Pokemon sizes make absolutely zero sense.
The fearsome Charizard?
Yeah,
it stands at a measly 5 foot 7 inches, that is a couple inches shorter than me.
The formidable Lucario? He's just 3 foot 11.
That's not even tall enough to get on most Disney rides.
And Furret,
you know, the Pokemon that's based on a ferret, is supposedly 6 feet long.
Not sure I want that thing running up and down my pant leg.
Anyway, I think you get the point.
The sizes listed in the Pokédex are all over the place.
But there's one Pokemon that takes the insanity and turns it up to 11.
The Float Whale Pokémon, Wailord.
For two decades this guy has sparked fan rage, so much
so that it's even spilled into the realm of a full on academic paper and all of it
stems from one simple question: Is Wailord lighter than air?
Seems like a weird thing to be asking about your 47 foot long whale, right?
Wrong.
Once you look at the rest of the numbers, you see how this has become
one of the most controversial topics in all the pokéverse.
So today we're going to be coming up with a definitive answer.
Has the Internet hit rock bottom or is everyone else, including this
Pokémon, full of hot air?
Hello Internet!
Welcome to Game Theory where today we're going back
to our roots, applying real world research to a fictional worlds.
Break out the pixel rulers class
because they were overanalyzing the disturbing science of Pokémon.
And no,
I am not talking about how a tiny Skitty and a giant Wailord are meant to breed.
Not touching that one with a ten foot Alolan Exeggutor.
At least not yet.
Maybe one day.
Nope, today I'm talking about the fact that Wailord is light.
Like stupidly light.
As I mentioned in the cold open
Wailord’s Pokédex entries confused fans since it was first introduced in Gen 3.
You see, Wailords weight is listed at 877.4 pounds or about 398 kilograms.
That's no doubt heavy, one of the heaviest Pokémon in the entire series.
But it is comically light when you compare it to your typical whale.
Blue whales, the thing that Wailord is based on, usually weigh somewhere between
290 and 330 thousand pounds,
or between 130 and 150 thousand kilos, practically
350 times the weight of your standard Wailord.
So these guys are heavy, but not too, too heavy, you know?
However, where things get controversial is when you factor in Wailord’s
other measurements.
Wailord’s quote unquote height is listed at 47 feet or 14.5 meters.
He's massively big for not a lot of weight,
prompting many fans online to speculate that Wailord may in fact be
the lightest Pokémon in all the games relative to his size.
Some have even gone
so far as to say that Wailord is so light, he's literally lighter than air.
The argument’s been so heated, in fact, that it eventually spawned
a real research paper from a real university in the UK.
And their conclusion?
Yep, Wailord is in fact lighter than air.
Strap a string on that guy, you got yourself a big ol’ whale balloon.
Reddit though, they weren't buying it.
Because of course they weren't, it's Reddit.
This prompted a massive post
arguing the exact opposite that no, Wailord is not lighter than air.
So today, loyal theorists, we're going to be putting an end to this seismic debate.
We're crunching the numbers ourselves to see who is right,
who is wrong, and who is super nerdy.
It was all of us.
All of us were super nerdy.
Will Wailord be sailing the seven seas
or floating amongst the clouds like a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon?
Ladies and gentlemen, it's MORTY time.
So how does one
go about proving whether a fictitious whale is able to float through the air?
Well, it all comes down to a little scientific principle called density.
Density is the measure of how much mass something has per unit of volume.
If we have ourselves two cubes of equal volume,
one made of lead and the other made of wood,
the cube of lead would weigh more and thus be more dense.
If I then drop that cube of lead into a fluid
that's less dense than it, say water, the cube will sink to the bottom.
If I drop the cube of wood into the water, meanwhile, it would float,
since wood is less dense than water.
It's all pretty self-explanatory stuff.
It's also pretty darn easy to calculate.
All you need to do is divide the mass by the volume
and bam you've got yourself the density.
Classic equation: D equals M over V, DMV, the one place where dreams go to die.
