If there was a contest for the Pokémon whose name gets mentioned the most times without even appearing in the story, I think Arceus would be the clear winner. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this is one of the most mentioned Pokémon across all the fanfic on Wattpad. This is a Pokémon that occupies a very special place in canon and an absolutely vital place in world building for your fanfic. Every writer has to make the choice of whether or not to include Arceus, and, in a canon universe in which a Pokémon is said to be the creator of everything, religious and non-religious writers alike have to decide how to depict or ignore religion itself in that universe. We're tackling some big questions here, and the decisions you make could have a major impact on your story.

A Brief Review of the Canon

Even in Pokédex entries, Arceus is referred to as a figure of myth and legend.

Diamond: "It is described in mythology as the Pokémon that shaped the universe with its 1,000 arms."

Pearl: "It is told in mythology that this Pokémon was born before the universe even existed."

Platinum: "It is said to have emerged from an egg in a place where there was nothing, then shaped the world."

Other games repeat the same information. Besides that, the Pokédex tells us the height and weight of Arceus (10 and a half feet and 705.5 pounds/3.2 meters and 320 kg). The video games also tell us that Arceus is genderless, has the ability to change type by holding an item called a Type Plate, and has the nickname of "the Alpha Pokémon". It also has a specialized attack that only it can use, which is called "Judgment".

Additional information is found by reading a book in the Canalave library: "In the beginning, there was only a churning turmoil of chaos. At the heart of chaos, where all things became one, appeared an Egg. Having tumbled from the vortex, the Egg gave rise to the Original One. From itself, two beings the Original One did make. Time started to spin. Space began to expand. From itself again, three living things the Original One did make. The two beings wished, and from them, matter came to be. The three living things wished, and from them, spirit came to be. The world created, the Original One took to unyielding sleep."

Some people also interpret Giratina as having been created at the same time as Dialga and Palkia (the "two beings" from the book). This is because of some dialogue delivered by Cynthia in Platinum: "When this world was made, Dialga and  Palkia appeared. Apparently, there was one more Pokémon that appeared at the same time. A Pokémon with as much power as Dialga and Palkia... But also one whose name was never to be spoken--! It's said to lurk in another world..."

In terms of the anime, Arceus appears in two movies, making its debut in Arceus and the Jewel of Life and having a brief appearance in Hoopa and the Clash of Ages. In Arceus and the Jewel ofLife, Arceus, along with Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina, are shown to be real Pokémon that the characters see and interact with in person. One of the characters is able to communicate with their hearts and shows a model of the universe with the earth at the center, the reverse world of Giratina around it, and three separate dimensions that are said to be the homes of Dialga, Palkia, and Arceus. Arceus's dimension is egg-shaped. 

This character tells the familiar story of Arceus creating everything but also says that it has been in a "long slumber" and that the fact that it is awakening is causing problems with space and time. If that wasn't enough, Arceus is said to have a grudge against humans that might cause it to destroy them entirely. Long ago, it apparently sacrificed itself in order to save the world from meteors. Having lost its plates in the collision (in the movie, it's able to carry all of them simultaneously), Arceus would have died if it wasn't saved by a human man named Damos who returned the plates to it. Arceus responded to this by using some of its plates to create an object called the Jewel of Life, which is able to turn a wasteland into a paradise. Damos was supposed to return the jewel after using it, but he ended up attacking Arceus instead. The Pokémon fell asleep in order to heal itself from these injuries. Some of these events are later changed due to time shenanigans, but the point is that this is a representation of the strength, capabilities, and character of Arceus under a specific set of circumstances.

Arceus colliding with the meteor that nearly kills it in Arceus and the Jewel of Life

My Perspective on the Canon

As usual, I think it's undeniable that the Pokémon canon contradicts itself here. The video games contradict themselves even within themselves because the sprite does not have 1,000 arms as stated in the Pokédex. The anime contradicts the video games in the depiction of the plates, which are not at all necessary in the games but which Arceus is said to die without in the anime-based movie.

