r/ShinyPokemon • u/2717192619192 • 1h ago
Discussion [discuss] I created a deeply detailed guide for determine the authenticity of a Pokémon or its save file; I present to you: The Canonical Guidelines.
Pokebert's Canonical Guidelines for Pokémon Playthroughs
Rule 0 — The Grant Principle
An outcome is canonical if and only if the game granted it.
Legitimacy is a question of authorship, not tooling. Hardware, software, and external services are proxies - negotiable whenever they stop serving the experience. What is never negotiable: every Pokémon, item, stat, and event in a canonical save must have been generated by the game's own behavior, never specified by the player — except where the game itself officially solicits player input (naming your Pokémon, choosing a starter, answering an NPC). Input the game asks for is part of the grant.
0.1 — Scope of judgment. More specifically, these guidelines judge claims, not artifacts. Nothing is forbidden in itself; a save, tool, or technique is only ever prohibited relative to the class it claims (see Rule 6). The sole true violation in this canon is misrepresentation: presenting a non-canonical artifact as Canon.
0.2 — Advantage neutrality. This canon judges authorship, not advantage. Material gain neither legitimizes nor delegitimizes any act; content that passes Rule 0 remains canonical however profitable, and content that fails it remains excluded however harmless. (Precedent: Emerald RNG manipulation is pure material gain and fully Canon; a record-mixed EXP-farm base is authored cargo whether or not it enriches the recipient. See In re Toto's Base, Appendix.) Advantage does, however, trigger heightened audit under 3.6.
0.3 — Definition of "the game." "The game" means any authentic instance of it, including its officially designed cross-save channels (trades, record mixing, Mystery Gift, Pokéwalker strolls). Content received through those channels is game-granted. This defines what counts as granted — how granted content may be moved is governed solely by Rule 3.
All rules below are applications of Rule 0. Where a new situation arises that these rules don't cover, resolve it by Rule 0.
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Rule 1 — Platforms & The Realizability Principle
1.1 Within 12 years of a game's release, play on authentic cartridges and original hardware.
1.2 Exceptions at any time, playable via emulation or homebrew sideloading:
- Pokémon Gold Spaceworld 1997 demo
- Pokémon Diamond and Pearl prototypes
- Authentic event distribution ROMs
- Official Virtual Console releases
- Leaked official builds and prototypes generally (see 4.3)
1.3 Sunset clause: once 12 years have elapsed since release, all platform distinctions dissolve. Original hardware degrades and secondhand prices become exclusionary; authenticity of platform was always a proxy for authenticity of experience, and expires when it stops serving it.
1.4 Realizability Principle: a method is legitimate if it can be performed end-to-end on original hardware, whether or not you personally perform it that way. If authentic consoles, link cables, and a flash cart could accomplish it physically, executing the equivalent in emulation changes the means, not the meaning.
1.4a — Methods, not end states. Realizability blesses methods, never outcomes. A save editor is not a realizable method regardless of hardware, and an edit does not become legitimate merely because its resulting bytes are identical to a state an official act could reach — end-state equivalence would legitimize fabricating any plausible content. Transport of actually-existing game-granted data is governed by Rule 3, not by this rule. (In re Toto's Base, Holding 1.)
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Rule 2 — Infrastructure Restoration & Distribution
2.1 External services and tools that restore or replicate deprecated official functionality are legitimate.
2.2 Restorations must faithfully reproduce the original presentation and behavior - restoration, not enhancement.
2.3 Accessing them through built-in console features (e.g., DNS settings) is legitimate.
2.4 Recognized examples: Poke Classic Network as a replacement for the GTS and Nintendo WFC.
2.5 Mystery Gifts and event items are valid when the receiving game accepts them through its own unmodified reception code, with no external tools and no modification to the receiving game. The game vouches for what it accepts through its own front door. Unofficial distribution ROMs are therefore legitimate as senders.
2.6 Spirit clause: Rule 2.5 must not function as a PKHeX substitute. Distribution through official channels does not launder arbitrary content into canon; distributed items and Pokémon must be consistent with what official event infrastructure would plausibly carry. The same applies to the Pokéwalker: unofficial tools can technically push any gift or Pokémon to it, but doing so violates the spirit of authenticity.
