Pokemon

Where it comes from, and why it sucks now.

Pokemon is probably the last big media franchise I haven’t posted about that holds a special place in my heart. I have liked Pokemon since I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, when I was first introduced to it through the trading card game at a friends house. I watched the anime every week, I played every main-series video game and a good amount of the spin-offs, and I read the Pokemon Adventures manga. I watched all sorts of Pokemon content on YouTube, from trivia to fan-theories to lets-plays. I would regularly go to the local library to rent Pokemon movies. I still like Pokemon , and usually buy the mainline games when they come out, but I can no longer be bothered to memorize every new Pokemon. I often find myself having to look up the typing of Pokemon that I would have known most details about off the top of my head when I was in elementary school. I think Generation 6 was the last generation that was truly planted into my head, probably because these were the last Pokemon games that I continued to play for a prolonged period of time after beating them. I can’t name most of the Pokemon from the succeeding generations, even though I will say that I think Generation 7 was objectively rather well-made.

Much of it is just that, simply put, I’m a grown man now. Pokemon suffers from the same problem as a lot of games meant for children — the fans get older, the characters don’t. They were going in the direction of making older characters for a while, if I remember correctly the protagonists for X and Y were in their mid-teens. After Kalos, they went in the complete opposite direction, and pretty much every game since Sun and Moon has depicted the player as very young. Funny thing is, I didn’t even like playing as a 10 year old when I myself was 10 years old. When you’re a kid, all you want to do is be an adult, or at least a teenager. When you’re an adult, you don’t necessarily want to be a kid again, but this isn’t the same as wanting to be an adult. Adults want to be lobsters, or alligators, animals that continue to grow their entire lives. A human being dies because they slowly decay until they break down. A lobster dies because it gets more and more magnificent until its greatness is simply too much to bear, and the shell it has created is so powerful that it cannot be shed. Lobsters die at their greatest state, human beings die at their worst state. RPGs like Pokemon offer a look into a world where development is linear and time is not a decadent force but a productive force, and for an adult this is immersion-breaking. Like in other popular RPGs (e.g. the Elder Scrolls) It is sort of implied in Pokemon that the route you take as a player is extremely compressed, both geographically and temporally, for obvious pragmatic reasons related to storage and pacing. The easiest NPCs are children, presumably younger than the player, such as lasses and schoolboys. The “ace trainers” you start to happen upon later in the game appears to be a bit older, maybe in their mid to late teens. Champions and evil-team bosses are usually in their mid-20s or older. An actual journey to become Pokemon Master presumably takes around 15-20 years, which is in the ballpark of clerical, associative, and military succession times in the pre-sort world.

And yes, I say pre-sort world, because Pokemon takes place in a sort of future-past. There is extremely advanced, basically magical technology all over the place, but life is mostly oriented towards the outside world and nature. You spend most of your journey travelling through uninhabited wilderness, fending off “trainers” who force you to battle their Pokemon. If they win, they get to shake you down. NPCs in Pokemon are literal brigands. You don’t have a car, and it wouldn’t matter if you did because there aren’t really any roads. You just travel on beaten paths, which often get interrupted by foliage full of dangerous wild monsters. The people still live in fear of nature spirits, and some villages don’t appear to live in the “technological world” at all, but reflect something more nostalgic and primitive. What must be understood about Pokemon, is that it is an ode to nature. Satoshi Tajiri, when creating Pokemon, based it off of his own childhood collecting bugs in the wilderness. He lamented the urbanization of Japan, that made his childhood impossible for millions of Japanese youths by severing their connection to the forest. Pokemon was meant to offer a vision of nature to boys surrounded by the technical.

The Pokemon themselves are not animals per se, even though they can take the shape of animals. Like I said in my post about Djinnbrain, wild animals and ambivalent invisible spirits were often equated in the Traditional world. Demons, gods, and enlightened men could appear in the form of animals, but they could also manifest as storms or rays of the sun or the ocean waves. Pokemon are not “pocket animals”, they are “pocket monsters”. Early on in the series, it wasn’t even very clear if Pokemon took the place of animals, and you occasionally see references to real-world animals that are not Pokemon in later installments. A more direct inspiration for Pokemon was probably the old Japanese catalogues of Yokai, or strange spirits that inhabited objects and sometimes creatures, with the Legendary Pokemon obviously being something more on the level of the Kami.

Yokai

Over time, though, Pokemon stopped being represented as powerful forces to be tamed, and were instead “friends” or “characters”. More and more anthropomorphic Pokemon were created in each passing generation, as well as more “cute” Pokemon. The soft edges of the series were rounded out, as well. Your rival slowly ceased to be someone you were supposed to hate, instead they were obsequious and saccharine. Their dialogue comes off as if they think you’re going to whip them if they say anything mean or slight you in any way. Even the evil teams became completely unserious. For the last two (arguably, three) generations, the evil team has basically just been delinquents, while in the preceding games they had developed from gangsters (like, Yakuza and Mafia, not street gangs) to megalomaniacs who wanted to create a new world in their image.

