What Is the Best Pokémon and Why?

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The very first Trying! topic that was suggested to me came from my friend M., who clearly stole it from his young son, O. That was way back in November, and the title of this essay has been sitting atop my list¹ ever since. I have now given this vital subject a good deal of consideration, and am finally ready to make my pronouncement.

But first, we need to talk about methodology.

The best is bullshit. (No offense, M. and O.!) If we were talking about the fastest or the strongest, we’d have some real criteria to lay on the table and argue about. Regieleki and Arceus, who I had never heard of until I just now Googled them, would be excellent candidates for those categories. We could talk about the bravest, the slimiest, the smelliest, the quietest—whether they are Pokémon or not, those are superlatives attached to firm, comprehensible, maybe even quantifiable adjectives.

But the best? The goodest, as it were? It feels gauzy, intangible, subjective to the point of nonsense. What do we even mean by “good”? As you probably know, that’s a question that’s bedeviled philosophers for millennia. Socrates supposedly said, “The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.” Then again, he was ignorant of Pokémon, and he knowingly drank hemlock, so I’m not sure whether we should trust his pronouncements.

Worse, “the best” has been so overused in the past decade that you should feel instinctively suspicious whenever it appears: the best national parks, the best Christmas pageant, the best places to live, the best medical schools, the best soccer player, beaches, zoos, the best SUV for the money, the best over-the-counter sleep aid, the best over-the-ear headphones, the best injection for weight loss, the best time to take a pregnancy test, the best aquariums, hospitals, over-the-range microwaves, the best painkiller for spinal stenosis, the best way to eat brioche, the best little whorehouse in Texas. People scour the Internet for these bests, hoping to alight on a link that melds insight, experience, and authority so beautifully that they can relax, secure in the comforting but mistaken knowledge that they really have found the best. Alas! The best is, in fact, the worst.

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As skeptical as I am about “the best,” I have often wondered about one particular category of bestness. This is really dumb, and I’m a bit hesitant to say it, but here goes: What was the best steak in history? Of all the cuts of all the cows over the centuries, was there one whose raw ingredient was so ideally marbled, so rich in flavor—and whose preparation was so precise, the edges crisp with Maillard reactions, the interior juicily medium-rare—that it could be termed the best of all the steaks that had been seared before or since? It doesn’t have to have been perfect. As we all definitely know, perfection does not exist. It merely has to have been better than every other.

Obviously, we can never know which steak was the best. But we can, once we’ve defined the characteristics that might make a steak “the best,” know that the best steak did exist at some brief point in time.

Still, that brings up other questions. Even if the best steak existed, was it consumed by someone who appreciated it, who might have realized they were being treated to the ultimate meaty outlier? It’s sort of tragic to think that the pinnacle of steak cuisine might have been eaten by someone who didn’t particularly know or care what they were putting in their mouth. And what if it was not consumed at all? What if it lay on the plate, ignored by a spoiled 8-year-old enraptured by her iPad? Does that detract from The Best Steak’s status in your mind? Can something be objectively the best if its quality and talent are never tested or experienced?

See, now even I’m getting wrapped up in superlatives when I said I don’t care. Really, I’m more interested in the second best, or the almost best. Tell me about the cow that, had it met the butcher’s knife two weeks before it contracted anthrax, would have produced steaks to delight Heaven itself. Tell me about the also-rans and the almost-wons, who had the potential for greatness but, whether they lacked drive or discipline or dumb luck, settled for goodness. We each might hope to be no. 1, but second place is the more relatable position—the B+/A- we’d all be happy with. The best, as I said, is bullshit, but no. 2 is really the shit.

There is one best, however, I will gladly concede, and that is: the best animal. As we all know, the best animal is the walrus. And that’s because the walrus is composed of three parts, each a glorious chart-topper in its own right. A walrus is, first of all, mostly an enormous, squishy, writhing tube of fat and muscle. Awesome. But then a walrus is also long thick tusks, so utterly unlike the writhing tube of fat and muscle that they shock the senses to contemplate. Finally, a walrus has a mustache, which multiplies its goodness by a factor of 1,000. You just can’t beat a walrus. And if only there were a Pokémon that was also a walrus, well, then we’d have a satisfying answer for M. and O. 🪨🪨🪨

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Notes

1. You can suggest topics for me as well! Just reply to this email, and I’ll add your suggestions to the list.

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