Axolotl

So I was driving back from bringing my partner to the airport at 4:30 AM (ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh) and listening to the album that goes with the fic with the Lyra on Mount Silver that I'll probably never finish because at around 6000 words it completely started getting away from me and I realized: In-Universe Pokemon Tarot would probably be quite different from ours.

Brief history lesson, synthesizing from Wikipedia and a couple of tarot books and conversations I've had and that one Tarot class I took: Tarot cards were essentially rich people playing cards in the 1400s, with the trump cards (what we now call major arcana) emphasizing various archetypes/mythical figures of cultural importance, and the numbered cards (minor arcana) just having repeated pictures of whatever the suit was, much like modern American (and I think British/Canadian/other-English-speaking places?) playing cards. (Apparently in Europe it's still common to play various card games, mostly trick-taking I think, with Tarot-like decks. I want to try one of these sometime, but I came up in the This Is A Mystical Object And You Must Treat It With Respect school of Tarot, so it's always felt too weird.) The divinatory aspects came later, because the things were already rife with symbolism, and because you could make a vague argument that maybe their origin was connected to Egypt somehow, possibly, and 19th century occultists were crazy over Egyptology. Around that time I believe, although I can't find a 100% certain citation for this, occultists filled in the minor arcana with images relevant to the symbol-space developed around the majors, and with symbolism that works for them --- so a bunch of mystic Christian things, Greek and Hebrew letters hidden in things, further references to astrology, &c. (More recent Tarot decks are fascinating conversations between symbol-spaces and image-libraries, but that's neither here nor there.)

The Pokemon universe doesn't have mystic Christianity, doesn't seem to put much stock in astrology or necessarily do it the way we do, or even necessarily to have had a medieval Italy for Tarot to originate in. Let's assume that enough things are similar that a deck-based divination could still evolve, though --- what would it look like? Would cups, wands, swords, and coins still have enough mythological currency, or is there something else? How would the Major Arcana look, given that their religion is focused more on Pokemon, which clearly actually exist even if most people don't get to interact with the divine ones? I don't know, but I have some ideas, and I'm curious to see if anyone else does.

• Minor suits: Given the combined canon of Pokemon Conquest and Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, I think it's pretty safe to say that swords as symbols of authority/power and of violence would still be present, although card imagery might focus on Pokemon who also have sword-like abilities (Secret Sword, Sacred Sword, Swords Dance...) as much as humans and literal swords. Swords might not necessarily be the suit of technology in the same way, though. In the Lucario movie, Sir Aaron (( minor spoilers )
  ) is able to store Lucario inside of a staff. If this was not a unique occurrence, it's possible that wands could be more about technology where swords are about history? There's also some argument to put your fishing rods in Wands, which would connect it to water, which is traditionally the element of Cups. BUT. Pokemon doesn't have a four-element system anyway! (And neither does much of Earth, although the folks who play with Tarot mostly do.) Pokemon has a sixteen-element system, where it's common for sets of two to pair reasonably well together. We know there are three major elements --- Fire, Water, Grass --- the ones that everyone who isn't in a wackadoo side game gets to pick from, pretty much. Maybe you get three different minor arcana, one for each of those, with the Ace being the type alone, and the other cards being that type combined with another? So the numbers of the minors are each associated with a type (numerology!) and each of the three suits is both a type and a symbol? That gives you 16 cards per suit, or maybe only 14 if you don't have Fire/Water, Water/Grass, &c. combos. 14 gives you A-10 and then four court cards... What would the courts be? And if Grass is Wands, would Water be Swords, or would Fire? What would the other one be?
• Major arcana: One of the major ways the arcana are understood is as "the Fool's Journey," a progression that the Tarot reader goes through represented by the card "The Fool." If that shouldn't be "The Trainer," I will eat my hat. One of them, I don't know which. It doesn't matter, because the Trainer's Journey makes so much sense archetypically here. I'm not sure what to do with the other roles though. Some of the archetypes we see in the modern Pokemon world seem like they'd exist further back --- the Professor, for example, might be "The Scholar" or maybe even just The Professor; "The One Who Put Together The PC System" surely has some historical analogue although I don't know what it would be. (I think it goes in the Magician slot though, and Magician isn't the worst card name.) We don't know too much about Pokemon governmental structure, though, to name political or religious positions like Emperor/Empress or High Priest/Priestess. (Also, does anyone really care that much if you are a boy or a girl?) I imagine there's a great schism about whether you put Mew or Arceus on the final card. Also, "The Lovers?" Pshaw. THE RIVALS.
• If this is something that's developed over hundreds of years, how do you make that fit with the idea that Oak knew about only 151 at the beginning of RBY? If it's me, I just don't --- I retcon that and assume that, as demonstrated by HGSS, all of the non-Unovan pokemon were known to Kanto/Johto, it's just that some are not native and others are quite rare. Heck, perhaps they used to be more common and are now only findable in Hoenn --- or maybe Zubat starved out all of the non-Unovan Woobat population and they only survive in Unova because there's such an ocean gap. There are reasonable justifications to put any Pokemon on a card, except maybe some of the late-appearing legendaries like Deoxys or Kyurem. (And even then I am sure you could make it work.)
• What would the original game have looked like? It could have been trick-taking, certainly, although numerical doesn't seem right; it seems like the basis of winning a hand would probably be type advantage, such that as a parlor amusement or children's game it helps one memorize the 16x16 type advantage chart. How would the majors work, then? Perhaps they just "win," but perhaps they influence the way numerical cards are calculated... like Supporter cards in the actual, extant TCG... which also evolved from medieval Poke-Tarot... which explains why all of the cards have numeric values and are suited by type. YES, I WENT THERE.