And what has been the result of this bubble-wrapping? Nothing good for the youth, I assure you. How many furries were created by the proliferation of anthropomorphic animal Pokemon? The furry-ization of Pokemon can be seen very clearly in the progression of starter-evolutions throughout every generation.

In the first two generations, there are really no anthropomorphic starters. You begin to see some anthropomorphic elements during the “fire-fighting era” of Blaziken, Infernape, and Emboar, but it’s still pretty monstrous. From generations 6 through 9, however, almost every starter has been noticeably anthropomorphized, with some of them basically just being straight-up furries. Pokemon are now supposed to be relatable to the viewer, they are meant to imagine themselves as Pokemon, instead of imagining the world as Pokemon. This new Pokemon has been quite attractive to normgroid stacy foids, who now seem to make up a large chunk of Pokemon’s fanbase. I don’t know where they came from, as when I was a lad I knew absolutely no girls who played the ‘mon. But now, they’re everywhere. Pokemon is probably the only game they play aside from Animal Crossing or some bullshit, and they have a bunch of cute Pokemon plushies in their room. Pokemon makes the vast majority of their money off of merchandise, and I can see why. Bitches want you to buy them a Pikachu but won’t even take a peek-at-u! SAD…

This is the fault of those religious people who morally panicked over Pokemon for so many years. The “pagan” element of Pokemon that they demanded be expunged was replaced with something much more corrosive to the youth. Many such cases! These same idiotic morons probably would have blown farts out their ears reading the Legendarium. Speaking of which…

The one recent Pokemon game that I have thoroughly enjoyed was Legends: Arceus. Not only does it return to a world where Pokemon are dangerous monsters that must be tamed, but it returns to the focus on the religion of the Pokemon world. We are given clarification that Arceus really is essentially God, or at least a benevolent Demiurge, and that “catching” Arceus is actually just the true Arceus rewarding the player with a sort of contained projection of his power. This was obvious to everyone with a brain beforehand, but it didn’t stop a moral panic from arising over Arceus back in Generation 4. Your character is essentially a prophet of Arceus who comes to teach humanity about the ability to catch and tame Pokemon, and eventually defeat the herald of Giratina (Satan)… Very esoteric indeed. Another good thing about the game is that it returned to a Japanese aesthetic. It’s not just that Pokemon is fundamentally Japanese, but furthermore that Pokemon is not the Japan of today. It is the rustic Japan, or the Japanese wilderness, and the constant journey outside of safety into the realm of the ghosts and the kami. Taking Pokemon out of Japan is like taking Princess Mononoke out of Japan. I don’t hate Generation 5, but I have no clue why they decided to set a game in the one place on earth that might be most divorced from nature and its spirits — New York City. I get that the Japanese don’t really know what NYC is like, but… Why? The lore of Black and White isn’t even bad, but I have no clue why they decided to set it in NYC. Almost every Zoomer aside from me loves Unova and glazes it endlessly, and I’ll admit that both Black and White and their respective sequels are some of the best games in the franchise, but I think a lot of the over-glaze is just people wanting to stick it to Genwunners. My favorite game is probably either Emerald or ORAS. It was during Generation 3 that Sugimori had basically perfected his art-style before slowly descending into something generic and unremarkable. The music in Hoenn is also really good, and it has a lot of out-of-the-park designs despite having a reasonably sized roster. Where GSC was something of a sequel to Red and Blue, RSE was able to recapture the novelty of the original games in a better digital environment and set the tone for the rest of the series. Hoenn was also the first game where the creators were really able to give an aesthetic to the region, because of technical advancements. The overworld had a lot of character, and it stands out for its uniqueness even today. It was the “water region”, the Wind Waker of Pokemon, and only mentally retarded people at IGN believe this to be an error.

I could go on to talk about the dozen other problems with Pokemon after generation 5, but they’ve already been aired out a million times. The gist of it is basically that The Pokemon Company is loaded, but puts no effort into their games. They’re all extremely ugly and have bad graphics, and they’re obnoxiously easy nowadays too. I barely even finished Scarlet and Violet, and have completely forgotten everything about the region. I just remember it being fucking stupid. Why am I a schoolboy? Pokemon is about ditching school to go catch wild creatures and shit. The delinquents shouldn’t be the “evil team”, it should be the player himself! I’m sure that in Generation 10, the evil team will be Big Chocolate LLC and the player will catch new Pokemon by eating his vegetables or some shit. This is a complete subversion of the original goal of Pokemon, of course.

That’s all I really feel like saying about Pokemon right now. If I think of more stuff, I’ll just edit this article. I hope you all have a happy Chinese New Year, or some fucking thing… Umm, because Chinese New Year is actually based and redpilled or something. Because it is, like, worship of shangdi o algo… *farts*