the library & things like the Cosmog dex entries. Acerola is explicitly from the royal line.

Which makes sense as I am fairly certain that real life Hawaii had a monarchy for a time. There's like a really famous song that's about a queen having ot hand over their land to colonizers?

OUCH. Man, how can I be the main gen 7 stan on this site without knowing my Alola lore? Imma fake fan smh...

 

[Pikachu315111]

OUCH. Man, how can I be the main gen 7 stan on this site without knowing my Alola lore? Imma fake fan smh...

There, there. We all have our blind spot moments. Like I consider myself a Gen 5 stan yet forgot how high a level Rufflet (and by extension Vullaby) evolves at. I mean, geez, 54. 1 level earlier than Dragonite! I think the reason I forgot it was that high was because I caught the event Braviary on Route 4 in White 2 that was Level 25 and used it on my team cause I wanted to use a Braviary but didn't get a chance to in my White playthrough since you catch Rufflet so late.

 

[Hematite]

Hello!! Still working on the aforementioned big XY conspiracy post - I actually started writing and got to 4200 words and counting, so brace yourselves - but I do not have it ready just yet, haha. This is something else (and much smaller)!
I was doing some research on Kalosian lore for that post, and I stumbled into a cool connection that I... don't actually think I've ever seen anyone point out? So I thought it would be cool to share!

Okay, so you know how ORAS confirms that Mega Evolution energy naturally forms in space, but this is something that X and Y don't really address at all? The origin of Mega Evolution was originally said to be the Ultimate Weapon, not meteorites like ORAS tells us, and ORAS doesn't really make any effort to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory explanations.
That said, I think I might have cracked, uh, part of the mystery of both Mega Evolution's origins and Anistar City's famous, unexplained sundial, and I've uncovered a cool bit of lore on an underappreciated Gen VI Pokémon in the process!

First of all, what do we know about Anistar City's sundial?
According to the Town Map, the sundial is a mysterious object that apparently arrived from space; Professor Sycamore helpfully adds that this took place "over 3,000 years ago," suggesting that it was around or shortly before AZ's time.
As we hear from Professor Sycamore in the postgame, the sundial has an unusual property of turning light into a strange energy, which seems to be why it reacts to the light of sunset. Notably, he points out that it shares this property with the Mega Ring, suggesting that this strange energy is actually what we now know as Infinity Energy. While ORAS seemed to go all out in retconning Mega Evolution into something that came from space, this is the only time that X and Y suggest anything of the sort - and it doesn't exactly confirm the origin of Mega Evolution, only suggest that this one object from space might be related to it.

What X and Y never bother to explain, however, is what the sundial has to do with the Ultimate Weapon that AZ created. Sycamore is exceedingly vague on this, and he doesn't actually attempt to link the two - really, it seems more like he thinks Mega Evolution is the connection: "the Ultimate Weapon has something to do with Mega Evolution, and the sundial has something to do with Mega Evolution, so what if we put them together?" And I mean literally "put them together" - the only reason he even asks you to go there is because your Mega Ring has already responded to the weapon and now he wants you to touch the sundial and see what happens!
But, uh... just looking at the Ultimate Weapon... it actually kinda looks like a similar material, doesn't it? I mean, they're different colors, but they have the same transparent, layered, crystalline look...
And if we know Mega Evolution energy comes from space, then the first part of my proposal is simple: the Ultimate Weapon might have been fashioned from the same material as the sundial, like another piece that fell to the planet around the same time. Given that Mega Evolution energy naturally comes from space, the Ultimate Weapon was the catalyst for Mega Evolution in the Pokémon world, and another Mega Evolution-related object of a similar material happened to come from space almost right before we know the Ultimate Weapon was created...
It's a pretty basic assumption, of course - it might actually be common sense and I'm just behind? - but I haven't seen anyone talk about it, and I think it helps to explain some of the weird lore behind Mega Evolution. So far, so good?

You know how I acknowledged that the Ultimate Weapon was a different color from the sundial, even though it otherwise looks like a similar material? The sundial has this distinctive shade of pink, and it's adorned with decorations that seem to be made of gold, but the Ultimate Weapon has no such decorations and instead seems to be made of this pale, glassy, blue-white color with slight rainbow effects.
And a much smaller thing - if the sundial arrived near Anistar City, but the Ultimate Weapon was still made with the other fallen space rock, the other one would probably have landed much closer to Geosenge Town, right? AZ would just have used the Anistar one if the other one was in some distant region - the Ultimate Weapon looks a bit big for transportation, after all.
Is there maybe somewhere around Geosenge Town that seems like a good place to harvest some pale, glassy, blue-white crystals with slight rainbow effects? Well, yes! That would be Reflection Cave!

So here's the second part of my proposal: while the first space crystal landed in the area of Anistar City, the second one fell to Reflection Cave (and seemingly shattered to pieces!), and that's where AZ gathered his materials to create the Ultimate Weapon.

And here's a fun connection! This is the part that ties into a certain Pokémon that Kalos introduced.
Time to state the obvious: Diancie looks kind of like Anistar City's sundial, right? I mean, it's a pretty basic comparison that plenty of people have made before - they're both crystalline, they have the same distinctive shade of pink, and Diancie even has its little gold neck band (? I have no idea what to call this) that matches the gold pieces of the sundial in color and approximate shape. Most people tend to ignore this because there's not really any meaningful lore connection - Diancie has never really been associated with Anistar City - but you wouldn't deny that they look kinda similar, right?
Meanwhile, it just happens that Reflection Cave is the only place in Kalos where one can find Carbink, a crystalline Pokémon with a confirmed connection to Diancie - and unlike Diancie, Carbink's crystals are not pink but a pale, glassy, blue-white color, and it has none of Diancie's gold decorations... just like the Ultimate Weapon compared to the sundial!
As far as I can tell, Carbink and Diancie seem to be another link that connects the Ultimate Weapon and the crystals in Reflection Cave to the sundial in Anistar City. Knowing explicitly that Carbink can turn into Diancie, and seeing that Carbink and its home of Reflection Cave both bear a resemblance to the Ultimate Weapon and that Diancie has a strong resemblance to the sundial, I think this cements the initial idea that the Ultimate Weapon was fashioned from a space crystal that's closely related to the sundial.
Accordingly, here's the final part of my proposal: despite what we're led to believe, Carbink and Diancie aren't natural Pokémon that just form underground over time - they're actually fragments of the very same kind of space crystal that have come to life. They're aliens! Edit: oh, I'm an idiot - the dex actually does outright confirm that Carbink have existed for hundreds of millions of years, so they can't have come into existence within only the last three thousand. Amended version: Carbink and Diancie have incorporated parts of these very same space crystals into their bodies and have adapted accordingly! it's slightly less fun than "they're aliens" but probably more accurate... darn
That said, while this is confirmed of Carbink, there's no explicit time period given for Diancie - so while regular rock Carbink might have existed for a long time, some reaction in these space crystals might actually be why Carbink occasionally "suddenly transform" in the first place, and knowing this connection might be the first step to figuring out what exactly Diancie is...?

Other fun tidbits:
- Reflection Cave isn't only near Geosenge Town, where the Ultimate Weapon was created... it's also near Shalour City, where the successors of Mega Evolution have resided since the beginning! Given that the Anistar sundial is explicitly compared to the Mega Ring, and this whole theory is based on the idea that the Geosenge crystal has the same properties, it's probable that the first Key Stones were harvested from Reflection Cave as well. We technically don't know if the first Mega Evolution took place in the Shalour area or if they just did it somewhere else and then moved to Shalour because it was nice there, but... I dunno, I feel like the first option makes some sense, right??
- Carbink is found in only three locations in the entire series: Reflection Cave in Kalos... and also Ten Carat Hill and Vast Poni Canyon in Alola, the location where Necrozma dwells and the location where Solgaleo and Lunala are worshipped! If my theory on Reflection Cave is correct, all three of these areas have clear connections to space and to "light," which is what the space crystals apparently turn into Infinity Energy.
- According to the Pokédex, Carbink attacks by firing beams from its crystals... so is Carbink actually like a tiny, functioning Ultimate Weapon right now?! I love it

On a related note, Diancie is known to be a rare mutation of Carbink, and it's known to be a much stronger form.
It's worth noting, then, that the sundial in Anistar City also seems to be a distinctly stronger material than the Geosenge crystal - the Ultimate Weapon was fashioned by AZ from the shattered pieces of the Geosenge crystal, and Reflection Cave is still full of other fragments to this day; the crystal didn't exactly survive the fall, and it was just used for its raw material.
On the other hand, I think we might actually be meant to believe that the sundial arrived from space more or less as we see it - the exact words in the Town Map description are, "Some say the enigmatic device used as a sundial came from outer space." This doesn't really scream "a weird rock came from space and then we made this thing out of it" - to me, it definitely sounds more like "this whole device came to us from space."
I think that helps to alleviate the strangeness of associating these two crystals with each other when Carbink and Diancie are so clearly not equals - the thing is that... the crystals themselves also aren't equals!
Of course, it begs the question: how the heck does a fully-formed device like that just fall from space?
... just wait until the real conspiracy next time!

