Shiny Pokémon Don't Exist Anymore

Baudrillard, Simulacra, and the End of Pokémon’s Real Rarity

My freshman year of college, I took a class called Postmodern Literature and Theory. A real mouthful. The kind of course title that sounds like it should be accompanied by a cigarette and a too-long stare out the window. I think about this class a lot. More than anyone would expect. More than you’re even imagining, reading these words, wondering if I’m about to bore you with some dense, capital-T Theory.

I barely remember half the syllabus—what novels we read, what essays we were assigned—but certain ideas from that class have lived in my head ever since, rent-free. Specifically, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his ideas about simulacra and the hyperreal. It sounds a little ridiculous, I know. Like I’m forcing a connection just to have something smart-sounding to write about. But I swear, I’m not. These ideas haunt me. They shape the way I see the world, the way I experience it—or, if Baudrillard is to be believed, fail to experience it.

See, Baudrillard’s whole thing was that we’re all getting further and further away from reality. We don’t experience things directly anymore. We experience versions of them, copies, simulations that overwrite the real thing in our minds until we can’t tell the difference. This is the hyperreal.

A simple example: Niagara Falls. If you visit, you might expect to feel awe, a sense of nature’s majesty, an all-knowing assurance that you are looking upon something beautiful. But why do you expect that? Because you’ve seen Niagara Falls before—not in person, but in postcards, travel brochures, movies, Instagram reels. By the time you’re standing in front of the actual waterfall, your reaction is already scripted. You don’t just feel awe—you feel the correct version of awe, the one you were prepped for. The experience isn’t fresh; you feel compelled to have the reaction you know you are supposed to have.

And then there’s the idea of the copy of a copy. Take fast food. Think about tomatoes. You know what a tomato is—bright, juicy, fresh off the vine. Now think about the tomato in a Taco Bell taco. Is that really a tomato, or is it a Tomato™? It looks like one, sort of. It tastes vaguely tomato-ish. But it’s been processed, engineered, replicated so many times that it no longer refers back to the original fruit. It refers back to itself, to the idea of “tomato” as a stable, reproducible fast-food ingredient. It’s a copy of a copy, and at some point, we stop remembering what the real thing even was.

That’s the world Baudrillard saw creeping in, and once you start noticing it, you can’t unsee it.

Ever since I discovered this concept, I’ve made a habit of constantly checking in with myself about what I really think or how I’m actually feeling. Do I truly like this thing, or do I just think I’m supposed to? Is the Mona Lisa really beautiful—to me?

So.

Shiny Pokémon.

Shiny Pokémon were introduced in Pokémon Gold and Silver, a quiet bit of magic buried in the sequels to the original Pokémon games. These were Pokémon that, through sheer chance, didn’t look the way they were supposed to. A Pikachu, but orange. A Psyduck, but blue. A Charizard, jet black instead of the expected bright orange, like it had emerged from some kind of parallel universe, a cooler, rarer version of itself.

In Gold and Silver, the game gave you one guaranteed glimpse of this phenomenon—a red Gyarados thrashing in the Lake of Rage. A scripted encounter, yes, but also a whispered tutorial. Beyond that, though, the odds of randomly stumbling upon a shiny were a staggering 1 in 8,192. A fraction of a fraction of a percent. Most players could spend their entire childhoods, generations of Pokémon games stacked behind them, and never see one in the wild.

Back then, a shiny encounter was something unfiltered, unspoiled. Unless you had a strategy guide—or a friend who swore they saw a blue Snubbul once, you had no real idea what any given shiny looked like. There were no mass uploads, no endless reels of streamers gasping in exaggerated delight. If you were lucky enough to encounter one, you had to process the moment on your own. The flicker of surprise, the second-guessing—Is my Game Boy glitching? Is this real?—followed by the realization that, yes, you had found something rare, something maybe no one else you knew had seen.

That’s all gone now. That experience is gone.

Today, we don’t just see shiny Pokémon; we are inundated with them. They are streamed, cataloged, and ranked in tier lists. People film their reactions as they appear—over-the-top gasps, shaking hands, victory screams—as if the experience itself demands a certain script. By the time a player actually finds their own shiny, they are no longer encountering a rare event. They are stepping into a moment they have already seen played out a hundred times before. They are fulfilling an expectation.

The Pokémon Company itself tells players about shiny Pokémon and how they can easily add them to their collections. No one is pretending they are what they once were—except for the players.

This is the hyperreal at work. Baudrillard warned that, in a world oversaturated with images and symbols, we don’t experience reality anymore—we experience its simulation. A shiny Pokémon, once a mysterious anomaly, is now a performed event. The moment of discovery has been pre-constructed by years of exposure to clips, screenshots, and exaggerated reactions. Even your own excitement—your own personal, unrepeatable joy—has already been shaped for you. You know how you’re supposed to feel. You’ve seen it.

At this point, the shiny Pokémon itself barely exists as a rare digital creature. It exists as a symbol. A copy of a copy. It no longer means what it once did—proof that you stumbled upon something wild and unexplainable. Now, it’s something to be obtained, collected, shown off. The thrill isn’t in the creature itself, but in beating the odds, the way a slot machine jackpot isn’t about the specific number combination but about the flashing lights, the rush of serotonin, the win. The meaning has shifted, violently, from something stumbled upon to something pursued, a commodity that exists only to be consumed and displayed. Exploration and discovery has been replaced by brutal calculus.

You know, the only reason I even remember Baudrillard—his talk of simulacra, the hyperreal, the slow erosion of the real beneath layers of copies—is because of the sheer, electric thrill of discovery. Stories have power. The moment when an idea clicks into place, when it reshapes the way you see the world, that’s the kind of thing that sticks with you. Reading Baudrillard wasn’t just reading; it was stepping into his way of seeing, a shift in perspective that, once made, couldn’t be unmade.

I think shiny Pokémon used to offer something like that—a small, unexpected moment of revelation. A brush with the improbable. A thing that made you stop, blink, question what you thought you knew about the world inside your game. But that moment of comprehension, that flicker of true surprise, is gone. Shiny Pokémon don’t change how we see the world anymore. They don’t make us pause. They don’t mean anything beyond the act of obtaining them.

The discovery is gone, and all we’re left with is the performance of it.

Thanks for reading all that.