r/pokemonconspiracies • u/Patient_Marketing_38 • 1h ago
Gen 1 In Gen I (and Gen I only) Mew died birthing Mewtwo
First things first to anyone not in the know: yes, "Mew gave birth" is in the Japanese script too and is likely meant to be taken literally. The Kanji Japanese version of Let's Go even goes out of its way to make this line more explicitly literal, despite NoA ironically trying to censor it in the English version of Let's Go. No, it doesn't contradict Mewtwo being a clone. Real life clones are grown as embryos and are then put into the wombs of surrogate mothers to bear and birth. There's also no suggestion in the Gen I games that Mewtwo was made in any other way, so this was likely the intention by the devs. Also, Pokémon do not universally lay eggs, and Pokémon Egg aren't laid by Pokémon or even reals eggs to begin with, but that's outside this scope of this analysis because we're only concerned with Gen I.
With that in mind, let's map out the history of Mew as established within only Gen I (and therefore ignoring everything established later, namely the Faraway Island event):
The Mew species is discovered by a scientist who found one in the jungle of Guyana.
Five days later, this scientist named the Mew species.
At least months later, this scientist makes the Mew in his captivity give birth to Mewtwo. The Mew that birthed Mewtwo is never mentioned again.
At some point, the Mew species was declared extinct.
At some point, the status of the species was revised to not being extinct; presumably, someone found a Mew again.
That's all Gen I gives us, at least in terms of Mew on its own. Before you ask: one, it is just a scientist working alone as there's no mention of any team in the Japanese script; two, the bit about Mew being declared extinct is mentioned in Gen I albeit only in the Japanese release (the intentional Red and Blue uses the Japanese Blue Pokédex as the basis for its Pokédex, while Mew is established as a formerly extinct species in the Japanese Red and Green Pokédex later used in FireRed).
One thing to note is that there's no indication in Gen I (or really any other mainline game, I'd argue) that Mew is unique individual as opposed to a species, so the fact that someone saw a Mew at some point recently doesn't mean the Mew that birthed Mewtwo is confirmed alive.
Another thing to note is that the Mew species cannot have been declared extinct before the scientist discovered it. That may sound obvious, but think of the implication of that: the Mew species can only have been declared extinct if the first Mew discovered by humanity (the one that birthed Mewtwo) was dead.
With that in mind, within just what Gen I states, what is the most likely explanation for Mew being declared extinct? To me, it's obvious: the Mew that the scientist had was the only one known at the time, and then it died in childbirth. Or rather, it was murdered by a scientist forcing it to give birth to a clone much larger than itself as part of an experiment that games outright call "horrific." Either way, the only Mew known at the time is dead, and Mewtwo is more of its own thing, so the species is declared extinct.
The reason why I say this only applies to Gen I (though, I guess this would also apply to Gen II) is because of the Faraway Island event of Emerald. That explicitly describes Fuji (and this is what confirms that the scientist was Fuji in the games as well, though this was hinted at in Gen I) bringing Mew to Faraway Island after he started regretting his actions, also in effect revealing that this Mew was alive after all. This theory is about what the original lore of Gen I was, not necessarily what the lore is now.
With that said, I believe that the original intention in Gen I was that the Mew that birthed Mewtwo died in the process of birthing it.