So let's just take ourselves an easy example here to get warmed up.
Voltorb.
Voltorb is a nice round sphere, so figuring out it's volume should be quick.
According to the Pokédex,
Voltorb has a height of 0.5 meters or one foot eight inches.
Its radius is half that. So 0.25 meters.
And the formula for the volume of a sphere is V equals 4/3 Pi R cubed.
So plugging in our values, we get a volume of 0.065 cubic meters.
Now all you need to do to figure out Voltorb’s
density is take that listed mass of 10.4 kilograms and divide it by the volume
that we just got to get a density of 160 kilograms per cubic meter.
Comparing that to the density of air, which is 1.293 kilograms per cubic meter,
we can see that Voltorb is definitely not floating away on the breeze.
But the density of water, it's actually much higher, 1,000 kilograms
per cubic meter.
So Voltorb would actually float on the water
despite him being a giant metal ball.
Which means in real life you'd probably be able
to teach your Voltorb how to use surf.
That being said, this is all pretty easy math, right?
Here's the problem with Wailord though.
Unlike Voltorb, who's a perfectly shaped sphere, Wailord is a blimp shaped whale,
and finding his volume is not as easy of a plug and chug solution.
So let's just take a look
at how both sides of this poke puzzle tried to solve the problem.
First, there's this paper written by William Farmer,
a student at the University of Leicester who wrote an undergraduate research paper
in the school's journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics.
I got to say,
love the fact that this debate's been going on for so long
that the kids who used to argue about it on the playground
are now old enough to write their own published research papers about it.
Truly, William Farmer, you are a man after my own heart.
If you're looking for a job feel free to apply for Theorists script writer.
Anyway, he calculated Wailord’s size using pixel measurements
in a classic theorist move and he used a cylinder
to estimate Wailord's base shape, claiming that the overestimates here,
these empty parts where the cylinders
bigger than the body, those would help account for the parts
that stick out, like his tail and his fins.
The volume of a cylinder amounts to Pi R squared
H, so Pi times the radius of the cylinder multiplied by the cylinders height.
So with a Wailord cylinder height of 14.5 meters and a radius at 2.855 meters,
he figured out that Wailord's
volume would be around 370 cubic meters, making the density 1.08
kilograms per cubic meter, which is lighter than air at 1.293.
So case closed, right?
No. You see, despite this coming from an academic journal,
the paper makes a lot of assumptions about Wailord’s shape and volume.
And this got reddit eager for a more precise solution.
This post comes from the r/Pokemon subreddit by user PetscopMiju, who
also use pixel measurements, but this time refined Wailord’s estimated shape.
Instead of just reducing him down
to a simple cylinder, they instead decided to add a hemisphere
to each end of the shape, that way
they didn't need to explain away as much empty space.
They also recognize that
pixel measurements tend to be slightly inconsistent across different games,
and so they tried to correct for that as well.
This led their estimate for Wailord’s radius to be smaller, 2.2 meters
as opposed to 2.8.
Their cylinder length then was 8 meters, leaving about 2.1 meters on each
end for the tail and the head.
In total, this refined equation where they added up the volume
of the cylinder and two hemispheres gave them a significantly smaller volume.
Only 166.24 cubic meters, less than half what the academic paper had proposed.
Divide Wailord’s mass of 398 kilos by 166, and you get 2.39 kilograms
per cubic meter, which is nearly double
the density of air and a vastly a conclusion than the academic paper.
With numbers like that, your float whale Pokémon here?
He ain’t floating anywhere. So which is right?
Well off the bat, the Reddit approach seems to be the more accurate method.
While both options are assuming
certain parts of Wailord’s shape, the Reddit one is taking precautions
by doing multiple calculations to account for the nuances
of both his shape and the differences in pixel measurements across games.
I got to say it my friends, I am on team Reddit for this one.
But you guys know I'm not going to just leave it there.
These calculations, they're not perfect.
Between its little grooves, its crevices and the giant fins and tail,
there is no perfect shape to truly describe what a Wailord is.