Beyond that, the depiction of Arceus does not make sense to me in either the video games or the anime. Arceus never appears in the story of any game, but it has been given away through special events. I have one myself, and my character carries it around and battles with it just like a normal Pokémon. In the movie, Arceus is shown to have great power but would have been killed by a meteor even at its full power. Either way, this shows a puzzling amount of weakness for a being that's supposed to have created the entire universe out of nothing.

As fanfic writers, we are tasked with either interpreting canon in a way that makes sense to us or adjusting it in order to suit our needs. Based on the facts as they stand, I think this is a case in which it's all but necessary for a writer to expand upon the canon if zie wishes to depict Arceus or to speak about it in a meaningful way.

As I mentioned, it's also a perfectly valid option to choose not to include any mention of this Pokémon at all. This might be because it's just not important for the story, but it also might be a conscious choice. If you do want to include it, there are many different ways in which you could do so. One option would be attempting to explain how it is possible for everything that is said about Arceus in canon to be true. Another option would be picking and choosing the parts of canon that you want to depict. Still another would be throwing every bit of lore out the nearest window and making up your own.

Because of the very nature of this Pokémon and its position in the lore, the choice you make about depicting Arceus will also be a choice about your depiction of religion itself. And that's a topic that I think we all realize to be potentially quite sensitive. I'm willing to bet that the people reading this article have a wide variety of views on the topic of religion and also different desires for how they want to write about it.

The rest of this article is going to be split into two pieces. One is for people who want to construct or build upon a fictional religious system in a way that's not offensive to readers who happen to be religious. The other is for fanfic writers who want to write in a way that either pays respect to or upholds a real world religious system. You're free to read one, the other, both, or neither. If you're the type of person who wants to write about religion in a way that's purposely combative to religious readers, well, I can't stop you, but I'm not the person you should be looking to for advice.

The "Foreign Building" from Diamond, Pearl and Platinum, which seems to be based on a church

Building a Fictional Religious System

If you want to build a completely fictional religious system, you have nearly endless possibilities. The important things to remember when doing so are, first, that all the lore should make sense; second, that the religious characters should act in a way that is in accordance with what they are meant to believe; and third, that you construct it in a way that doesn't appear to be an attack against or an insult to a real world religion.

How can you know if religious people might be offended by the way you write about religion? Well, as always, it's a great idea to have a sensitivity reader, a person from the religion/culture/general group that you're concerned about who will read your book just for the purpose of checking for problems with your depiction of sensitive topics. The next thing you can do is to look at examples of books and media that have been considered to be offensive and books and media that clearly have not. Pokémon canon itself is a great example of a fictional religious system that generally does not offend people. As for controversial books or media, well, you've probably heard of a few and can easily find some news articles or blog posts or rants on social media that explain what people disliked about them.

Typically, I think that religious people get offended for one of a couple broad reasons, and both of them occur in situations where the fictional religion is interpreted as symbolizing a particular real world religion (or real world religion in general). One reason is if the fictional religion is symbolizing a real world religion but actually misrepresenting it in the process, especially if it's misrepresenting it in a way that makes it look bad. If you make a fictional religion called "Eslam" that looks 99% like Islam but depicts 100% of its believers as hate-filled terrorists, for example, you're going to offend Muslims. Another reason is when you symbolize a real world religion and then proceed to send a message that tears it down and/or suggests that another belief system is superior to it. If you create a fictional parallel to the Catholic church and criticize it for taking part in a fictional version of the Crusades, for example, you would have a legitimate grievance based upon historical facts (and many Catholics would even agree that this was a terrible moment in the history of their church), but if you then use your book to suggest that Catholics should convert to another religion or abandon their faith completely in favor of atheism, then you're still going to upset them. 

I would say there's absolutely no excuse for misrepresentation. The second case falls entirely within an author's rights, but I'm making the point by way of making sure that people only take that approach if it is actually what they mean to do. As you might remember, I did say one of the points of this particular article is to teach how to avoid accidentally offending religious readers. You might also remember that this section of it is about making fictional religions, not parallels to real world ones (which is the section below), so I'm actually assuming a mistake has been made in these situations right off the bat.