 

[DrPumpkinz]

Hello!! Still working on the aforementioned big XY conspiracy post - I actually started writing and got to 4200 words and counting, so brace yourselves - but I do not have it ready just yet, haha. This is something else (and much smaller)!
I was doing some research on Kalosian lore for that post, and I stumbled into a cool connection that I... don't actually think I've ever seen anyone point out? So I thought it would be cool to share!

Okay, so you know how ORAS confirms that Mega Evolution energy naturally forms in space, but this is something that X and Y don't really address at all? The origin of Mega Evolution was originally said to be the Ultimate Weapon, not meteorites like ORAS tells us, and ORAS doesn't really make any effort to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory explanations.
That said, I think I might have cracked, uh, part of the mystery of both Mega Evolution's origins and Anistar City's famous, unexplained sundial, and I've uncovered a cool bit of lore on an underappreciated Gen VI Pokémon in the process!

First of all, what do we know about Anistar City's sundial?
According to the Town Map, the sundial is a mysterious object that apparently arrived from space; Professor Sycamore helpfully adds that this took place "over 3,000 years ago," suggesting that it was around or shortly before AZ's time.
As we hear from Professor Sycamore in the postgame, the sundial has an unusual property of turning light into a strange energy, which seems to be why it reacts to the light of sunset. Notably, he points out that it shares this property with the Mega Ring, suggesting that this strange energy is actually what we now know as Infinity Energy. While ORAS seemed to go all out in retconning Mega Evolution into something that came from space, this is the only time that X and Y suggest anything of the sort - and it doesn't exactly confirm the origin of Mega Evolution, only suggest that this one object from space might be related to it.

What X and Y never bother to explain, however, is what the sundial has to do with the Ultimate Weapon that AZ created. Sycamore is exceedingly vague on this, and he doesn't actually attempt to link the two - really, it seems more like he thinks Mega Evolution is the connection: "the Ultimate Weapon has something to do with Mega Evolution, and the sundial has something to do with Mega Evolution, so what if we put them together?" And I mean literally "put them together" - the only reason he even asks you to go there is because your Mega Ring has already responded to the weapon and now he wants you to touch the sundial and see what happens!
But, uh... just looking at the Ultimate Weapon... it actually kinda looks like a similar material, doesn't it? I mean, they're different colors, but they have the same transparent, layered, crystalline look...
And if we know Mega Evolution energy comes from space, then the first part of my proposal is simple: the Ultimate Weapon might have been fashioned from the same material as the sundial, like another piece that fell to the planet around the same time. Given that Mega Evolution energy naturally comes from space, the Ultimate Weapon was the catalyst for Mega Evolution in the Pokémon world, and another Mega Evolution-related object of a similar material happened to come from space almost right before we know the Ultimate Weapon was created...
It's a pretty basic assumption, of course - it might actually be common sense and I'm just behind? - but I haven't seen anyone talk about it, and I think it helps to explain some of the weird lore behind Mega Evolution. So far, so good?

You know how I acknowledged that the Ultimate Weapon was a different color from the sundial, even though it otherwise looks like a similar material? The sundial has this distinctive shade of pink, and it's adorned with decorations that seem to be made of gold, but the Ultimate Weapon has no such decorations and instead seems to be made of this pale, glassy, blue-white color with slight rainbow effects.
And a much smaller thing - if the sundial arrived near Anistar City, but the Ultimate Weapon was still made with the other fallen space rock, the other one would probably have landed much closer to Geosenge Town, right? AZ would just have used the Anistar one if the other one was in some distant region - the Ultimate Weapon looks a bit big for transportation, after all.
Is there maybe somewhere around Geosenge Town that seems like a good place to harvest some pale, glassy, blue-white crystals with slight rainbow effects? Well, yes! That would be Reflection Cave!

So here's the second part of my proposal: while the first space crystal landed in the area of Anistar City, the second one fell to Reflection Cave (and seemingly shattered to pieces!), and that's where AZ gathered his materials to create the Ultimate Weapon.

And here's a fun connection! This is the part that ties into a certain Pokémon that Kalos introduced.
Time to state the obvious: Diancie looks kind of like Anistar City's sundial, right? I mean, it's a pretty basic comparison that plenty of people have made before - they're both crystalline, they have the same distinctive shade of pink, and Diancie even has its little gold neck band (? I have no idea what to call this) that matches the gold pieces of the sundial in color and approximate shape. Most people tend to ignore this because there's not really any meaningful lore connection - Diancie has never really been associated with Anistar City - but you wouldn't deny that they look kinda similar, right?
Meanwhile, it just happens that Reflection Cave is the only place in Kalos where one can find Carbink, a crystalline Pokémon with a confirmed connection to Diancie - and unlike Diancie, Carbink's crystals are not pink but a pale, glassy, blue-white color, and it has none of Diancie's gold decorations... just like the Ultimate Weapon compared to the sundial!
As far as I can tell, Carbink and Diancie seem to be another link that connects the Ultimate Weapon and the crystals in Reflection Cave to the sundial in Anistar City. Knowing explicitly that Carbink can turn into Diancie, and seeing that Carbink and its home of Reflection Cave both bear a resemblance to the Ultimate Weapon and that Diancie has a strong resemblance to the sundial, I think this cements the initial idea that the Ultimate Weapon was fashioned from a space crystal that's closely related to the sundial.
Accordingly, here's the final part of my proposal: despite what we're led to believe, Carbink and Diancie aren't natural Pokémon that just form underground over time - they're actually fragments of the very same kind of space crystal that have come to life. They're aliens!

Other fun tidbits:
- Reflection Cave isn't only near Geosenge Town, where the Ultimate Weapon was created... it's also near Shalour City, where the successors of Mega Evolution have resided since the beginning! Given that the Anistar sundial is explicitly compared to the Mega Ring, and this whole theory is based on the idea that the Geosenge crystal has the same properties, it's probable that the first Key Stones were harvested from Reflection Cave as well. We technically don't know if the first Mega Evolution took place in the Shalour area or if they just did it somewhere else and then moved to Shalour because it was nice there, but... I dunno, I feel like the first option makes some sense, right??
- Carbink is found in only three locations in the entire series: Reflection Cave in Kalos... and also Ten Carat Hill and Vast Poni Canyon, the location where Necrozma dwells and the location where Solgaleo and Lunala are worshipped! If my theory on Reflection Cave is correct, all three of these areas have clear connections to space and to "light," which is what the space crystals apparently turn into Infinity Energy.
- According to the Pokédex, Carbink attacks by firing beams from its crystals... so is Carbink actually like a tiny, functioning Ultimate Weapon right now?! I love it

On a related note, Diancie is known to be a rare mutation of Carbink, and it's known to be a much stronger form.
It's worth noting, then, that the sundial in Anistar City also seems to be a distinctly stronger material than the Geosenge crystal - the Ultimate Weapon was fashioned by AZ from the shattered pieces of the Geosenge crystal, and Reflection Cave is still full of other fragments to this day; the crystal didn't exactly survive the fall, and it was just used for its raw material.
On the other hand, I think we might actually be meant to believe that the sundial arrived from space more or less as we see it - the exact words in the Town Map description are, "Some say the enigmatic device used as a sundial came from outer space." This doesn't really scream "a weird rock came from space and then we made this thing out of it" - to me, it definitely sounds more like "this whole device came to us from space."
I think that helps to alleviate the strangeness of associating these two crystals with each other when Carbink and Diancie are so clearly not equals - the thing is that... the crystals themselves also aren't equals!
Of course, it begs the question: how the heck does a fully-formed device like that just fall from space?
... just wait until the real conspiracy next time!