There's still a lot to do here, and also the question "how is this useful for anything?" Help? :D

This comes out of a conversation with Sonata two nights ago that I have no idea how we got into. Also, full disclosure: I identify as both trans and genderqueer and thus have strong personal feelings about this stuff. Okay! That said.

Basically: The Pokemon universe, to the best of my knowledge, has almost no characters who are canonically trans or genderqueer; see pseudogeek 's comment below for some implicitly genderqueer characters, and Akari from the How I Became A Pokémon Card manga. (Please correct me if I am wrong!! I haven't read PokeSpe yet so I might be missing something.) Fortunately, that has never stopped fandom with anything at any time, so there's still fic (and art, and probably other media too) where some of the characters meet one of these descriptions. At the bottom of this post I'm including a list of the things I happen to have run into and will totally add things to it based on recommendations --- I don't get out of my personal little fanfic hole very much so I am sure there's a ton I am missing. I've run into a bunch of genderswap fic in which a character is written as if they have always been another gender/sex, but not that much where one of the characters transitions or comes into a different gender identity as a child or adult. In this post I won't be considering the genderswap fic, not because it's not interesting or important, but because I think it's a different kind of interesting/important. There's also crossdressing as a kink but while that sometimes can shade into trans stuff, I'm not really considering it much either. (Though I went and read a bunch to see if I should list any of it, and... not my kink. Oof.)

What I most want to see in fiction, at least right now, is stories with trans characters that don't shy away from discussing that transness but also aren't strictly speaking about it. This is what I've tried to do with Julie/N in New Game + and Collections of Elegant Formulas; I don't think I nailed it perfectly but I think the sense of it being important, but not the only important thing, comes through. I hope? Most of the other things I've found have been kink meme fills, and often the transness is part of or all of the kink, and so even when the stories are really well-written they are about transness and not too much else. I haven't seen any kink meme participants or such asking for genderqueer specifically, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. One of the things that excites me about stories that include trans characters is that the presence of the trans character can illuminate the relationships of the people around them to gender. I don't mean to suggest that trans characters should be used as ciphers to help better understand the cis characters, who are obviously the important ones --- that would be exploitative --- but anything that tugs at a thread in the gender norms blanketing society bunches them up in other places in interesting ways.

Other than N transitioning postgame (which is rocksolid in my headcanon even outside of the comaverse), I don't have any characters who I think of as trans in the Pokemon universe. Amanita strikes me as the sort of nerd woman who doesn't care about gender but not caring means going with the gender she's assigned because doing something else would get in the way of computers. Genderqueer Silver makes (perfect) sense but doesn't fit with the narrative in my headcanon; Cheren being a trans man makes a whole lot of sense to me but is and idea I ran into only recently so I'm not sure if I want to integrate it into my headcanon or try writing it yet. What other characters might be good choices for this? Are there characters you think of as trans or genderqueer, or think would be interesting to write that way? I kind of want to play with writing this stuff more, but I am not really sure where to go, so I'm asking both in general because I think it's interesting and also because I might try writing based off of other people's ideas to see where they take me?

Here's the list of stories I've found with some brief commentary. Most of these are from anon memes, partially because they are well-tagged, and partially because that was basically all I could find:
( the list )
What am I missing? Have you written or read something like this that I should add to the list? I checked a couple of people's lists/journals but couldn't find anything obvious. Thanks to keltena  who helped me find a bunch of things on tumblr,  pseudogeek  who also sent recommendations, and sharonaparadox who mentioned Akari and added another link!