If you don't want your fictional religion to be interpreted as a symbol of a real world religion, then, how can you avoid it? You might think the answer is to make a fictional religion based on nothing from real world belief systems, but that is impossible to actually accomplish. In order for it to be a religion, it has to have a particular number of deities. Just from making the choice between zero, one, or multiple, you're already starting to make the audience think of the real world belief systems that have that number. Even beyond that, if you eliminate all possible aspects of your fictional religion that resemble real world religion, it's no longer going to be recognizable to your audience as a religion.

One approach, then, is to do exactly what Pokémon did, which is to combine aspects of many different belief systems along with elements that don't exist in any belief system (this will be explained more in the other section). Readers belonging to the religions that are represented in part will then recognize those elements and see the fictional religion as being a religion, but, at the same time, they will see things that definitely don't fit their religion and that also are clearly not intended to do so. They will interpret it as "a religion, but not my religion".

Another possibility is to take aspects of a real world belief system that no one believes in anymore. Many authors use Greek or Roman mythology, for example. You can do anything you want if you use something like that as a base because everybody living (as far as I'm aware) agrees that Greek and Roman myths are nothing but fictional stories, just like your fictional story.

Regardless of what you do, the fictional religious beliefs, stories, and customs all have to make coherent sense. Why? Well, for one thing your readers won't appreciate being confused, but for another, that is the nature of religion. Even if you yourself are not religious, you have to recognize the basic fact that religious people would not follow their religion if it did not make sense to them. You yourself might not have the knowledge required to personally understand a particular real world religion, but just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't understandable. On a similar note, you have to have your characters who follow that religion act in a way that makes sense for people who have that set of beliefs.

This is the point at which I'm going to say that research into one or more real world religions might be helpful if you don't have the necessary background. Understanding how religion works in general is important for being able to build and depict a fictional religion. If you want your fictional religion to have a holy book, for example, it might help to read up about the Bible, the Quran, the Talmud, the Sutras, the Vedas, etc. just to see how sacred texts are treated in general. If you want your characters to pray to or worship a deity, you might research how people of different religions do these things. You certainly don't have to copy any of them, but it is important to understand the general principles in order to create something believable and recognizable as a religion.

So, there are endless possibilities, but you want an example of something you might do? You probably want to take at least a bit from canon. Maybe you want to have Arceus and all the other legendaries to be like deities. Maybe you decide that there are lesser ones and greater ones and Arceus is the leader of them all, kind of like Jupiter/Zeus. Maybe you decide that the stories about them are based on competing speculations on the part of humans who have never seen them or are stories so old that they got changed and misremembered over time, which explains the apparent contradictions. You come up with the parts of canon that are going to be "the truth", add in a bit more to fill out the parts of lore that are important to your story, decide what humans know about the legendaries and how they act towards each other, and boom, you have a working setup.

Another possibility? Maybe Arceus and the other legendaries are really just extremely rare and powerful Pokémon; they're not actually all they're cracked up to be. Maybe the people used to believe that Arceus created everything until they learned more about Arceus as a Pokémon and now they have a new religious system. That new system can be anything you want.

From Season 1 Episode 20: The Ghost of Maiden's Peak - Misty Trying to Ward off a Gastly with a Cross

Respecting or Upholding a Particular Real World Religion in the Context of a Pokémon Fanfic

This section is all about exploring the options that exist for depicting or referencing real world religions within a Pokémon fanfic. The first question is whether canon already has references to real world religion such that you can simply use it as if it is a fictional version of the real religion with no further explanation. The answer, in my opinion, is a big no.

"But I thought Arceus basically was the Christian God in the form of a Pokémon!" some of you might be saying right now. On the other hand, if there are any Buddhists here, you might be saying, "But wait, isn't Arceus basically just referencing Avalokiteśvara?" And right there you see the problem. 