So if the Ultimate Weapon was fashioned from shattered blue crystals, and it's capable of granting immortality and planet-wide omnicide, and pink crystals are implied to be be better and stronger...

Does Anistar City have an Annihilargh just sitting there?

 

[R_N]

I think it's less "mega evolution comes from space", specifically, and more "the energy to mega evolve can come from space". The real kicker is there needs to be a massive surge of energy that mutates the stones and allows the pokemon to resonate with a bond. The meteorites can probably natively contain it and bring that down which will surge outward, but we also have the weapon's firing and Primal Kyogre/Groudon's full emergence. All of these instances cause mega stones to appear around their regions.

Still, that's some good meta right there, I like the connections you're bringing to the table. Waiting with baited breath on the next part of the theory.


Oh and Diancie's gold things are likely meant to evoke a necklace's chain

See how they "attach" to the diamond on its chest?





You you know if mega evolution as a whole is just triggered by Space Stuff and if this were another series, one that likes to draw these connections as meaning something, maybe we'd have a recurring character go "hey, isn't it weird how mega evolution, z moves and dynamaxing are all foreign power surges that affect our world in different ways".

 

[Hematite]

To be fair, since all we actually know they do is convert light into energy - AZ is the one who figured out how to weaponize that - it's probably harmless on its own, but it also probably would be a much more dangerous conduit if you were trying to use it to amplify something like Xerneas or Yveltal in the same way.
And, uh, I didn't account for the anime in my theory, but the final arc in XYZ did have everyone trying to stop a massive energy source from reaching the sundial because that would risk wiping out all life on the planet, so uh...
... maybe??

Alright, guys. It’s time to talk about my favorite Pokémon conspiracy theory.

Based on various strange and unexplained design choices in the final version of X and Y... things that ended up happening in later games that seem to harken back to these same concepts... and even a few minor hints that we were given before X and Y that seemed to amount to nothing in the end... I honestly think that this conspiracy theory provides a fascinating perspective that puts a ton of stuff about Generations VI and VII in a new light - enough so that, as crazy as it sounds, I would not be surprised if it was true after all.
This was originally introduced to me in the context of an alleged leak - a person claiming to have information about the development process of X and Y, which they received secondhand from various inside sources and then compiled into a post - and if reading it with that lens sounds enjoyable and worthwhile to you, then please feel free to do so!
But I also know that a lot of people may not be so easily convinced of that, and something I love about this is that even if we don't take this as actual inside information - even if this "leaker" is completely making it up and just presenting their own fan theory in a deceptive way - the extent to which some of this actually seems to fit together makes it weirdly compelling and definitely enjoyable all the same. If nothing else (even if it's not at all true!), it's also just a fun as heck hypothetical!
With that in mind, I also ask you not to be discouraged from reading it if the original premise that it may or may not be a leak doesn't appeal to you. I'll do my best to address both sides, explain how it checks out with confirmed information, and highlight what the person might have been able to figure out just by being a particularly observant fan at the time and what actually does seem like any noteworthy level of foresight.

I should also mention that, when I was first introduced to this concept and to the possibility that it might be real, it was through an article written by a third party who discovered the alleged leak and who offered their own take on how it might seem credible. In the interest of giving a proper citation, I will link both to this article and to the original post of the alleged leak at the end.
However, I also must confess that I am not wholly in agreement with some of the points made by the author of that article, and I also have plenty of observations of my own to add that the author of that article did not seem to catch. If you don't mind, I would appreciate if you held off on reading it until the end (and generally if you refrained from judging this post based on the things the author of that article said)!

With that introduction out of the way... here it is:

The Time when X and Y Were Actually Maybe About Aliens

A while ago, I stumbled upon this alleged leak from the days of X and Y - not a leak from before they came out, saying what they were going to include, but a leak from after they came out, claiming to talk about cut content and scrapped concepts from the development of the games. Their "story" is that they were compiling this secondhand from a variety of low-ranking inside sources, rather than personally working at Game Freak. This does come up at one point later on.
That said, their claims were crazy; they would have sounded completely implausible at the time...
So naturally, instead of brushing them aside, we're going to indulge them for a bit and take a look at all of the things that actually make more sense if we take them to be true!

I think it's important to begin by saying that this leak is from May 4 of 2014 - that's almost seven months after X and Y were released, and they had been datamined by this point (including general public awareness of all three Mythical Pokémon and the dummied-out AZ's Floette), so don't mistake anything said on those topics for a part of the "leaker's" foresight. On the other hand, this was before Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were so much as announced - and obviously before anyone knew what new lore they would bring to the table about Mega Evolution in particular.
The reason this is relevant is that the claims presented here seem to mesh surprisingly well with information that wasn't available to the general public at the time; I'll go into this a bit later, but I figured I should say this up front in case it changes how you look at the entire post.

Here are the parts that I thought were important, interesting and compelling:

Eyes on the Stars

The leaker's claim: The story was originally more "paranormal" and revolved around space and actual aliens.
Apparently, it was gradually dialed back later in development when it was deemed "too weird," and the more "mystical" and generally normal boring story we got in the final release was essentially an attempt to turn the pieces into something Game Freak expected to be more palatable.
Notably, this happened late enough in development that the final iteration of the story was stuck trying to incorporate as many as possible of the assets that had already been created despite taking them in an entirely different direction.

My thoughts:
The first and most obvious thing to say right now is that this kind of plot actually happened in the very next Generation, with the story revolving around the Ultra Beasts. USUM even went so far as to include human-looking aliens in the Ultra Megalopolitans, which would have been another of the more ridiculous-sounding parts of this post without the benefit of hindsight.
That pretty much automatically makes this more plausible than it must have sounded when it was first posted in 2014, when no one had any idea that this was what was coming for Pokémon. The article that introduced me to this leak makes a point of this!

However, before I go any further, I also want to add a neat tidbit about the Kalos region itself.
When it was first revealed, it was with this description: "Your adventure in Pokémon X and Pokémon Y takes place in the Kalos region, home to beautiful skies and forests! The mysterious Kalos region is shaped intriguingly like a star."
Does this word choice seem... odd at all? I mean, calling the region "mysterious" is both meaningless and par for the course for the series - but what this calls "intriguing" is the region's shape being that of a star.
The shape of the Kalos region is obviously a stylized version of real-world France, and a star shape is a perfectly reasonable direction to take that. On the other hand, calling the shape itself "intriguing" definitely seems to imply that it carries actual significance - more than just "hey, that's neat!"
So... I can't help but wonder if this was originally intended as a cute way to play on this alleged space-themed storyline?
Given the claim that the story was only being dialed back late in development, I don't find it terribly hard to believe that at least some space-related elements might have remained even by the time this blurb was published on May 11th, although it was probably to a less extreme extent than this full proposal - there's already a fairly conventional and well-explored level of "this important Pokémon comes from outer space" and "space is important to the culture of the region" that I could see making it very far into development before ultimately just being scrapped because it was unnecessary or irrelevant, and if that minor element wasn't fully gone until the very last draft of the story, then advertisement acknowledging it this "late" isn't that implausible.
Maybe worth noting: we do know from other official sources that the final implementation of the story and gameplay events is one of the last things that takes place in development!
For example, it's known that Ohmori himself was still implementing events like the tasks for Alola's Trials so late in development that new assets could not even be created, entirely using the basic eventing tools that were accessible to him as the director and seemingly well after the completion of the region map, the Pokédex and a majority of game mechanics; despite this, even he still had enough creative freedom at this point that many of the tasks themselves were of his own invention in an effort to make the most of those tools, which in turn means that all of the writing for the Trials happened even after that.
This pretty much cements that, although they obviously need to have enough of an idea to request specific assets earlier on, the final implementation of the story and writing really is one of the last things that goes on in the development cycle.
... And in fairness, that also seems consistent with any sensible way I can conceive to approach game development!

