One thing I feel is missing from how many people reminisce about the early days of the Pokémon fandom is how the Pokémon Fandom and the wider Nintendo fandom related.
Pokémon is the only franchise represented in the original Super Smash Bros. that wasn't old enough to even have an SNES game, a few others had no NES games but only Pokémon had no SNES games.
The way Pokémon so quickly jumped to being arguably the most mainstream popular of all of them and certainly bigger than every franchise but Mario and Zelda did garner some degree of subtle resentment from the more long-time Nintendo fans. Not me though, I was a Nintendo loyalist for years already before I heard of Pokémon but once I discovered Pokémon I quickly thought of it as part of the family. But I noticed that for example early Sprite Comics predicated on being epic Nintendo crossover fics never included Pokémon. And when there were Pokémon references it sometimes felt kinda mocking.
Today Pokémon isn’t different from other Nintendo first party franchises because it’s seen as too new, Pokémon is older now then Mario and Donkey Kong were when the first Smash came out (in fact so is Smash itself) and some even younger franchises are firmly part of the Nintendo pantheon now. But Pokémon does feel a little different still in some hard to explain way.
Nintendo loves dropping Easter Eggs to their other first party franchises in various games, but Pokémon does feel a bit left out of that tradition, both in terms of being referenced and making references. Smash seems to be the only place Pokémon coexists with the other Nintendo franchises and it’s not first party only anymore.
It might be because Pokémon is by many thought of as a Multimedia franchise rather than a Video Game franchise first. The whole Pokémon saying only their own names trope is an Anime invention that proper Pokémon games rarely incorporate and when they do only really for Pikachu. Except Smash of all places where Jiggleypuff also still does this (I do appreciate how Rachel Lillis name is immortalized as part of the Smash Ultimate credits).
In which case it does go both ways. Comic Party is an Anime from OLM the same studio as the Pokémon Anime that I refer to as the Lucky Star of the early 00s, more specifically it is for OLM what Lucky Star is for KytoAnimation on a meta level. And yet Pokémon is the one OLM Anime left out of all that referencing even though it was by far their biggest franchise. Perhaps because Nintendo didn’t want their new Crown Jewel being so directly linked to Otaku Culture.
Pokémon is by money earned the largest IP franchise of all time, beating out even Star Wars and Batman. So it’s perhaps the one franchise Nintendo feels they don't need to cross promote.
On a Fandom level Pokémon’s long term ubiquity has made it now the opposite of what I observed in the early days. Pokémon references inevitably show up in fan content related to other Nintendo and other Anime franchises. But a Pokémon specific YouTube channel is not likely to bring up Metroid.
It’s a shame because I think there is a lot of fun you could have with fan theories based on connecting Pokémon to the rest of the Nintendo multiverse, like the parallelism I see between the Lake Guardians and the Golden Goddesses. Or how Kirby could be a Pokémon anatomically related to Clefairy and Jiggleypuff. Heck one could go beyond just Nintendo and speculate on a relationship between Deoxys and Jenova.
And if Link isn’t out of place in Mario Kart then Pikachu certainly wouldn’t be. If a Side Stepper can somehow drive a Go Kart so can a Krabby.
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