Can we please ban "why is a certain thing a certain way" questions?

Question

They're pointless and almost entirely based on speculation.

Comments

I don't think it's a good idea to ban all of them. Many questions, like "Why does Trapinch evolve into Vibrava?" and "Why does curse have two different effects?" have real, good answers.

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There used to be an example in the rules that said to not ask trivial questions such as 'Why is Mew pink?' That kind of question is obviously pretty pointless but the rule went on to say that we should still try and think about the question before we render it pointless and flag it down. I can't find that in the rules anymore (probably not looking that hard) but I think all questions like this deserve some thought bc some do have good answers, like the ones sumwun mentioned. "Why are some moves (like FeatherDance) spelt without a space in the early games?" is another one I can think of. I wish there was a better way to classify the quality of these types of questions though, bc I agree that some of them are annoying as hell and have no more justification beyond Game Freak logic.

Answer 1

Some of those questions can be quite good. Sometimes there are good and interesting reasons why something it the way it is, and people don't know one way or the other before asking. So it's difficult to come up with a rule to say what's allowed and what isn't.

Comments

I understand. I'm just irritated by questions that can only be answered by the developers/designers.

Answer 2

Excuse me bumping this up, but I do think we should have a response to these questions in some way. We can't really have questions without an answer on the site. I think something should be formalised, however I agree with Pokemaster that there is no way we can enforce a rule on this. Instead, we can compromise.

The simplest way to deal with these questions is to edit them so that they don't ask for something we don't know. I've been doing this for a few months now, and it has worked well so I thought I'd put it out there as an option. For example, questions can be changed like this:

"When will Marshadow release in the west?" → "Do we know when Marshadow will release in the west?"

I could take down the question on the left, but I don't really have grounds to do that because there's no rule. Instead, I would change it to the question on the right. That one is a yes or no question, and we can answer it right now even though the Pokemon Company has been so quiet on the subject. If the answer was yes, then it would basically be courtesy to mention when Marshadow releases as well. All of that can be dealt with in comments or as a follow-up question regardless.

I can't see anyone having a problem with that as opposed to having the thread removed entirely, so I think this is a good way to handle these. If you see posts like this around, I'd encourage that you edit them if you can, or flag them so somebody who can edit will get around to it. I would leave a comment for the asker as well so they know what is going on.