This other bit is definitely more of a stretch, but there's also a thematic reason why I think this kind of plot element would be surprisingly at home in X and Y.
It's been confirmed that the decision to name the games "X" and "Y" was based on the idea of a coordinate point - an intersection between x axis and the y axis - explained as a point where people come together and are the same, even if they come from different places and cultures, speak different languages and have different mindsets. This was apparently one of the first themes that was decided for the games and drove many of their design choices.
But the thing is... this theme basically doesn't relate to the actual story of the game - in fact, other than maybe Looker and that one tourist in the Looker missions, the story doesn't involve a single person who wasn't born and raised in Kalos. There are no characters in the final story whose worldviews are influenced by the fact that they come from different places and cultures.
Even the song Kiseki seems to suggest a theme of being born in the same place and being lucky to have the chance to meet one another - and neither of these is really that relevant at all to the actual story of the game.
On the other hand, all of these themes seem like they would be perfectly at home in a story about visitors from space - as we'll see when the leak goes into more examples of characters and plot elements, the idea that some of these aliens found common ground with the Pokémon world's people and others did not is at the very core of the proposed alternate story.

But that's enough on the basic premise of the leak - on to the more specific, interesting parts of the post!!

The Ultimate Weapons...?

The leaker's claim: Xerneas and Yveltal were originally alien lifeforms. Rather than being the power source of the Ultimate Weapon, they themselves were essentially living superweapons.
Some more minor notes that they also mentioned:
- Xerneas and Yveltal apparently had their colors swapped at some point in development; Xerneas was originally red, while Yveltal was originally blue.
- Zygarde was one of the last Pokémon implemented and was not originally meant to appear until a later game, although it would be "hinted" in the story, presumably in a manner similar to Arceus. When it became normally available, Diancie was promoted to a Mythical Pokémon in its place to fill the gap; it was originally just an evolution of Carbink.

My thoughts:
Okay, so you know that theory that this trio is based on the beings from Norse mythology that live on Yggdrasil (with Xerneas also drawing from Yggdrasil itself)?
- Xerneas is speculated to be based on Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr and Durathror, the four stags who live in the branches of Yggdrasil, and the tree connection is fairly obvious given its own dormant form and the design of its horns.
- Yveltal is similarly supposed to draw from various death-related eagles from Norse mythology, like the nameless one that perches on the top of Yggdrasil, or maybe Hraesvelgr, the one that sits at the end of the world and devours corpses.
- And while Zygarde's 50% Forme mostly seems to draw from Nidhoggr, the serpent that gnaws on the roots of Yggdrasil and communicates with Yveltal via squirrel, each of its different Formes also corresponds to one of Loki's children, with its 10% Forme reflecting the wolf Fenris (its "cool scarf" is seemingly based on the rope that binds him), its 50% Forme reflecting the world serpent Jormungandr that wraps around the planet, and its Complete Forme being inspired by Hel, the ruler of the afterlife (her body is often said to be either half-alive and half-dead or half-flesh-colored and half-blue, and Zygarde reflects this with its own asymmetry, including half of its body being accented with Yveltal's red and the other half with Xerneas's blue also, note that if the claim about their colors being switched is true, the death-related half and the blue half would have been one and the same, which only adds to the similarity).

But... whenever people bring this up, invariably, someone else counters with the fact that all of these beings are really, really dark!
Xerneas's apparent four deer inspirations have nothing to do with "life" - their very names seem to mean, respectively, "the dead one," "the sleeping one," something like "murmur" and something like "delay." Why would Xerneas be based on these four in the first place??
And Zygarde, which represents order and the world's balance, seems to be inspired by two creatures associated with the end of the world and a third who not only watches over the dead but specifically rules over the worst afterlife - why would such a benevolent being, concerned with the world's stability, draw so much inspiration from beings that are ominous at best, downright evil at worst, and linked to one another only by the common thread that they're the children of the "chaotic neutral" trickster god?
And all of those character discrepancies aside, what does Yggdrasil or Norse mythology even have to do with the actual story of X and Y or the trio's apparent ties to life and death?

But let's look at this with the lens of the trio as aliens instead!
First of all, Yggdrasil, "the world tree," is said to be what connects the nine worlds, which also means that all of these creatures that live on its branches and edges (literally the edges of the universe!) are actually a sensible inspiration for Pokémon that are supposed to be extraterrestrials
Second, if Xerneas and Yveltal were not meant as incarnations of life and death but simply as living superweapons, it makes perfect sense that both of them would come from equally dark, gloomy and death-related inspirations.
It's probable that, like Solgaleo and Lunala a Generation later, their alien origins and their real role in the story was meant to be kept secret until it was revealed during the story of the games, which explains why their designs ended up being so subtle about it - and perhaps why it was apparently so difficult to design Xerneas and Yveltal (especially Xerneas).
Ultimately, this might have worked in their favor - when these concepts were scrapped, their designs weren't so heavily linked to being planet-destroying aliens that they couldn't be used, while the more superficial concept of "stag = nature = life, vulture = scavenger = death" came through well enough already that it could be passed off as all there was to them.

This is very subjective, but to be honest, I've never really thought that they did very much with the life/death/order concept purely on a design level.
I mean, Yveltal certainly looks suitably death-y, but Xerneas doesn't really have any particular life-related features - its horns are covered in glowing crystals rather than something organic like Sawsbuck's plant-covered ones, and it actually came off as vaguely metallic the first time I saw it. The most "life-related" thing about it is its horns looking like tree branches, and even that's hardly the first thing people notice about them!
Knowing that this design was incredibly challenging and had to go through several designers, I can't help but question whether "nature deity representing life" was even the concept they were trying to express - if it took the collaboration of so many different people to make Xerneas convey the idea that it was supposed to represent, and that idea was nature deity and the element of life, why does the final design seem to express that concept to such a limited extent, and why do most of its details do nothing to contribute to it?
Meanwhile... well, Zygarde has earthy colors, I guess? But we've already talked about how far removed its apparent design origin is from a guardian of the ecosystem!
Really, I don't think it's too hard to swallow that there was more to their concepts that's been lost. And honestly, I kind of prefer it that way! This has always been my favorite mascot trio on a visual level - and they have some steep competition! - but their lore has always seemed so much less interesting than their designs, and I can't help but love the idea that there was something this "out there" hiding below the surface.

I also think it's worth drawing attention to just how, uh, "alien-coded" Zygarde already seems to be.
I mean... it's a lime-green, bug-eyed monster with a cellular motif, it's covered in glowing lights, it's actually a superorganism, and its Complete Forme adds winged humanoid and flying mecha on top of that - all of these things are common alien design tropes!!
This sort of reminds me of what we got, again, in the very next Generation, this time with Necrozma.
Solgaleo and Lunala's designs were incredibly subtle about coming from Ultra Space, just otherworldly enough that they feel right for their story role but not so much so as to feeling out of place (and remember that we also weren't supposed to know that they had anything to do with Ultra Space until the story revealed that to us).
But meanwhile, Necrozma is introduced long after that plot element has come to light, so despite being part of the same trio, it goes all out with alien design features and weirdness - it fits in noticeably better with the other Ultra Beasts than with the Cosmog line. I mean, remember when it was first leaked as just an image, and we didn't even realize it was supposed to be part of a trio with them until its stats were datamined and gave it away?
If Zygarde was meant to be hinted in the story but not properly introduced until after X and Y, its significantly more alien design compared to the others is much easier to explain.

Anyway, with all of this in mind, I think that this lens goes a long way to justify the seemingly random influence of Norse mythology on their designs compared to the totally unrelated lore they have in the final version.
But there's actually something really neat that I've _never_ seen anyone bring up - can anyone guess what other important design in these games is based on Norse extraterrestrials, perhaps even more blatantly so than Xerneas, Yveltal and Zygarde themselves?

The Tall Visitor from a Distant Land

The leaker's claim: AZ came from space as well. He traveled to the planet long ago to destroy it using Xerneas or Yveltal due to a violent war that was taking place, but he had a change of heart after meeting Floette and stayed on the planet as a wanderer. His long lifespan is credited not to immortality but simply to being inhuman; he apparently aged more slowly than everyone else.

My thoughts:
Okay.
Let's talk about AZ.
AZ is an extremely tall man with long, light-colored hair and a skin tone that certainly falls somewhere from fair to tanned.
His role even in the actual story of X and Y sees him ending a war in the past, and while he created the Ultimate Weapon himself, his role in the present also has him actively warning against its use and trying to stop it. (The Ultimate Weapon is very clearly a parallel to atomic weapons, right?)
Allegedly - based on this leak, I mean - it also happens that AZ is from space, and he originally came to Earth with the primary intention to prevent an ongoing war (if by particularly violent means of his own).
This is the same game that has a trio based on Norse mythology, and this trio is even related to AZ and the Ultimate Weapon.
I feel like there's a certain class of aliens that concisely encapsulates all of those things at once?

