Bulbasaur Evolutionary Line Fan Theories & Conspiracies

The Seed of Doubt: Fan Theories & Conspiracies About the Bulbasaur Evolutionary Line

The first entry in the Pokédex. The very first Pokémon. And yet, for all its familiarity, the Bulbasaur line remains one of the franchise’s most profound (though not the most popular) enigmas. Is it a reptile? An amphibian? A plant wearing an animal like a suit? Is its relationship with its bulb a symbiosis, a parasitism, or something far older and stranger than either? Generations of fans have stared into that unblinking red eye and asked: what are you, really? The theories that follow represent the most compelling attempts to answer that question—none confirmed, all unresolved, each casting the Seed Pokémon in a new and unsettling light.

---

The Foundational Conspiracy: The Bulb is Not a Plant—It’s a Passenger

The “Oddish Symbiosis” Theory

The most enduring and visceral theory concerning the Bulbasaur line posits that the creature we recognize as Bulbasaur is not a single organism at all. It is a host-parasite pair, and the “parasite” is an Oddish .

The theory reconstructs the Bulbasaur life cycle as follows: a female Venusair produces seeds within her flower. If a male Venusaur is present to pollinate it, the seed will germinate into a Bulbasaur. But if no male is available—or perhaps if the timing is off, the environment unsuitable, or the female’s biology simply defaults—the seed will instead germinate into an Oddish .

In this reading, the “Bulbasaur” is actually a fleshy, defenseless baby frog whose body has been hijacked by a rogue Oddish seedling. The Oddish, its feet actually roots, uses its Ingrain ability to fuse itself into the froglet’s skeleton and nervous system, siphoning nutrients far more efficiently than it ever could “sulking around at night” . The bulb is not a symbiotic partner; it is a colonist, and the frog is its colony.

The evidence, proponents argue, is visible in the female Venusaur’s design. She is consistently depicted with a small seedling visible within her flower—not a seed, not a bud, but a tiny, fully-formed plant waiting to be planted . This is not a reproductive organ. It is a spore, and it is looking for a host.

The Reproductive Hostage Crisis

This theory extends to explain the line’s notoriously slow reproduction rate. The plant, having achieved sentience, now holds its host’s reproductive system hostage. It will not permit the Venusaur to reproduce until it has been pollinated first . This is not symbiosis; this is coerced surrogacy. The Venusaur is a gestational vessel for a plant that has learned to farm animals.

A 2024 viral theory from a Japanese plant biology graduate student offers a more clinical but no less provocative framework. Observing that Venusaur’s sex ratio is seven males for every one female in the game data, the student proposed that the species exhibits androdioecy—a reproductive system in which males coexist with hermaphrodites capable of self-pollination . This is exceptionally rare in the natural world. Its presence in Venusaur suggests a species in evolutionary crisis, adapting to scarcity by any means necessary .

The conspiracy, then, is that Venusaur’s reproductive struggle is not a quirk of biology. It is a chronicle of desperation—a species that has spent millennia negotiating with the parasite on its back, and is slowly losing.

---

The Biological Conspiracy: The Frog Cannot Survive the Flower

The “Blood Poisoning” Hypothesis

A detailed fan analysis of Bulbasaur’s biology, framed as “SCIENCE!” but presented with unsettling rigor, arrives at a grim conclusion: the Bulbasaur line should not be able to exist .

The argument is physiological. Roots absorb whatever liquid they contact. The liquid they contact in a Bulbasaur’s body is blood. Plant roots submerged in vertebrate circulatory fluid will not simply float there; they will drink. And what they drink is approximately 50.3% water, 34% hemoglobin, 8.4% proteins, 3.5% lipids, and 0.8% salts .

The water and hemoglobin-iron are beneficial. The proteins and lipids are neutral. But the salt—3,340 milligrams per liter, entering the plant at a rate of half a liter every four hours—would kill a corpse flower within days . The Rafflesia would experience catastrophic osmotic dehydration, its cells shriveling as its environment becomes more saline than its internal chemistry can tolerate.

