Fresh Water and the Pokemon War

Welcome to Toylab's Pokemon War series
The Pokemon War could be coming to the Pokemon Go game.  What is the Pokemon War and what is the evidence of its arrival?  This post is part of a weekly series where Toylab will focus on a new part of the Pokemon War theory. As these posts have been very popular we will begin a podcast series focusing on the war as well stay tuned for that!

In this post we will be looking at Fresh Water as evidence of a greater war having occurred prior to the events of games Pokemon Red/Blue.  Fresh Water is an item that appears in multiple Pokemon Games and it can be used to heal Pokemon and also is used as something that can be traded or bartered with.  Fresh Water was not something mentioned once in Pokemon Lore but is something that reoccurs in the video games, card game, anime and manga.  It literally appears in almost every iteration of the series except for......Pokemon Go.  Why is this?  The Pokemon War of course!

What is Fresh Water:
Fresh Water is naturally occurring water with a low amount of saline (Salt) or other dissolved solids.  It is the water that almost all land based living things depend on for sustenance.  While, the Earth has an abundance of water, only a small fraction of the Earth's water is deemed to be freshwater.  About 2.5-3% of the world's water is considered fresh water and most of that is frozen in glaciers.  Fresh water is thus important for all kinds of biomes and human civilization itself.

Fresh Water in Pokemon:


 In Generation I and III you can find a Fresh Water for sale in a department store.  You use this Fresh Water to trade a guard for passage.  Fresh water appears as purchasable items in vending machines in Generation V.  Overall Fresh Water is a healing item and a very good one at that.  Fresh Water tends to heal pokemon better than potions at less cost.  The problem with fresh water is that you generally need to go around and look for it the places they are sold tend to be much more rare than the Pokemon Potions.

Fresh Water Questions:
The appearance of Fresh Water as an item in the game is bizarre in and of itself.  Consider this what other games has Water appeared as an item in a game?   I have seen special kinds of water like Holy Water in some games.  Generally though drinking, potable or fresh water are considered ubiquitous in games.

The only games I can think of where finding Fresh Water is a thing are games like Fall Out.  These are post apocalyptic games that take place after a terrible (normally nuclear) war in which fresh water is very rare.    The fact that Fresh Water is something that is bought, sold, and even hard to find means that fresh water is very scarce in the Pokemon world presented in Red/Blue and on.  The game double downs on this item with how much it appears in subsequent generations.  This means that its appearance was not flukish or done by mistake it is firmly built into the lore of the Pokemon World.  This would be another hint that the games creators intended to portray the world of Red/Blue as a post war world.

Like many of the oddities that appear in the game Fresh Water's scarcity points toward a previous catastrophic event like a war.  This war would have left much of the world's fresh water supply as tainted by toxins, pollutants or radiation.  The populations of the world survive on liquids of some kind but only a small percentage of that would be considered truly fresh.  This is why a Pokemon heals from drinking fresh water because generally a pokemon lives off tainted water.  Drinking of fresh water would be considered a special thing, and a thing that would heal like a medicine.

This also explains why Fresh Water has not appeared as an item in Pokemon Go.  Pokemon Go appears prior to the Pokemon War (At least so far it has) and thus Fresh Water is still abundant.  There is no reason for people to purchase Fresh Water in Pokemon Go world it is all around them.