Here's a neat related fact! As mentioned, Nordic aliens are associated with warnings against the use of atomic weapons, so they're a relatively modern concept - the first claimed sightings are from as recently as the 1950s. Because they're so modern, it's suggested on that page that the very idea of Nordic aliens may have been inspired by a famous science-fiction film called The Day the Earth Stood Still, specifically by an alien character named Klaatu. A major part of this film - I haven't seen it, but it sounds like this is one of the most thematically important plot elements and basically the point of the film? - is Klaatu's companion, a robot named Gort, who has the power to destroy all life on the planet but also the power to resurrect Klaatu from death. In fact, the resolution of the story hinges on Gort choosing between the two after Klaatu's death, with the phrase used to stop him from destroying humanity having become famous in its own right.
Can I point out that these are literally the two functions of the Ultimate Weapon in the actual story, and this seems to mirror AZ's relationship to Floette perfectly? Like, how specific can this get?
I know "resurrection device" and "doomsday device" are not exactly uncommon concepts in isolation, but seeing them both put together, seeing both purposes come up as mutually exclusive choices in direct response to the death of someone important, and seeing them cited as the definitive thematic elements of the very story that inspired the very concept on which I already thought AZ was based... I kinda think it's too much to dismiss as coincidence!

I was just talking about space crystals yesterday!!! (this is why)

The leaker's claim: Mega Stones were originally pieces of AZ's spaceship that spread across Earth when he landed, and the original designs for Mega Evolutions tended to be much more alien in appearance (apparently including some similarities to Deoxys).
A minor note that they also mentioned: Korrina's connection to Mega Evolution apparently came much later in development, presumably also after this had already been scrapped.

My thoughts:
Okay, so I'm not going to comment on the design similarities to Deoxys or generally looking like aliens, because I think they'd be very superficial and subjective - and unlike the mascots, we know explicitly that they revised the Mega Evolutions anyway after this was scrapped, so I don't think it would be all that productive to talk about their current designs from this angle.
However, I am going to highlight this:
X and Y tell us that Mega Evolution comes from the Earth-native AZ firing the Ultimate Weapon that he made on Earth using the energy of the Legendary Pokémon that's also from Earth, and Mega Stones come from that energy irradiating the Evolution Stones that are also mostly from Earth.
Meanwhile, ORAS literally tells us outright that raw Mega Evolution energy comes from space and naturally exists in meteorites.
Even if this "leak" really is complete nonsense, I honestly can't fathom any way to reconcile these two conflicting sets of lore except to say that either AZ or the Ultimate Weapon or Xerneas and Yveltal came from space, and this person went on the record saying that about all three of them, long before anyone even knew that contradiction would ever exist!
It seems to me like the most obvious interpretation of this claim is that AZ's "spaceship" is what was originally intended of either the sundial or, if it existed in this draft, the Ultimate Weapon - the two crystalline structures that do seem to come from space and that do seem to be connected to Mega Stones, as I discussed yesterday. However, that's a conjecture on my part, not one of the alleged leak's claims!

As something of a disclaimer, I do think it's important to qualify this by noting that the sundial in Anistar City is known to come from space, and it did already have some vaguely defined connection to Mega Evolution even before ORAS introduced that element - for reference, looking into the sundial a bit more is actually what led me to my theory yesterday on the nature of the Ultimate Weapon.
From what Professor Sycamore tells us, even X and Y also tell us that the sundial first arrived on Earth shortly before AZ's time, so it's definitely possible that someone saw that and decided to make the connection on their own - that they were simply a fan who read into that relationship and used it as the basis of their "leak" to make it more convincing.
With that in mind, this particular information might be "disqualified" as evidence that they had any inside information; again, I totally respect it if you would rather read this as a work of speculation than as a potential leak!

This isn't really proof "for" or "against" the veracity of this "leak," but just a clarification:
The connections to Norse mythology, to Nordic aliens and to the Anistar sundial are all my own interpretations, and the leaker themself didn't actually mention them at any point! They did not attempt to use these facts to make themself seem more believable, nor does it seem that they even had them in mind when presenting their claims, although there's technically no way to prove that they didn't plan on people making these connections to back them up.
It's possible that these really do connect the leaker's claims to Game Freak's intentions in a way that validates them, and that's why I find them so fascinating! But I also recognize that... well, I would admittedly find the post less credible if the "leaker" had spelled out every step it took to reach their story from the things we already knew, and it's possible that they intentionally avoided that in order to cover their tracks. I really don't mean to suggest that this is 100% undeniable!

Solar Flare

The leaker's claim: Team Flare came from space as well, and while they arrived more recently than AZ, their goal was also to destroy the planet. Their appearance was meant to evoke "MIB"-type characters - aliens posing as humans and taking over society.
A minor note that's also mentioned: Malva apparently had nothing to do with this - she existed as one of the Elite Four, but her connection to Team Flare came at some point after this had already been scrapped.

My thoughts:
Okay, so I don't have a ton to say on this one (I think it's fun, but I have no particular reason to think it's inside information), but I do want to highlight that Team Flare is already space-themed: the backdrop for the final battle with Lysandre is inspired by the sun, and the five scientists (Aliana, Bryony, Celosia, Mable and Xerosic) have a naming scheme based on the classifications of solar flares (A, B, C, M and X), and of course "solar flare" is the inspiration for the very name Team Flare.
With that in mind, playing along with the leak and supposing that they were aliens at all, they would likely have been from the sun, although the leaker didn't explicitly say so. I'm drawing attention to this because it meshes really well with something that comes up again later.
Incidentally, we also never see any of their eyes - except Lysandre's, but I'll get to him in a moment! - because they're all wearing sunglasses or visors for the entire game, which lends itself pretty well to the "masquerading as humans" concept.

Obviously, these are both things a person who just played the game would have known well before this leak came out, so it 100% doesn't suggest that they had inside information. However, I still find it interesting to note the extent to which it meshes with all of their other ideas - I would argue that it does add some credibility when looking at this through the lens of a theory (as in "this is a plausible starting point for what we got with Team Flare," not as in "Team Flare is aliens in the final story" - just making clear that this is what I mean when I say to think of this as a theory!), even if this part doesn't do much to sell it as a genuine leak.

Also, "MIB-type characters - aliens posing as humans" is, again, not exactly an unusual concept for the series - this would go on to be the concept for Ultra Recon Squad, kind of?? They even have similar design choices, with the visors and all...
This is also something the article pointed out!

Okay, so what makes Lysandre an exception? This bit is kinda crazy...

Symbiont

The leaker's claim: Lysandre was originally the leader of the villainous aliens... but he was also possessing the body of the region's professor after exposure to a rock from space. It's also mentioned that, while the rest of the plot was being toned down later in development, Lysandre being the alter ego of the professor lasted a bit longer (simply as a disguise rather than an alien possesion), although this was also obviously scrapped in the end.
Minor clarification: as mentioned, this is the one (1) time I am choosing to take into account the leaker's claim to be compiling secondhand information rather than being an inside source themself.
I recognize that it's unwise to make excuses to handwave discrepancies like this, and any leaker who says something like that to cover up glaring errors is generally not to be trusted, but... I think it's worth it in this case.
To clarify, then: the leaker's actual claim is that the leader of the aliens was possessing Professor Sycamore specifically. Provided that this really was secondhand information, however, I think they may have been misinterpreting what they were told, and there's a reason that I've changed this to just "the region's professor."

My thoughts:
I have two important points to make about this!

First of all, this weird "Jekyll and Hyde by alien possession" sounds like a downright nonsensical plot device for Pokémon at first... but only until you realize how strikingly similar it is to what we got in Sun and Moon: the main villain of the game was a famous and mostly benevolent researcher (Lusamine) came into contact with a rock from space (paralleling Nihilego, which is even a Rock-type) and ended up basically possessed as a result.
Obviously, Nihilego's neurotoxin seems to have been toned down a great deal relative to "a sentient alien literally possessing and assuming direct control of the body," and Lusamine was already kind of crazy even before she went to Ultra Space, so it's definitely not a perfect comparison. Still, I would argue that that's pretty expected, considering that this was something Game Freak deemed "too weird" and... well... was actively trying to tone it down a bit.
More importantly, despite those differences, I think the degree of similarity is still too much to overlook - friendly reminder that this was May of 2014, before even ORAS had been announced, and there is absolutely no way this person could have known about Lusamine's concept; it probably wasn't even finalized even within Game Freak at this point in time.
With that in mind, the fact that they explained this plot point this far in advance certainly lends a bit of credibility to the fact that a) Game Freak had toyed with a similar idea in the past and b) this person had some way of knowing that.
It could definitely still be a coincidence and a very lucky total guess, but it certainly wasn't something they could just figure out by looking at the information they had. In any case, I think it's a pretty fascinating similarity!