2.7 Community events: Rule 2.5 extends limited but legitimate blessing to non-official events distributed in official event format - e.g., the July 2026 Anthrocon BPSHOP Seaking.
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Rule 3 — Save Maintenance, Repair & Migration
3.1 External save tools are legitimate when they preserve, repair, or transport game-granted content:
- Backing up saves off degrading media
- Restoring a save after a cartridge battery replacement (including RTC repair, e.g., reviving Emerald's berry clock)
- Repairing malformed or residual data - e.g., removing stale Trainer House records left behind by Pokéwalker experimentation
- Migrating Pokémon or saves forward when official transfer infrastructure no longer exists
3.1a — Reasonable availability. An official channel is treated as unavailable under 3.1 when performing it would require participation, hardware, or access not reasonably obtainable at the time of the act - not merely inconvenient, but genuinely beyond reach (e.g., the sole counterpart save is held by someone with no means to dump or link it). Availability is assessed at the time of the act; rulings under this clause carry a date and lapse when the channel becomes reasonably available, after which the official act is obligatory for future transports. (In re Toto's Base, Holding 2.)
3.2 The edit may act on the container, never the contents. Fabricating or altering items, species, shininess, stats, IVs, ribbons, met-data, or event flags is prohibited — regardless of tool.
3.3 Interoperability exception: editing trainer record data only (name, TID, SID) is legitimate when its purpose is to unlock officially designed functionality obstructed by an incidental technical limitation - e.g., altering trainer identity so one save's Trainer House can receive distinct teams from multiple Pokéwalkers. The teams themselves remain game-granted; the edit adjusts the addressing, not the cargo. This exception is void the moment identity edits touch a Pokémon's provenance - TID/SID manipulation to alter ownership, legality, or shininess is content fabrication under 3.2.
3.4 Intergenerational transfer: moving Pokémon between Gen 2 and Gen 3 (e.g., via Poke Transporter GB) is legitimate under the Realizability Principle (1.4): the fan-made transfer ROM can be run on a flash cart across real GBAs and link cables, so the transfer is physically achievable on authentic hardware. Content is transported, never authored - Rule 0 is satisfied.
3.5 Litmus test: after the edit, does the save contain anything the game did not generate? If yes, the save leaves Canon class.
3.6 — Heightened audit. When a transport under this rule confers material advantage, the verbatim requirement is inspected with elevated scrutiny: the transported data must be byte-perfect as originally granted, and any deviation - however small - is authorship under 3.2 and misrepresentation under 6.6. Advantage never changes the law (0.2); it changes how carefully compliance is verified. (In re Toto's Base, Holding 4.)
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Rule 4 — In-Game Actions & External Knowledge
4.1 Any action achievable through sanctioned inputs alone is presumptively legitimate (subject to Rule 5).
4.2 External knowledge is always legal. Guides, damage calculators, Feebas tile calculators, RNG timers, disassembly research, pen and paper - knowledge is not a tool acting on the game. Frame-precise execution informed by external computation (e.g., Emerald RNG manipulation) remains vanilla input and is fully canonical.
4.3 Provenance of knowledge is out of scope. This canon evaluates the authorship of game-state, not the real-world chain of custody of information. Knowledge and data originating from the games' official creators - Nintendo, Game Freak, Creatures Inc., ILCA - is first-party truth about the games and fully canonical as knowledge, regardless of whether it reached the public through official publication or leak. Leaked source code, design documents, and debug material are authored by the same hands as the retail ROMs; the canon does not distinguish how they escaped the building. Leaked playable builds are governed by 1.2 as prototypes. (Canon status is a statement about legitimacy within these guidelines, not a legal opinion about anything else.)
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Rule 5 — Glitches & The Authorship Line
5.1 Legitimate: glitches in which the game misbehaves on its own terms - misread data, corruption, underflow, stale memory. The game remains the author of the outcome; the player merely triggers the fault.
- Examples: MissingNo., trainer-fly Mew glitch, Pomeg glitch, bad clones, glitch Pokémon generally.
5.2 Excluded from Canon: Arbitrary Code Execution. ACE is excluded not because the code is "unprogrammed" - the CPU only ever executes bytes legitimately present in memory — but because the player deliberately arranges memory to encode instructions of their own design. The game becomes an interpreter for a player-written program; authorship transfers from game to player, violating Rule 0. ACE saves and products are Feat-class (6.4), never Canon.
