The context of the question is not “Does anime exist?”, but “Does anime portray reality?”. For a bit more background: the character asking the question was originally told that the anime films/episodes they were watching were documentaries on humans, and has now just been told that they were fiction. Said character…

That’s actually due to a quirk of Gen I that Gen II exploited. The “catch rate” of a given ‘mon was stored along with the other data for that ‘mon (for some reason, it’s never used in Gen I), and Gen II used the same slot for the held item. (For catch rates that map to unused/key items, they are changed on first…