Second...
Well, unlike the above, this is another thing someone might have surmised on their own rather than an impressive "prediction." Even so, I think it adds an interesting layer to Lysandre's proposed role, and I think it's definitely worth bringing up anyway!
I strongly believe that Kalos really was[/i] supposed to have two professors.[/i]
Here's a completely unrelated leak from nearly a year before this - one that we do know without a shadow of a doubt to have been an inside source who gave accurate information about the completed games well in advance.
This post is from June of 2013. You'll find that it clearly marks what information was confirmed at the time and what had yet to be revealed. I can confirm it hasn't been sneakily edited since because I was also there and following the leaks in June of 2013 and this is exactly as I remember it, including the references to the professors.
And here's why this leak is relevant: they were right about basically everything!
Their only real errors are the following minor details:
- They switched the secondary types of Chesnaught and Greninja. Notably, the post clarifies that they had those two the other way around the first time and that this was a "correction." When this leaker first posted, they had it right.
- Minor mechanical details: Psychic doesn't resist Fairy, and Draining Kiss has only 50 power and restores more than half of the damage dealt. Both of these could easily have been changed late in development - notably, the order of internal data suggests that Draining Kiss was first implemented well before Oblivion Wing, so the 75% healing gimmick might have been added only after Oblivion Wing was created.
- All three of the Gym types they list are accurate, but they're out of order. This could also easily have been changed late in development (the shape of Kalos is absolutely conducive to more than one possible Gym order anyway, and there are a handful of possible paths around the region's existing layout that could justify this in particular - even a convenient loop from Route 14 to Route 16 that takes the player from Lumiose to Laverre and back without hitting any other Gyms, leaving room for Korrina to be pushed back by only one!).
- Shauna actually gives the player the basic stage of her starter, not the final stage.
With that in mind, I think it's pretty easy to see how credible this source is. There's only thing that seemed blatantly wrong: that there are two professors. The one who gives you your Kalos starter is named Patrice; the one who gives you your Kanto starter is Sycamore.
I really need to emphasize that this is before either of them was revealed - no one knew about Sycamore or the Kanto starter gift any more than they knew about this supposed Professor Patrice - and they were not just adapting their leak or basing it off of already-confirmed information. This leak is reliable, and as far as the leaker knew, there really was a second professor by the name of Patrice.

Okay, so if this Professor Patrice was a thing this far into development, why did he just disappear without a trace?
Well... what was it this scrapped concepts leak already said about having to prioritize the use of existing assets? If Lysandre apparently possessed this guy, they would have had the same physical appearance - which also means they would have had either the same design or designs that were too similar to reuse for two unrelated characters. The fact that they apparently stuck with this plot idea longer than most - keeping Lysandre as Patrice's alter ego even after they scrapped the alien possession - also speaks to a desire to be able to get away with using the same model if they could, right until they eventually gave up on it entirely and left us with just one Professor.
To be honest, this also maybe explains the random costume change in the final boss battle where he abruptly dons a visor and weird machinery. (That could be his Team Flare self, while his normal design is just Professor Patrice.)

Wait so she was almost actually cool???

The leaker's claim: Fairy-type Pokémon in general were originally aliens from the moon. Unlike some of the other aliens in the story, the ones from the moon had learned to live in peace with humans on Earth. Like AZ and Team Flare, the moon was also home to a much more human-looking group: Diantha was also one of these benevolent moon aliens and was actually their leader. Apparently, her original design might have looked more like Valerie.

My thoughts:
Okay, so the first bit here is easy. Within Generation VI's selection, we already have Fairy-types that explicitly come from the moon (the Cleffa line), Fairy-types that dwell in moon-related places (the Igglybuff line), two different rabbits that were retconned to be Fairy-types partly because of their association with moon rabbits (the Azurill line and likely Mawile), and a clear moon association indicated in the moves of the type (Moonlight and Moonblast). This part doesn't seem like it even needs to be inside information; if you're already writing a theory about how X and Y was originally going to be about aliens, it's kind of an obvious thing to tack on when the entire new type is all about the moon. :p

Wait.
The moon?
The benevolent fairy aliens are the ones that come from the moon? And this isn't something the leaker just made up to support their post because canon already indicates a moon association anyway?
And... their alleged rivals, the evil aliens, are... the ones that come from the sun? And this also isn't something the leaker just made up to support their post because canon already indicates a sun association anyway?
... And Game Freak would have us believe there is absolutely no connection between these two concepts???

The Diantha bit isn't really supported by anything specific in canon that can't be explained any other way, but at this point, I just don't think it's worth questioning it. Her signature Pokémon is a Mega Evolved (space) Gardevoir (Fairy) that knows Moonblast (moon) and she bears a slight resemblance to the seemingly-lore-relevant Diancie (that we've established has a strong connection to the space crystals and is also a Fairy-type... and if it really wasn't originally Mythical, it was probably on her team at one point, too), her design is obviously meant to evoke an angelic, winged figure even if it's just a costume, and even in the final story, she's clearly meant as a rival to Lysandre even though she never actually gets to make anything of that...
By no means is this bit actually proven, but at this point in the conversation? Yeah, to be honest, I could buy it.

Light of Ruin

This whole section is way less meaningful than most of the other stuff that grabbed my attention! It definitely doesn't point towards this leak any more than it points towards any other person's idea that X and Y were rushed, haha. Even so, I thought it made for an interesting point and wanted to cover it!

The leaker's claim: Rather than a literal key as in the final version, the "key" needed to activate the superweapons (Xerneas and Yveltal) would have been the Eternal Flower held by AZ's Floette. Team Flare would have been searching for AZ in order to take Floette from him to activate the superweapons.
Some more minor notes that they also mentioned:
- Floette was apparently originally just intended as AZ's signature Pokémon, and actually as a one-off/single-stage; the rest of its line came later in development. Since AZ's backstory was totally different at the time, the plot point about the two being separated just hadn't been considered at this point.
- The Flabébé line was also originally part Grass-type, but it had a different design at the time; its plant-based features were actively scaled back to accommodate for the eventual change.

I don't have a ton to say on this one, but I feel like it's worth noting that the Eternal Flower itself is characterized... inconsistently in canon as it is?
Between the move Light of Ruin and Eternal Flower Floette's unique Pokédex entry in USUM, it sounds like the flower is supposed to hold some incredible destructive power... But this just isn't something that comes up in X and Y, like, at all.
The canon story's take on it seemed to be that Floette already had this flower from the start, and then Floette died, and then it was resurrected, and then it and its flower became immortal... But there's no clear reason why that would also come with destructive superpowers? (Can AZ also fire lasers??)
For that matter... Floette seems to be visibly using Light of Ruin even in the A Terrible Past sequence which would quite obviously have to have been made post-rewrite - there's really no other move in Floette's learnset that that could be. Does that mean its flower is supposed to have had that special power before the Ultimate Weapon was even created?
Honestly, giving the Eternal Flower itself some kind of plot significance simply seems like it's more in line with Game Freak's own plans than the complete lack of acknowledgment it gets in the final story of the games. At the moment, it just seems like they didn't really know what to do with it or have any clear background on it in mind - if the current backstory is that Floette started out like any other, the extent to which that seems muddled strongly suggests to me that it wasn't the original plan honestly, this kind of thing might even be why Eternal Flower Floette was never released.