If you were paying attention during my review of what canon has to say about Arceus, even if you forgot all the contradictions I pointed out, you should have noticed some details that clearly weren't inspired by the same religion as other details. In reality, the design of and lore surrounding Arceus is pulled from many different real world religious inspirations, and that means the total of it all does not point to any one religion.

Christians and Jews believe in a God who created the universe, just like Arceus is said to have done. He existed before time began, which seems to line up with the Pokédex entry from Pearl, and the Biblical book of Genesis describes the world as being "a void" prior to creation, which has some similarity to the entry from Platinum.

But what about those 1,000 arms from the Diamond entry? Well that's where you see a reference to Avalokiteśvara, who, in a particular Buddhist story, was given 1,000 arms with which to help suffering people. Avalokiteśvara also has many different forms, which may be similar to the fact that Arceus in the video games has a different form for each type. Additionally, the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra states that the sun, the moon, the winds, the earth, the sky, Shiva, Brahma, Narayana, and Sarasvati were born from parts of Avalokiteśvara, which is similar to the fact that the Canalave Library book hints at Dialga, Palkia, Mesprit, Uxie, and Azelf having been created "from" Arceus. It didn't say "by", it said "from". (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalokite%C5%9Bvara)

There are also similarities to Taoism, which says that creation started with a dormant mass in the shape of an egg that hatched, releasing a giant and a balance of Yin and Yang. The giant separated Yin and Yang, which created the earth and the sky. When the giant died, the parts of his body became the wind, thunder, the sun, the moon, the mountains, the rivers, the fertile land, the stars, the forests, the minerals, the diamonds, and the rain. Here again we see references to an egg, to a being who creates the world, and to that one being creating two of something. (Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangu)

There's also a reference to the creation myths of a great number of cultures just in the references of Arceus having hatched from an egg and the fact that its home dimension also references an egg. A large number of cultures have stories about the source of the universe being shaped like an egg or about an egg shape being involved in creation in some significant way, including Vedic mythology, Zoroastrianism mythology, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, Phoenician mythology, Norse mythology, Finnish mythology, Polynesian mythology, and Dogon mythology. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_egg)

The Orphic Egg from Greek Mythology

There may even be other references that I haven't even mentioned and might not even be aware of. The point is that it seems as though the Pokémon company deliberately included references to many different religions and mythologies. And that means that you really can't use Arceus as a symbol for a deity or figure from one particular real world religion without changing a single thing from canon.

Since, let's face it, Christianity is the religion I'm most familiar with (and also the one I see used most commonly as a real world base in Pokémon fanfics), I'm going to be using that as an example from here on out.

So what's the problem with using Arceus as a fictional representation of the Christian God? Well, for starters, Christians definitely don't believe in anything comparable to Dialga and Palkia. Christians believe in one God who created everything, including time and space. Same problem with the lake trio, which created "spirit", according to canon. For another thing, the Canalave Library book says that Arceus's egg "appeared", which contradicts the Christian belief that God has always existed. And then there's the fact that Arceus went into "unyielding sleep" after all of this was done. The word "unyielding" suggests that it couldn't be easily broken, that it probably lasted quite a while, and that it maybe is even going on to this day. The book of Genesis says that God rested on the seventh day of creation, but Christians definitely don't believe that God is asleep at the wheel.

If we use the anime-based movie as canon, we see even more problems. We have the issue of long sleep again, but more importantly we see that Arceus is weak enough that it can be killed by a meteor or even by a coordinated attack from humans and Pokémon. We see that Arceus flies into a rage that causes it to want to wipe out all human life based on something that ends up being a trick. The Christian God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. Arceus in the movie is not any of those things.

And if you go with the canon from the games instead of the movie, you have to deal with the fact that Arceus is able to be captured, kept inside a Poké Ball, and ordered around by a human during battles. Personally, if I imagined Arceus to be a representation of the Christian God, I would be downright offended by that fact alone.

