I absolutely love that the Pokémon universe is literally tearing itself apart at the seams. Fantastic worldbuilding, A+++
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A non-exhaustive list:
Mega Evolution comes from a meteor. The impact of that meteor literally split the dimensions apart and made it canonical that different versions of the same game are parallel dimensions (Alpha Ruby is a different world from Ruby, for instance). This is later confirmed by the presence of Anabel in Sun and Moon, who fell through dimensions from a world without Mega Evolution.
Speaking of Sun and Moon, wormholes are opening up all over Alola, letting in extradimensional beings that Pokéballs don’t catch properly. There are silver-skinned humans from one of these portals that live in a giant prismatic city.
Also in Sun/Moon, you can pass through to a mirror world where day is night and night is day. When this happens, you can catch the mirror world version of your box legendary friend.
There’s a giant space alien in Sword and Shield who’s leaking particles that cause Pokémon to briefly turn massive, which sometimes rearranges their genetic makeup.
In Scarlet and Violet, reality is splintering. There’s a hole to the future/past that generates paradox Pokémon which are heavily implied to have been materialized out of a researcher’s desire to see them rather than actually from their future/past. The same energy that supposedly made them enables Pokémon to become any type they want and caused a robot to gain human sentience.
In the hole you find the paradox Pokémon in, you find buried monoliths that nobody knows where they came from. The very material they’re made of is canonically unidentifiable.
Time and space were briefly unraveled in Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum as a maniac tried to overwrite the current world and make a new universe out of it, and in the Platinum universe, this opened a hole to another dimension where a banished god lives. The banished god was pissed off about this and abducted the guy that messed with time and space.
People sometimes slip through the cracks and become Pokémon in Pokémon-only worlds (the Mystery Dungeon series) or drop through time to different eras (Legends Arceus’s protagonist and Ingo).
In Mystery Dungeon, time is eroding (Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky), and the world is warping and distorting into areas that scramble themselves every time you enter them and make the inhabitants of those areas agitated and hostile (entire series).
the thing about mystery dungeon tho, and in particular explorers of sky, is that they were the FIRST games in the franchise to do multiverse shenanigans wayyy back in the ‘00s. i mean the very premise of “human from a world with both humans and pokemon comes to a world with only pokemon” implies that these people are either coming from the main game universe(s) or something similar.
(spoilers for the explorers games, particularly explorers of sky, beyond this point)
then in explorers, they introduce TIME-TRAVEL, wherein the hero isnt actually a human from the human world, but a human from the FUTURE of the world youre playing in, a future where time froze because the god of time went insane after his house started falling apart. and by the end of the main plot, you stop his house from doing that, thereby erasing that future (and therefore yourself) from ever existing, marty mcfly style. but then to thank you, and to soothe the grief of the friend you left behind, the time god says “hey bud sorry about that, lemme just—” and just Brings You Back
and THEN, in explorers of sky, they added special episodes that center around side characters. and in the fifth and final version of this, you play as grovyle (the player character’s former partner from the future, who sacrificed himself to bring a bad guy BACK to the future to get him out of the way) as he journeys through the frozen future to try and defeat the insane time god on HIS end. and at the end, the world begins to unfreeze as the effects of your victory in the past begin to ripple forward. everyone—grovyle, his allies, his enemies, even the time god himself—is erased from existence while watching the first sunrise in eons as their entire timeline collapses…
but then they wake up. everyone is fine. everyone turns to the time god to ask wtf happened, and he says “idk man wasnt me. some power beyond me must have done this.” and they all just,,, go on with their lives. the implications of this are that a bunch of heroes stopped the bad future from ever happening, but then some nebulous and omnipotent force (thought to be arceus, the ultimate god of all pokemon) just Brings It All Back, meaning there are now two PARALLEL futures, one where the world sucked for a long time, and one where presumably it was totally fine (we dont get to see this future but obviously time DOESNT stop in this version), and suddenly you’ve got an explicit, discrete, canonical multiverse, years before the main series ever touched the idea
so anyway TL;DR: in mystery dungeon, you erase the future from happening, but a capital-g God so powerful even the god of time doesnt know them says “actually no” and un-erases it as its own alternate timeline simply because it wouldve been sad not to, thus creating a multiverse.
theres a reason its my favorite game of all time shskfhskf
also no the shit about time god’s house is not an exaggeration, the god of time is a pokemon called dialga and he begins to go insane as his home, temporal tower, slowly collapses. its ultimate collapse (and his insanity) is what causes time to freeze across the world. now really all this means is that the inanimate world (rocks, trees, rivers) become petrified, but only SOME pokemon follow suit. how anyone at all survived is a mystery (dungeon. heh), but evidently some DID because YOU are one of these survivors.
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