Other exceedingly minor but vaguely interesting predictions

- They stated that Looker's primary role in the story would have been to investigate the aliens in Kalos, not to hunt down Xerosic for being a wanted criminal. This is exactly what Looker went on to do in Sun and Moon.
- While, again, I'll refrain from commenting on any actual resemblance between the first batch of Mega Evolutions and Deoxys, I do think it's interesting that they chose to draw a connection there. One of the comments someone made in response to the original leak was that this was a misunderstanding of what Deoxys even was - and prior to Generation VI, I would have agreed with that. But... with the benefit of hindsight, I can't help but wonder if this might have been meant as setup for the Delta Episode? That story already places an emphasis on the origins of Mega Evolution and its relationship to meteorites... and one such meteorite goes on to become a Mega Stone, while another goes on to become a Deoxys, which was itself unprecedented in being the first time a Mythical Pokémon was available without an external event. I might be stretching, but I want to say they called this, too.
- They also correctly called Poké Ride fully replacing the bike, saying that Game Freak wanted to do that for X and Y but had difficulty with it. This bit could just as easily have been a lucky guess, though. XP I do think most people would have expected Game Freak to want to make more of the riding feature in the future regardless, haha.

Citations: the Article and the Original Leak

In the interest of giving credit where it's due, here is a link to the original article that first introduced me to this leak - but before you click on this, an important note!
The article includes a direct link to 4chan, which was the original source of the leaks, and rightly gives a warning that some of the content that follows may be offensive. It also includes what the author claims is a more “safe” version of the leaks in the form of an imgur album of screenshots. This is erroneous. The “safe” version still includes screenshots of crass and intolerant language, including racist and homophobic slurs directed at the original poster. And no, there is absolutely no valid reason why these messages would need to be included in the screenshot album. Excellent work with the filter...
Here is an actual safe link to nothing but the original poster’s alleged leaks (read from bottom to top), which does not include any of the profane responses! I’m not sure how many of the people here are bothered by that kind of post, but I would feel bad if I shared the article without saying anything and it made anyone uncomfortable.
That warning aside, the article itself should be fully clean - just don’t be misled by their external links!

I don't want to be mean, but also: what is that insane troll logic in the "Serebii confirmed" section oh my goodness

 

[R_N]

A thorough earnest breakdown of this is all pretty interesting but honestly....even despite that....I just can't see this as possibly much mroe than coincidence, even with where the franchise would go in the future.

I think it is very easy to sort of backfill some of these details as going "YO THIS FITS SO WELL" when XY's plot is as laser focused into its 2 hours as it is. You can just go off the wall and make vague connections without much getting in the way. And for as hard as this tries to connect all the major players it does skip over anything pertaining to our friends or Dexio & Sina, who even get super hero identities.
Just...even ignoring Eternatus is a literal alien, I think you could apply with some elbow grease a similar framework and say things changed during development. Whereas I'd be more willing to believe they either ran out of time to implement all the events or oh, my god, you thought the story as-is was fine didnt you.

Sometimes gamefreak just gonna gamefreak. And as time goes on I'm more willing to believe that....
--------
THAT SAID there's one thing you bring up that does make me scratch my chin a bit.
You're totally right about the theme of the names not quite lining up with the theme of the product. That is interesting, isn't it? Compare this with the couple keywords & themes we know about (I can't remember if we've herad what Alola's theme was, sorry):

• Gen 4. The theme was "Ultimate". This is reflected a lot. The plot is about recreating the universe. There's no less than 7 pokemon treated as Gods and you can make arguments for Heatran (reverred negatively as controlling Stark Mountain) and REgigigas (the regi have always been worshipped, Gigas is in a temple, and has a creation myth attached). The control of space & time is a big step up from land & sea. The generation is FULL of brand new evolutions for prior pokemon.
• Black & White: "Interference". We have N & Ghetsis actively trying to shake up the foundation of the Pokemon's world. The clash of truth & ideals (if hokey) can argue to be interfering with unity. The differences between the nature/technology Opelucid & Black City/White Tower. The only game to have 0 old pokemon in it until you beat the game.
• Black & White 2: Resonance. It's set 2 years later and we see how the events of the first game effects everyone in different ways, from central characters, to the world state to even the former villains. The Key system exists so players can, in their words "broaden each other's worlds". You have Memory Link to connect the past with how they're affected in the future. the climax of the game is literally kyure mresonating with the other box legend.

In terms of mechanics I guess there's the PSS? But this is just a natural evolution of the multiplayer features from before, really...
The closest thing to intersecting relationships would probably be your friends. 5 folks who happened to come together one day and move forward. The original pokebeach leaks did treat it more as you guys touring the region, what if we were all originally immigrants to Kalos? With the rival being the only "native"? I dunno, see what I mean about it being so easy to just slap a theory onto something? But this does feel like something got dropped at some point. Either that or we are vastly misinterpreting what they mean.

And I may as well throw my hat into the Patrice ring by wondering if Patrice is still in the game and they just got turned into Trevor &/or Tierno. The pokebeach leak never mentions them, just that you have 2 rivals, one of which is obviously Shauna & the other Calem/Serena. The pair of them are the ones who give you the starter & pokedex and Trevor in particular winds up asissting research or something. Just another for the mystery pile, I guess.

 

[Hematite]

To be fair, while some of the finer details may be on the stretchier side (particularly AZ being inspired by Nordic aliens and Patrice being Lysandre - maybe I went a bit far on the conjecture there), I do think at least the basic foundation - that some older version of the plot was somehow space-related, until suddenly it wasn't - is pretty convincing!
There does seem to be a suppressed focus on space in many parts of these games:
- the region map is perfectly star-shaped, and the official blurb made a point of saying so in case we didn't notice/so we didn't think it was an accident
- the sundial explicitly did come from space, and the game tells us outright that it arrived right before AZ's war and has something to do with Mega Evolution
- Team Flare is unambiguously sun-themed, while the Fairy type is unambiguously moon-themed
And that aside, ORAS definitely made it seem like they had meant for space to tie the two projects together, given how badly they seemed to want to tie space into Mega Evolution.
Setting aside the admittedly wilder parts like, okay, I do not blame you at all for throwing out "this is proto-Lusamine" and "AZ is a hyper-specific reference to this sci-fi film I haven't even watched," I think it's hard to deny that Kalos was meant to have a fair amount more to do with space than it ultimately did.

The other stuff this theory happens to explain is really just a bonus - I enjoy the fact that it gives a better explanation for the Yggdrasil motif, that it ties in with AZ's design and that it "foreshadows" Sun and Moon, but the basic premise doesn't really rest on those things in the first place; these can all be dismissed as coincidence if they're too much of a stretch (and I can definitely understand why you think they are!).
There are definitely two ways to look at the comparisons to Sun and Moon - they might be icing on the cake ("if there are hints of a scrapped space plot in one Generation, and then the next one is explicitly about aliens anyway, wouldn't you have guessed that some of that was recycled from the first time even if a leak didn't tell you so?"), or they might just be needless and distracting ("are all of these contrived coincidences really necessary to make your point?"). Wherever you land there, I think you're right to cast your own judgment on that side of the theory and come to your own conclusion rather than taking my word for it!
And of course, with respect to the validity of the "leak" itself, it may well be that this "leaker" just caught on to those few definite examples of the space motif before the rest of us and made something up to explain them especially with how obvious those bigger points seem after they've been pointed out to me, I don't have such a hard time believing it.

Even so, I really do think X and Y must have had a heavily space-related plot in an earlier draft - aliens or no aliens.
I recognize that I've probably given the specifics of this "leak" more credit than I should have it's mostly just that this leak goes about it in such a satisfying way that I want to believe it, but I'm not surprised that none of that actually sounds convincing to someone else, haha, but the biggest evidence here at least points to some kind of space-related storyline, and I think that much is pretty hard to refute, whether it's the same story proposed in the leak here or not!

Edit: also, I think Alola's theme was literally "a land that supports various types of life" - the way it was reflected in the storyline was with the prominent ecosystem motif, and the titles were literally because the sun/moon/light are necessary to support life. I want to say they talked about the names at E3 in 2016, if you're interested in looking for that? It might've been the Nintendo Treehouse segment where they demonstrated Sun and Moon.

Edit 2:

By the way, how was Kalos described in the Japanese version of the site?

I'm not sure I should make a new post for this because it would definitely be an unhelpful one-liner, but all I can say is... I actually have no idea, haha. I would be surprised if the site was even still up, to be honest - I know I have the exact wording for the English version because it's quoted in multiple news articles from the same time period, but I don't think I would be able to find the same in a language I don't speak, unfortunately. That's actually a really good question, though - I wish I could answer it, and I think it would give some incredibly useful input on this discussion one way or the other... if anyone can find the equivalent, please do let me know!