So am I trying to tell you that it's impossible to represent a real world religion like Christianity within the Pokémon world? Am I trying to say that it just doesn't fit? That this is a world in which the Christian God (or whatever religious figure/deity you choose) doesn't exist according to canon itself and that you have to either go with what that canon says or avoid depicting religion entirely? Absolutely not! What I am saying is that you have to break from or modify canon in order to make it happen.

Well, to be clear, I'm saying you have to do that unless you have an easily available alternative. For example, if your characters are living in or coming from the real world, you don't have to do a thing in order to have them belong to any real world religion you want. Alternately, if characters from the Pokémon world come into the real world in your fanfic, you can obviously show whatever real world religion you want to while they're there.

Another thing you could do is change canon in one specific but very easy way: just say that the Sinnoh creation myths are nothing but stories. Using video game canon, you could say that the Canalave Library book is comparable to the mythology of an ancient civilization that no one follows in the modern world. You could point out the fact that the Pokédex itself doesn't state any of this as being fact but rather says things like "It is said". You could say that these are old stories that no one believes anymore and that Arceus and the other legendaries are nothing more than very rare and very powerful Pokémon.

After that? Well, you have a couple different options. You could make up a fictional religion that mirrors your real world religion so closely that it's effectively shown to be basically the same but for the Pokémon world (change the name slightly, replace references to animals in religious stories with Pokémon instead, etc.). Or you could just say that your real world religion exists in the Pokémon world, too.

I feel like some of you might argue with that second option, but I ask you to look at the picture of Misty and the Gastly that I started this section with. Whether or not you think that Misty is just being superstitious (I tend to think she is) and whether or not you think this is a somewhat offensive use of Christian symbolism (definitely possible given that it's used for a joke), the fact is that a Christian symbol obviously exists there. Another supporting fact is that Brock, in a different episode, references the story of Noah's ark.

So, um, how does that work exactly? Well, that, my friend, is where you need to put your creativity to work. Maybe the Pokémon world is actually our world in the future, which would also explain the similar geography (Kanto matching up to the real world Kanto region of Japan, Kalos being based on France, Alola being based on Hawaii, etc.). Maybe the Pokémon world is actually an alien planet that exists in our universe and was colonized by humans who later forgot that it had happened but kept believing in a particular religion. Maybe the Pokémon world is an alternate universe that's just like ours except for things like Pokémon. Going back to Christianity as an example, it would be easy enough to say that God, being the all powerful, all knowing creator of everything, knows about and loves the Pokémon world just like He does ours. Maybe when Jesus came to our world he saved theirs, too. Maybe the Pokémon world had prophets who learned of it from God and spread the message. Or maybe you're not comfortable with any of that and need to find another way.

It doesn't really matter how you do it as long as the explanation you come up with respects the teachings of the particular religion you're interested in writing about. Another thing to remember, though, is that you need to somehow do this world building inside the text of your book if you expect your readers to pick up on and understand it. Whatever you do, you can't decide something inside your head and never put it on the page. You'll confuse your readers at best and maybe even upset them through misunderstandings at worst.

Additionally, if you're wanting to use a real world religion that you have never belonged to, I highly, highly encourage you to do all the research that you need in order to make sure your portrayal is accurate. Read books about it. Talk to people who belong to it. Find a sensitivity reader from that religion who is willing to read your book just for the purpose of checking for problems with your depiction of the religion. Religion is an extremely sensitive area, and the last thing you want to do is make a mistake about what people believe when you're trying to write an accurate portrayal of it.

Arceus speaks to Damos in Arceus and the Jewel of Life

Conclusion

There's a whole lot to consider when it comes to Arceus and the possibilities for depicting religion in Pokémon fanfic. I hope that I've made some basic points and given you a few ideas for how to handle these topics in your fanfic. I know there's a ton more that I also could have talked about, so feel free to ask questions if you have them. I would be more than happy to answer them or even go into further discussion on an aspect of this topic that I didn't cover in as much depth as you would have liked.

I wish you all luck with your religious world building!