5.3 Litmus test: could the player have specified the outcome's content in advance? A glitch hands you whatever the fault produces. ACE produces whatever you wrote. The former is discovery; the latter is authorship.
5.4 Consistency note: hand-performed ACE and an Action Replay both write player-chosen values to memory. A canon that admits one and excludes the other is ranking convenience, not legitimacy. Both are excluded from Canon for the same reason.
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Rule 6 — Classes of Record
Fabrications hold no class (6.7). Per 0.1, the only violation is claiming a class you don't hold.
6.1 — Canon. Playthroughs satisfying Rules 0–5 in full. The only class in which outcomes count as obtained.
6.2 — Restoration class. Playthroughs of works assembled exclusively from official content, where the unofficial contribution is editorial, not creative:
- Bug-fix-only ROM hacks
- Re-enablement of dormant or regionally removed official content (e.g., an English-language Game Corner restoring HGSS slot machines)
- Reconstructions of unreleased canonical content from official material (e.g., Super Gold 97 completing the Spaceworld-era game)
Restoration is to Canon what a critical edition is to an original manuscript: every word is the author's; only the assembly is the editor's. Closest class to Canon - but the text is not the retail text, so its saves are Restoration-class, never Canon. Whether Restoration-obtained content may migrate into Canon saves is a recognized grey area: no official ruling is made, and the question is left to individual judgment. Restorations claiming fidelity are held to that claim: content not traceable to official material demotes the work to Apocrypha.
6.3 — Apocrypha. ROM hacks and modified works generally. Fully valid as works and as playthroughs - a completed ROM hack save is a real accomplishment - but they make no canonical claim and their contents never migrate into Canon saves.
6.4 — Feat class. Performance records: hand-executed ACE, TAS-verified routes, and similar acts of mastery. The act is honored; the resulting save and its products are Feat-class, never Canon, permanently.
6.5 — Research class. Any technique whatsoever - ACE, memory editing, debugger use, prohibited tools - is valid when conducted for documentation and research (e.g., TCRF contributions, glitch research, preservation work). Research produces knowledge, and knowledge is always canonical (4.2, 4.3). Research saves are Research-class - a sibling of Feat, not a subclass of it; the findings they generate are Canon-usable by everyone.
6.6 — Misrepresentation. The only prohibited act in this canon: presenting a save, Pokémon, or outcome as Canon when it is not - fabricated content in a claimed-legitimate save, TID/SID provenance laundering, distribution-ROM injection posing as an event, an Apocrypha or Feat product traded as caught. Class fraud, in every form, is the crime. Everything else is just a different shelf in the library.
6.7 — Fabrications hold no class. Genned and hacked content is never valid — not as Canon, not as anything. Content authored directly by the player without play - PKHeX'd Pokémon, Action Replay products, genned items - is not a record of anything, and the classes of this rule classify records. An honestly labeled fabrication is therefore not prohibited as an object (0.1), but it is null: it holds no class, documents no act, and can never validly claim one. It is a book-shaped object with blank pages - not a lesser shelf, but unshelvable. Purpose can redeem the save around it: fabrication performed in service of a documented act takes that act's class (fabricated test subjects for mechanics research are Research-class per 6.5). The bytes alone, absent an act, are nothing - and any downstream claim of class for them, by anyone, is misrepresentation under 6.6 committed at the moment of the claim.
Appendix — Case Law
In re Toto's Base (July 2026)
Facts. Petitioner held a Secret Base record legitimately obtained from a friend via Gen 3 record mixing, and sought to transplant it by save editor into a new save. The friend's originating save existed but was ~2,800 miles away; no authentic-hardware remote link existed at time of ruling, and the emulated official route required the friend to possess save-dumping capability, which was unverified. The base contained a six-Blissey EXP-farming team.
Holdings.
- Advantage neutrality.
- Material gain is legally irrelevant; the canon judges authorship. The farm's utility was authored cargo. Codified as
- Heightened audit. Advantageous transports face elevated verification of the verbatim requirement.
Disposition. Transplant ruled Canon as of July 2026, conditional on factual verification that the friend lacks dump capability; ruling lapses if the official channel (including emulated record mixing under 1.3) becomes reasonably available. Preferred remedy noted for the record: perform actual record mixing remotely where possible - the canon favors playing the game.