 

[R_N]

To be fair, while some of the finer details may be on the stretchier side (particularly AZ being inspired by Nordic aliens and Patrice being Lysandre - maybe I went a bit far on the conjecture there), I do think at least the basic foundation - that some older version of the plot was somehow space-related, until suddenly it wasn't - is pretty convincing!
There does seem to be a suppressed focus on space in many parts of these games:
- the region map is perfectly star-shaped, and the official blurb made a point of saying so in case we didn't notice/so we didn't think it was an accident

By the way, how was Kalos described in the Japanese version of the site?

Edit: also, I think Alola's theme was literally "a land that supports various types of life" - the way it was reflected in the storyline was with the prominent ecosystem motif, and the titles were literally because the sun/moon/light are necessary to support life. I want to say they talked about the names at E3 in 2016, if you're interested in looking for that? It might've been the Nintendo Treehouse segment where they demonstrated Sun and Moon.

Hmm that does kind of sound familiar. I know that UBs in particular were based on invasive species. I'll try checking around those old treehouse streams.


you know what here's something I could see being dropped into SM as a side thing. Alola is really set on that whole intersection thing. 3 of the primary characters are an immigrant from Japan Kanto (the player), a native islander (Hau) and a general foreigner (Lillie, maybe meant to be just generic white people from not-america?) and they all come together and it doesn't matter where they came from. Even the UBs kind of play into that; they're dangerous because they're lost & scared but you can calm them down and they're not really different from Pokemon (I mean they're absurdly strong and cant breed but just---just let me have this).
It's a lot more of a theme than XY where you're just....people. All ostensibly not-french. Don't even really know what walks of life everyone's from beyond Serena I think. Also actually you all may have already known each other? It's been a while. Anyway point is I can take that theme and apply it pretty well to Alola without much effort while it would not necessarily apply it to the other regions or at least not as easily (& no more or less than applying something like Interference or Resonance or Ultimate).

 

[Ironmage]

If we're going to ascribe a Nordic origin to AZ, I would note that he shares some similarities with Odin. Odin is a deity with a pretty large portfolio, including healing, death, royalty, and rune magic, all of which could be tied to AZ. AZ is also always depicted with one eye covered, which may mirror the fact that Odin gave up one of his eyes for wisdom. Finally, Odin is frequently portrayed as an old wanderer, to the point where the Romans associated him with Mercury (Mercury did also have the duty of escorting souls to the underworld). Though if GF really wanted to go all in on that, they probably should have given AZ a wolf or raven mon.

 

[Pikachu315111]

Of course, it begs the question: how the heck does a fully-formed device like that just fall from space?

We got a space skeleton dragon that can cause Pokemon to grow gigantic now so I just stopped asking questions.

Though considering Carbink appears at locations where Necrozma does could there also be a connection with Ultra Space (or at least could they retcon an Ultra Space connection)?

So if the Ultimate Weapon was fashioned from shattered blue crystals, and it's capable of granting immortality and planet-wide omnicide, and pink crystals are implied to be be better and stronger...

Does Anistar City have an Annihilargh just sitting there?

At least people aren't worshipping it.

See how they "attach" to the diamond on its chest?

Magnetic bond?

"hey, isn't it weird how mega evolution, z moves and dynamaxing are all foreign power surges that affect our world in different ways"

Well we do have Professors who study each one of these phenomenon and surely there must be some kind of science convention where Professors around the world meet up and talk about their findings. Wouldn't be surprised if Sycamore, Kukui and Magnolia probably tried to figure out how their may be a connection between all their phenomenon but for one reason or another couldn't figure it out of the theories they came up with have a few snags here and there. But in their home region they probably just focus on their field of research cause that's what they have access to.

The Time when X and Y Were Actually Maybe About Aliens

Geez... I mean... wow...

This is for you

You have me convinced!... Well, sorta. It's a very well put together theory though, as R_N said, it can be read something that was made by working backwards from what was given to us.

But reading it I am convinced that GF at some point probably did have a lot bigger things planned for XY but for one reason or another had to scale back to the point where the plot was "adequate" that it can be packaged and shipped out. Many video games start out as something completely different then what they turned into, story ideas are dropped or added to a point where symbolism that was kept may have lost their original meaning.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I can believe at the very beginning I can see GF going "okay, the plot involve aliens" and its why we have all these alien themes. Kalos is shaped like a star, the villain team is named Team Flare, the Legendaries are made to look like alien creatures, etc.. However, I kind of find it hard to believe it got so far to be this intricately detailed. The AZ theory I'm most hesitant on, if only because I like AZ's story as is and with Lysandre, Team Flare, and Diantha being aliens I at least want one other major human character.

Actually, reading a lot of this didn't remind me of Sun & Moon but rather of:

MAJOR SPOILERS

Okami.

Especially the part about the peaceful alien race that lives on the moon which look like angels. Granted I also think that's something from Sailor Moon (and I know the moon people is something from Japanese mythology though the angel context isn't immediately connected to it).

However you are right a lot what was typed here does sound like something that was later refined in Sun & Moon. Could be they either didn't feel the "ALIENS!" plot was fully cooked or they had to scale back to meet deadlines so instead put it on the backburner to work on the plot, possibly make it more simple and involving the player so they wouldn't have to scale down that much.

So in the end I guess you can say that

 

[Hematite]

... Oh, hey! This is going to be a very short post, but I just made an observation about Xerneas that helps to explain the design of its horns!

I mentioned earlier how weird I found it that its horns were decorated with crystals instead of following through on the tree branch design with some kind of foliage, right?
But... what if that's actually meaningful? The most distinguishing quality of Xerneas's horns is that, despite being modeled after tree branches, they sport crystals in place of the expected mechanism for photosynthesis.
If you've read my last few posts, you'll know that I'm a fan of the idea that Xerneas was originally meant to be an extraterrestrial Pokémon. This is inspired by the claim in the "leak," but I still maintain that it rings true either way - a space-themed design motif is definitely present all over Kalos, and I've explained why I think the idea of being extraterrestrial helps to justify the Yggdrasil design scheme of the mascot trio better than anything we know about them now. This is something that could reasonably be speculated just from the content of the games themselves, so you can take this as its own theory in isolation from the rest of the "leak" if you prefer!
As it happens, the lore of X and Y already features at least two (confirmed: the sundial and Key Stones) or maybe three (speculative: the Ultimate Weapon) crystals from space that exist in Kalos and turn light into energy.
I think it's possible that Xerneas's design is meant to relate to these - if Xerneas came from the same part of space as those devices (which is likely, given its direct connection to them in any version of the story you consider), it's likely that its crystals are a mechanism for photosynthesis, so that's why it has them specifically in place of leaves!

That's all for today, haha - no big theory post or anything, but I thought this was a neat thing to add!

 

[Ironmage]

Well we do have Professors who study each one of these phenomenon and surely there must be some kind of science convention where Professors around the world meet up and talk about their findings. Wouldn't be surprised if Sycamore, Kukui and Magnolia probably tried to figure out how their may be a connection between all their phenomenon but for one reason or another couldn't figure it out of the theories they came up with have a few snags here and there. But in their home region they probably just focus on their field of research cause that's what they have access to.

Somewhat related to this: it's possible that the more destructive dex entries for Megas in gen 7 were more a result of Alola being less equipped to control the energy (i.e. a major shortage of key stones). If Super MD is any indication (I prefer physical cartridges, so life has stopped my from playing the remake to compare), an uncontrolled Mega evolution is very powerful, but also quickly goes berserk. This is a lot more likely to have been the state Alola first encountered Megas in, while it was more likely to have been stabilized by a key stone in Kalos (it's pretty much confirmed to be such in Hoenn). You can draw some comparisons to the difference between a trainer's Dmax pokemon and a raid boss.

If you want to extend this further, you could ascribe the extreme shows of force in various UB dex entries to unstable Z-power. When fought, I don't think there's a mechanical difference between a UB's red aura and the totems'/necrozma's/status Z-move's yellow aura, so it's reasonable to assume they are similar effects. Most interestingly, Lusamine's mons in her boss fight have yellow auras, despite the strength clearly originating from a UB. It would then be possible that, if the red aura is the equivalent of a berserk status Z-move, then e.g. celesteela burning down an entire forest despite not being fire-type could be the result of a berserk offensive Z-move.