It's not a cylinder shape. It's not an ellipsoid shape.
It's just a Wailord shape.
This is where our two density debaters get into trouble.
But what also complicates things
is that the scale of Wailord, it's never been consistent.
Since Wailord is so much larger than just about every other Pokemon in the games,
it's always shrunken down so it can fit within the confines
of the system, the battlefield or the screen.
And with Wailord being so large, any amount of estimation error
gets exaggerated to become a whale sized problem.
Without factoring in that sort of inconsistency, who knows?
You might conclude something
insane, like saying Wario was ten feet tall or something ridiculous like that.
As a result, my dearly beloved pixel measurements,
they might not be the best tool to give us the most accurate numbers
in this instance.
So, how don't we get the most accurate results
and settle this debate once and for all?
Well in the wise words of Patrick Star
We have technology.
Since the release of both the Reddit post and the research paper Wailord
has made the switch to the Nintendo Switch with Pokémon Sword and Shield.
In the Isle of Armor DLC we finally get to see Wailord
in all his blubbery glory, just as Arecus intended, which means
that we finally have access to a full 3D model of this Pokémon.
No more pixel measurements based on weirdly angled sprites required.
This means that we can take this new 100% accurate 3D model
and imported into a 3D modeling program like Blender.
While this program is typically used for creating 3D models, it also allows you
to do things
like measure the volume of your or in this case, Game Freak's creations.
Therefore, as long as we have the proper scaling figured out, we can use Blender's
built in tools to get the exact volume of a Wailord.
No estimates required, including the tails and fins.
Now, up to this point
everyone's been using Wailord’s Pokédex height to measure his length.
It sounds confusing, but this is actually a common quirk amongst the Pokédex.
Sometimes it means vertical height,
but other times, especially when you're talking about long Pokemon like Wailord
it means length. But just make sure that we didn't
get the math wrong I wanted to be extra careful.
So I took a look at every depiction of Wailord
that we've ever been given, like the size comparison tool from generation
4, or the player character standing next to Wailord in Sword and Shield.
Given that the trainers in the series
are usually around 5 foot 4 inches, there's no way that Wailord’s 47
foot height in the Pokédex could refer to anything other than his length.
So, with that once settled I was able to make sure
that our blender whale was scaled correctly,
and by creating a mesh for him, we can use Blender's volume calculator to tell us
that Wailord has a volume of 182.8557 cubic meters precisely.
No estimates, no assumptions.
That is the exact number.
From there, all we have to do is divide Wailord’s 398 kilograms by his volume
to get a definitive density. Drumroll please.
[Metal drum rolling sound]
Really?
That's the best we got?
I gotta admit.
I don't know what we got to do at this poi...
I am perturbed by the lack of a solid drumroll Yosi.
Fix it, man! Pull out all the expenses next time.
I want a drumroll that will melt minds.
Promise?
Yosi I put you in the shaving episode, so you better promise me.
Thank you. Where was I? Oh, yeah, his true density.
Wailord's true density is 2.18 kilograms per cubic meter, which means that
I can now say, without a shadow of a doubt that Wailord is not lighter than air.
Even if you don't include Wailord’s tail in the overall calculation,
it still wouldn't be enough to get him airborne.
And honestly, all this checks out.
Wailord being lighter than air would have broken
the information that the Pokédex tells us about him.
Wailord’s Pokédex entries going all the way back to Sapphire
tell us that Wailord can knock out prey by the shock of its splash.
Which, you know, is going to be
pretty hard to do when you're so light you can't even hit the water.
So there you have it, my friends.
The debate is finally squashed.
Wailord is not lighter than air.
Reddit was right.
Not completely, obviously, but their conclusion was pretty darn close
for an estimate.
I guess we'll just have to leave floating off to the sky to team rocket.
Team Rocket’s blasting off again.
And now with that one out of the way, tune in next time when we calculate
how the density of Cosmoem would end the known universe.
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And as always, my friends remember, it's all just a theory.
A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching.