Quote Originally Posted by Rater202 View Post
People jump on the "Raticate Died" there when there are better explanations.
But no cooler explanations.

The Raticate died theory suggests that there is a story element that was either cleverly half hidden by the authors or even came into existence entirely on accident. It makes the world of the game a richer (if sadder/darker) place while tying together several setting elements, being your almost hostile rivalry with blue, your repeated battles, the theme of the Pokémon Tower level, the text of the game and probably a few more things. It's a cool idea, and while the evidence for it is far from conclusive so is the evidence against it. For instance: in the runs where you skip the Anne battle maybe you already killed his Rattata in the match before that? Sure, it doesn't make sense from an out of game viewpoint, we know you could have chosen to not skip the battle, so between the two battles, was his Rattata/Raticate both alive and dead at the same time, only choosing a state ones you decided to skip or not? But from the view inside a single run through the story is consistent. (Or we could just say remakes don't count, because there are plenty of remakes that slaughter all the cool bits of the original.) So as head canon: why not?