>>283276177
People focus on the wrong things in the ULTRA MEGA leak, but broadly speaking it bears out the argument. The Typhlosion and Slaking memes are memes ignoring the obvious nature of the stories as world building myth and how, you know, they did not ever let you know they existed until someone stole them.

But there's tons of production presentations notes about some people, presumably in marketing or the general like "let's not make a a golliwog Pokemon" division being hyper aware of every little detail. Even down to insane shit like "is this design feature on a Pokemon that no one is ever going to see too similar to a villain from an American scifi show?" or "this Mermaid seal seems sort of similar to a Precure."

It is beyond a doubt that, at the very least, someone looked at this during production and it was their job to remind people that, yes, there are not only people who will see this as an intentionally romantic plot (even just as the breathless "ew, did you know people want to FUCK Gardevoir?"), but there are actually people who want to fuck Gardevoir. Even if they were working completely in some hermetically sealed room, it is certain at some point there was some meeting where it was someone's duty to bring this up. Pokemon is at that level of brand management and awareness.

So yeah, they did know. Whether they WANTED to know, whether they wanted it to be true, is a different story, but they knew.