I think the big breakpoint is probably more cultural - potentially sapient pokemon exist in the listed high intelligence types, but they don't think like humans, they think more like high intelligence, emotionally sophisticated pokemon with more pokemon oriented priorities.
Oh, for sure. But just to clarify, "sapient" doesn't necessarily mean "thinks like a human". In this context, it would mean "
can think
as well as a human". When it comes right down to it, no two humans think exactly the same! Ralts and Kadabra may have entirely different ways of looking at the world, but as long as they're able to function as well in it as a human, they would be just as sapient as a human.
I won't doubt that some pokemon species are smarter than others. But Echo, just this chapter, talked about how they
aren't sapient.
Dermonster's even said it out of character.
Dermonster mentioned on SB that Hoenn's ralts are more intelligent. I've pointed out that the inability to speak does not make one unintelligent, and
Dermonster just said that pokemon in Hyphen just aren't as intelligent as humans and directly stated that Roxanne was correct.
The background setting of Hyphen is that Pokemon cannot communicate with humanity at a higher level, and at best act with the intellectual capacity of astonishingly smart dogs, primates, and other such animals.
The way this differs from reality is that this barrier can, in fact, be overcome; either with overwhelming effort or truly bizzare and likely irreplicable circumstances... Can an Alakazam talk to their trainer? Sure, but they aren't using words unless you spend twenty straight years teaching them how while they're still an Abra.
To sum it up, Roxanne isn't in the wrong here. She was asked, in essence, 'Can a service dog open a shop or otherwise independently contribute to society?' and answered 'While service dogs are smart, and can effectively communicate in ways they have been trained to, they are fundamentally incapable of doing that.'
She just happened to say that to, comparatively, an anthropomorphic dog-woman in a trenchcoat that came from an entire secret society of dog-people. It's completely outside of her context or awareness.
...
In the end, Astra's struggle to achieve her goals, grappling with subterfuge and trying to learn and fit in with human society while hiding her true nature gets kind of...worthless, if it comes out that, actually, there are multiple publicly known examples of species and groups of human-level intelligence pokemon around the world.
So I'm not disagreeing, but there is one thing I'd point out: the necessary thing for the story isn't that "pokemon are never sentient", but "humans
believe pokemon are never sentient". Even in the canon of the games, pokemon are shrouded in mystery, with new species being discovered all the time, with even the most decorated researchers admitting that what they know is
dwarfed by what they
don't know.
Astra and Echo are both living evidence that one of Roxanne's presuppositions was wrong. The only question is,
how wrong? Are their two colonies the
only instances of sapient pokemon out there? Or are there more, possibly the pokemon equivalent of cryptids for the lack of publicly known and/or scientifically documented information on them? Basically, the scenario described in the
Virtuoso omake; they
exist, but as yet are unknown to humans, possibly because, like Astra's village, they are afraid of humans and actively hiding themselves.
Psychic pokemon probably have an easier time of it than most, but the implication that I have gotten is that pokemon can learn to speak because of how adaptive they are. Any pokemon can become sapient, but they need to learn sapience. Echo needed to learn sapience. But Astra did not need to learn sapience. She needed to be taught yes, but she naturally developed it.
I don't think that phrasing meshes very well with what I know about feral children, who demonstrate that humans need to learn that sort of thing too. But I can't speak with confidence about developmental psychology.
I think we might be getting a couple of wires crossed here? It's not that
feral children are
non-sapient, it's that they can
appear that way to humans who've had a normal, healthy upbringing. They
can learn to speak in adulthood, for example, but face all the same struggles (and a few extra) that any adult trying to learn a foreign language does; a brain that's still in the process of growing has an easier time reconfiguring itself for a new language than one that's finished. You could say that it's a nature vs nurture thing: all humans are sapient
by nature, but they might not be getting their money's worth from it if their upbringing fails to give them the knowledge and experience they need to actually use their brain to its full potential. Likewise, I don't think that just
any pokemon can do it; no matter how patient you are in your teaching, no matter how badly it
wants to, you're never going to teach a Magikarp to do calculus. It is just completely beyond the biological capabilities of their brains.
Abra clearly need more intellectual stimulation than Ralts do to trigger their evolution, so I think you could say that Abra "aren't sapient" (in the same way you could argue that a newborn human "isn't sapient"; and the same is likely true for newly-hatched Ralts). But I don't think the same can necessarily be said of Kadabra and other high-intelligence candidates without exploring other possibilities. For example, humans are clearly biased to believe that pokemon, no matter how intelligent, are still just animals unless they can "speak". However, Echo demonstrated that this bias might go both ways...
[Think some tried, but not work. Invaders never understand, only seem to receive great head pain. Unpleasant.] Echo grimaced.
Huh. Head pain? Why would they...oh, maybe it was Echo's way of speaking? Having so much psychic power woven through every word probably wasn't great for humans; that Pokemart Cashier and the Aqua Grunt that Astra had Pinged were proof enough. Why did she talk like that anyway? If the Ancestor taught the colony how to speak human like she had the village, their speech should have been the same.
"Maybe it's how you talk?" Astra suggested. "I've never encountered anything remotely similar. There's a lot of psychic...stuff interspersed in everything you say, and sometimes it seems like there aren't any words at all—not to mention what I think are names? They come across as a bundle of concepts and metaphors."
[Wait, not understand short-talk?] Echo asked, looking at Astra in disbelief. [Knew talk like Invader so try not use pure speech, but thought you just long-winded.]
"Long-winded!?" Astra exclaimed. "I am not—you know what, nevermind." she huffed, folding her arms. "I'm just saying, humans aren't Psychic. At all. And they don't seem to agree with large amounts of it being mentally thrust on them at once. They probably got a headache because you've been bundling every word you say with enough Psychic energy to overload them."
... I wouldn't be surprised at all if
both sides generally saw the other as "smart enough to be dangerous,
not smart enough to be reasoned with". Their natural methods of communication are so dissimilar that they've both made the (incorrect) assumption that the other just isn't capable at all. And that's with a Kadabra that
does have a decent grasp of (psychically-spoken) English; imagine how much higher that barrier would be for one who's never learned to speak it
at all; one who's
only other communicated with other Kadabra via high-density psychic information packets.
A Kadabra's ears might not even connect to their brains the same way a human's do; the language-processing center might have evolved under the assumption that
all meaningful communication will come through telepathy, and when they hear actual human speech they assume that it's random noise that
just so happens to accompany the faint brainwaves (carrying the same information) humans emit when they're talking! But then they try to respond across that same channel, accidentally do it too "loud", human has a one-way ticket to migraine-town, thinks the Kadabra's attacking, Kadabra thinks humans just can't understand speech... If this is a common pattern for psychic pokemon, then it would be no wonder that humans don't think there are any sapient pokemon in the world, and almost no pokemon thus far have even been aware of that misconception, let alone taken steps to rectify it!
Diplomacy's difficult even when you
aren't a hunter-gatherer trying to survive in the woods, occasionally stumbling across an unknown, violent species that feels pain when you talk and has a habit of capturing creatures like you in little balls and spiriting them away to arceus-knows-where... Better to just avoid them altogether.