The notes in Cinnebar Mansion say there were tons of failed expiriments to create a clone of mew specifically in the first location you find Dittos
The only other location where you find Dittos is where you find MewTwo who is the same color as Ditto
Ditto and Mew both use Transform, have the same weight and similar stats, and both have blue shinies
I could be misremembering but I faintly recall the Pokémon movie showing actual ditto-like goo turning into clones in the Team Rocket cloning vats
The best argument against this is:
Shigeru from GameFreak said he only added transform as its ability because Mew was a last minute easter egg at the time and it stuck
Ditto do appear in other regions but it’s debated if they’re canon or if they’re intended to be used for Pokémon breeding strats which are a popular game mechanic/feature
The way I thought it all shaked down (and what I thought was established fan canon long ago), was that the Cinnerbar Mansion experiments were an attempt to clone Mew.
Ditto was one of the first failures (and I bet the poor guys have it worse than no thoughts of their own, but rather their very thoughts are constantly trapped fighting shifting self-identity, if we want to go Grim Dark lol)
And they never got to perfect a Mew, because the next stage in the experiment precluded that.
That they achieved Mewtwo, after Ditto, and the scope of the project rapidly changed when the “benefactor” (sue me, there’s still kids picking up the games, I ain’t spoiling it, but we know who we’re talking about) bankrolling the project got the initial “power level readings”.
So they pumped Mewtwo, their perfect IV monstrosity, with both forced and artificial EVs, until what happened, happened, and Mewtwo had to go hang out in that cave to get some peace.
I guess theres still debate about it but:
The notes in Cinnebar Mansion say there were tons of failed expiriments to create a clone of mew specifically in the first location you find Dittos
The only other location where you find Dittos is where you find MewTwo who is the same color as Ditto
Ditto and Mew both use Transform, have the same weight and similar stats, and both have blue shinies
I could be misremembering but I faintly recall the Pokémon movie showing actual ditto-like goo turning into clones in the Team Rocket cloning vats
The best argument against this is:
Shigeru from GameFreak said he only added transform as its ability because Mew was a last minute easter egg at the time and it stuck
Ditto do appear in other regions but it’s debated if they’re canon or if they’re intended to be used for Pokémon breeding strats which are a popular game mechanic/feature
The way I thought it all shaked down (and what I thought was established fan canon long ago), was that the Cinnerbar Mansion experiments were an attempt to clone Mew.
Ditto was one of the first failures (and I bet the poor guys have it worse than no thoughts of their own, but rather their very thoughts are constantly trapped fighting shifting self-identity, if we want to go Grim Dark lol)
And they never got to perfect a Mew, because the next stage in the experiment precluded that.
That they achieved Mewtwo, after Ditto, and the scope of the project rapidly changed when the “benefactor” (sue me, there’s still kids picking up the games, I ain’t spoiling it, but we know who we’re talking about) bankrolling the project got the initial “power level readings”.
So they pumped Mewtwo, their perfect IV monstrosity, with both forced and artificial EVs, until what happened, happened, and Mewtwo had to go hang out in that cave to get some peace.
Meanwhile the Dittos suffer ;(