The frog, meanwhile, would bleed out. Its circulatory system, tapped by an organism that consumes blood at a rate exceeding the body’s capacity to produce it, would collapse. The plant would drain the animal dry before the animal could adapt.

The conclusion is unavoidable: a real Bulbasaur would die, probably before reaching Ivysaur .

That it does not die, that it thrives, that it evolves, suggests something the Pokédex does not record. The plant has adapted. It has learned to regulate its intake, to desalinate, to synthesize blood components it once merely consumed. The relationship is no longer parasitic; it is symbiotic fusion. The animal’s circulatory system is now partially the plant’s. The plant’s photosynthetic output is now partially the animal’s. They are not two organisms sharing one body. They are one organism that began as two, and the boundary between them is no longer legible.

The “Corpse Flower” Revelation

The flower on Venusaur’s back has been definitively identified by fans as a Rafflesia arnoldii—the largest individual flower on Earth, known colloquially as the “corpse flower” for its pungent aroma of decaying flesh . This is not a rose. This is not a lily. This is a parasitic, rootless, holoparasitic plant that, in nature, lives entirely within its host vine, emerging only to bloom and rot.

The implications are staggering. Rafflesia is not merely difficult to cultivate; it is obligately parasitic. It cannot survive without a host. The Venusaur’s flower, then, is not a decorative accessory. It is the reproductive organ of an organism that has no independent existence, that has merged with its host so completely that the host now carries its genes in every cell.

The “seed” on Bulbasaur’s back is not a seed. It is a juvenile Rafflesia, already embedded, already drinking, already growing its mycelial network through the froglet’s organs. By the time the flower blooms on Venusaur, the plant has been growing inside the animal for decades. The animal is, in a very real sense, the plant’s body now.

---

The Evolutionary Conspiracy: The Living Fossil’s Forgotten Herds

The Permian Ghost

Scientific analysis of the Bulbasaur line’s morphology has identified its closest non-plant relatives not among modern amphibians or reptiles, but among Dicynodonts, a group of herbivorous therapsids that went extinct approximately 200 million years ago . The exposed tusks, the stout body, the beaked snout—these are not frog features. They are the features of a Permian survivor, a lineage that has persisted through the Triassic, the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, and the Anthropocene with almost no morphological change .

Bulbasaur is a living fossil. Its ancestors walked the earth before the dinosaurs. Its contemporaries are fossils. It has outlived its predators, its competitors, its ecosystem. It survives now only because humans found it useful—first as a sacred companion, later as a captive-bred starter .

The Vanished Herds

The wild Bulbasaur line is, for all practical purposes, extinct. The Kanto swamps that once hosted their great migratory herds have been drained. The Bug-type flocks that followed them, feeding on their pollen and in turn pollinating their flowers, have dispersed. The ancient humans who “wandered behind the path of these Pokemon, far after everything had grown, following the path of growth and picking food to survive upon,” have long since settled into cities and forgotten the old ways .

Conservation efforts through the Starter Program have preserved the species in captivity, but a captive Venusaur is not a wild Venusaur. It does not migrate. It does not participate in the mass-evolution gatherings that once saw herds of Ivysaur scale half-constructed gym towers to reach the sunlight . It does not fulfill its ancient ecological role as a living god of propagation, its pollen fertilizing entire valleys, its presence a blessing on the land .

The conspiracy is not that Bulbasaur is rare. It is that Bulbasaur is already extinct in the wild, and what we keep in captivity is a memory of a species, preserved in jars of genetic amber.

The Vileplume Mimicry

A persistent fan theory once claimed that Venusaur and Vileplume were related—that their similar flowers and shared Grass/Poison typing indicated a common ancestor, or perhaps even that Vileplume was Venusaur’s failed evolutionary branch . This theory has been aggressively debunked by fans who point out the profound anatomical differences between the two lines: Vileplume has no trunk, no fronds, no capacity for Mega Evolution or Gigantamax, and its pollen is purely toxic rather than rejuvenating .

