text of tweet
TRAINERS: The Mythology of the Sinnoh Proletariat
Pokemon lore is so incoherent and weird. Like it’s merging this animist framework of pokemon being these nature spirits or the spirits of places and things, which eventually ascend into godhood as they age or otherwise acquire power, with them also being normal animals that are used as livestock or kept as pets. It has these themes of unity and cooperation with these spirits where cynically using and exploiting them is actively evil and prone to failure and disaster because pissing off the spirits is a very bad thing to do, but then the actual gameplay loop is just cynically hunting, harvesting, exploiting, and disposing of them en masse while everyone praises you for the “special connection” you must have to understand basic type matchups and stats and/or just fed a given spirit power by having it slaughter others en masse.
So lorewise it makes sense that pokemon, being powerful sapient spirit beings in their own right, are actively choosing symbiotic cooperation with humans who respect them (and we see that when there’s not cooperation, it’s the humans who lose and end up marginalized) and overall this arrangement also results in abusive humans getting policed by other pokemon and humans working in concert, it’s just tonally dissonant with the games and how callous and cruel they inherently are by mechanical design.
Ash was 10 years-old when his mother sent him off into the wilderness to gamble on dog fighting.
Telling kids to wander off outside for the day used to be the norm, but that was largely ended by car traffic deaths and televised moral panics.
To be fair the ‘dogs’ in question here are closer to being intelligent beings rather than just living xboxes like actual pets. You’re not supposed to just entertain yourself with it until it dies and then dispose of it for a new one like an actual pet, you’re supposed to treat it like a friend in a world akin to a fantasy setting where people team up to go dungeon delving. You get gold and equipment and the pokemon gets power and a way out of the ‘dog eat dog’ natural world. The pokemon that just get stuffed into pokeballs to never see the light of day except when they’re needed are just indentured servants though.
team plasma?
not in sinnoh though is it?
*but maybe some notesOh you know i didn’t think of the region i think you’re right
Team Plasma turning out to be secretly attempting to disarm the populace of Unova so they could take over really just reinforces that despite the friendship aspect, Pokémon are just guns
Cute guns, but just guns
“friendship”
love to kidnap and enslave and force my friends into cock fights, or shove them into a computer for all eternity.
Oh, and my very best friends get given to Professor Oak to press into candies
Trying to draw comparisons between the cartoonish morality of the deeply inconsistent Pokemon universe and the real world is as played out and boring as “Mario is actually the villain” theorycrafting.
“Mario is actually the villain” theorycrafting.
How dare you disparage my unpopular badposts about Mario
I mean, you can explore the logical conclusions of a fictional setting. This is how you make good subversive works like Madoka Magica. Unfortunately, this requires a competent creative team and a genre that people will actually engage in outside of its one dominant franchise.
I think that’s why I feel this way… there are strict controls on what a Pokemon plot is allowed to explore, and it’s never really gonna go that deep, so making assertions about the morality of the world come off to me as wasted effort.
Also I find it more fun to explore the metaphysics of the setting rather than the morality… like how Pokemon lay eggs when paired in a daycare, and yet in-game they repeatedly say “no one knows where the egg comes from.” Like… y’all never just put cameras on them when they’re confined to your backyard? Not that you’re going to get more conclusive deductions from pondering these sort of things, it’s just more funny to me, I guess.
i don’t even know how farming works in pokemon and if they have meat
Not a lot of Pokemon eating, for the most part. Slowpoke Tails are a poachers delicacy outside of Alola’s more ethical gathering the shed ones off the ground. Basculin are sometimes eaten, since they’re just bass with anger issues. Um, I think Tauros on occasion, though this has been largely sidestepped outside of S&V where beef and sometimes even mussels make an appearance.
I guess it’s a grey area with how kids will snap the bananas off of Tropius’s neck, but that’s presented as a mutualism thing. Tropius gets pets and scritchles and the kids get fruit. Plenty of Pokemon have milk and unfertilized eggs. Shuckle is used as a living winery, without necessarily harming it.
The comics can get more gritty and that’s where I’d defer to other opinions. Never made that jump into the manga
According to EP016, they considered eating Magikarp but the Pokémon is apparently only scales and bones so there’s nothing to eat
I did consider that episode, but that was sort of a desperation point like when people are forced to eat grass and rats. I think that was also early on when animals still largely existed in that universe, so stuff like perch and lobster would be eaten instead.
On that matter I remembered that people eat Crabrawler claws, but they break off regularly from their boxing habits before quickly regenerating.
It would be one thing if the morality was under the surface, but it’s quite overt. You capture and enslave sentient creatures and delude yourself they are your “friend”. These creatures are forced into manual labor, stored inside computers indefinitely or made into candies to be consumed by other pokemon for stats.
None of this is under the surface or hidden. Japan and America are fascist societies so they see no issue with these underlying problems, they easily handwaive them away. You can say it’s cliche or whatever to point this out, doesn’t change that it’s there and quite shocking and that tons of people consume this completely uncritically.
One of the games even puts it in your face:
For real if we’re going to create an answer to the zizians it should at least be based on MGS or possibly king of the hill
Pokémon aren’t real. They are holographic projections created by governments of eld in order to control the populace. Pokémon are maintained by a network of satellites which the current peoples of the world, so enamoured they are in exploring Pokémon, no longer have the technological aptitude to interact with. The ‘ancient structures’ with pokémon lore in them are ancient tourist traps which people now believe are their cultural heritage.
I feel like the last pokemon game I played had something like that idk 15-20 years ago. Black / white or maybe the one before those? Though of course they were the antagonists lol
Yeah I was gonna say Black/white too. That was like the entire storyline, and the antagonist actually made more sense than the protagonists.
I mean…unlike animals in the real world pokemon are almost people levels of intelligent; I don’t see pokemon organizing for rights in that world, or protesting; they’re certainly intelligent enough to do it if they wanted.
literally mewtwo
IIRC this was actually a plot for one of the Pokemon movies that later got canned
Mewtwo did nothing wrong.
The biggest problem with writing a pokemon game is that the most obvious social issue in the world is the widespread slavery and abuse of intelligent creatures, and how that is a fundamental part of the game. So canonically pokemon actually love to battle because it would be too fucked up to acknowledge what the player, and every other human, puts their pokemon through. Which means you kinda can’t tell a serious story that has any takes on society without attacking what Pokemon has been about for the past few decades.
This is why I think Scarlet and Violet had the best story. It’s about a bunch of kids having a fun adventure and not really being friends. There’s a boy with his sick dog, a shy uwu girl, and Goku. They get to have a quest where they find the boys robot parent. It’s a fun little character-driven story, and is completely carried by Arven being the emotional core, but for a kids game, I think it’s good.
Dobby LOVED being a house elf
Pokémon S/V was really good, I hadn’t played a game since B/W. I played S/V after the initial release, I heard there were a lot of bugs at first but I didn’t see any when I okayed, they but have updated it. I really enjoyed it. Arveb definitely was a high point. I played the OG games as a kid up to B/W.
Arceus legends was amazing also, Pokémon foes well when it changes up the formula.
It sounds like Salin never played past Gen 1.