But the debunking itself raises a question: why would two unrelated species evolve to look so similar? The answer proposed by some theorists is mimicry—but in reverse. Vileplume, a common and adaptable species, may have evolved to resemble the sacred, powerful, and terrifying Venusaur in order to deter predators. It is not a relative. It is a copy, a forgery, a lesser creature wearing the face of a god .

---

The Anime Conspiracy: The Refusal to Evolve

The Trauma of Charizard

Ash Ketchum‘s Bulbasaur is famous for its absolute, unwavering refusal to evolve. The anime never explicitly states why, but fans have constructed a compelling psychological profile .

The catalyst, many believe, was Charmander’s evolution into Charmeleon and then Charizard. Ash‘s Charmander, once a loyal and affectionate companion, became arrogant, disobedient, and violent after evolving. It ignored Ash’s commands, attacked its own trainer, and slept through battles . Bulbasaur and Squirtle watched their friend transform into a stranger. They saw that evolution did not merely change the body; it changed the personality, the loyalties, the self .

Bulbasaur’s refusal to evolve is not stubbornness. It is trauma response. It fears not the form it would become, but the loss of the friend it would leave behind.

The Pikachu Precedent

Ash’s Pikachu, the most famous non-evolving Pokémon in history, provided additional reinforcement. Pikachu’s rejection of the Thunderstone was framed as a statement of self-acceptance: it did not need to become Raichu to be strong, to be loved, to be a champion. And Pikachu proved this thesis repeatedly, defeating legendary Pokémon, world champions, and gods .

Bulbasaur, watching Pikachu’s triumph, learned a dangerous lesson: evolution is optional. Power does not require transformation. Victory does not demand sacrifice. One can remain exactly as one is and still matter.

This is, perhaps, the most radical message the Bulbasaur line carries. It is a species defined by its intimate, irreversible bond with another organism. Its evolution is a process of deeper and deeper fusion, culminating in a creature that is no longer separable from the plant that has consumed it. And yet the individual can, through sheer force of will, refuse. It can remain Bulbasaur forever, frozen in the first stage of a transformation that would erase it.

The conspiracy is that Bulbasaur knows what Venusaur is. It has seen the flower bloom, smelled the corpse-scent, witnessed the slow, placid, plant-like existence of its fully evolved form. It knows that evolution is not growth; it is dissolution. And it chooses, again and again, to remain itself.

See also: Fan Theories in Pokémon World, What is Fan Theory and Conspiracy Theory in Games and Anime

---

The Ultimate Theory: The First Pokémon Was a Memorial

The grand, unifying conspiracy synthesizes every thread.

The Bulbasaur line is not merely ancient. It is primordial. Its ancestors witnessed the Permian extinction, the reign of the dinosaurs, the rise of mammals, the emergence of humanity. It has outlived every threat except one: us.

We drained its swamps. We hunted its herds. We scattered its pollinators. We reduced a species that once reshaped entire ecosystems to a captive breeding program, its genetic diversity bottlenecked, its wild instincts atrophied.

And then, in an act of either supreme arrogance or profound guilt, we made it the first entry in our encyclopedia of living things. We placed its image at the beginning of our catalog of the world’s wonders. We gave it to children as a companion, a protector, a friend.

The conspiracy is that we are trying to atone. The Starter Program is not conservation; it is reparation. Every Bulbasaur given to a ten-year-old trainer is an apology, a promise that this species will not be forgotten, that its name will be spoken, that its herds will one day return to the valleys it once called home.

The flower on its back is a corpse flower. The creature beneath it is a ghost from the Permian. Together, they form the oldest, saddest, most resilient life form in the Pokémon world.

And when a Bulbasaur refuses to evolve, it is not refusing power. It is refusing the final dissolution of the wild self into the cultivated garden. It is choosing to remain what it was, not what we have made it.

The first Pokémon. The most mourned. The last of its kind.

And still, impossibly, here.