By Kathleen S. Kirk
My childhood was largely deprived of a phenomenon I understand to be pivotal to many ’90s kids. I’ll call this phenomenon the Little Yellow Thing. I grew up without its adorable, heart-melting cries or its, ahem, shocking personality.
What I am referring to is one of the more baby-nerd-friendly icons, Pikachu.
Yes, folks, I grew up with frighteningly little exposure to Pokemon. I never watched an incompetent, annoying ten-year-old with a voice like a pack-a-day smoker perform acts of socially-acceptable animal cruelty. To be fair, I retain an almost frightening recollection of the Digimon universe; as a kid, I had all three generations of Digivices, a plethora of trading cards, and a small army of action figures. I can still tell you a Garurumon would trounce a Patamon and where exactly File Island is.
But until recently, I remained completely unfamiliar and unaware of who or what exactly a Little Yellow Thing was or what it was for until I encountered one on Tumblr and promptly squealed over its cuteness. My Militantly Nerdy Boyfriend Alex about choked on his soda when he realized I wanted one as a pet anyway, even though it’s impossible and impractical.
He decided the best course of action would be to show me what they could do and see if I still wanted one as a pet, so he showed me all the scenes where the Little Yellow Thing shocked its owner repeatedly. But then he showed me a scene in the second episode of the first season where it’s revealed that all the electricity in an animal hospital comes from a bunch of happy Pikachus bouncing on a treadmill.
I was smitten.
For those of you who apparently lived under a rock like I did, a Pokemon is a monster crafted to imitate various naturally-found animals or naturally- and socially-developed constructs, such as fire. In the Pokemon universe, these monsters are captured, caged in balls much smaller than the monsters themselves, and then forced to fight each other, à la dog or cock fighting. Where, I ask you, is PETA? Here’s a situation where they’d actually be potentially functionally helpful, but where the hell are they? Standing on a streetcorner yelling about how “fur is murder”? (I can complain about this, especially because I myself don’t wear fur.)
Anyway, a Pikachu is small, yellow, plushy adorableness. It has a type classification, which determines the nature of its attacks. Pikachus are electrical, which means that they attack using electricity.
I would like to take a moment at this point to say how completely fucked up this world is. This world is supposed to be a natural construct. These things are supposed to be found naturally, with this supposedly somehow intrinsic desire to fight and live their lives in a small, dark ball. That’s literally what happens. They must be fought and won to be caught, but these battles are portrayed as more of an honor thing than an actual fight for their lives. And then, at least in the case of the show’s protagonist, these monsters are placed in the care and keeping of an obstinate ten-year-old boy with no adult supervision whose stubborn desire to win places these creatures in mortal harm.
Perhaps its just the Japanese way. I am reminded of a comic from the Scandinavia and the World collection where Japan is talking to Denmark about Denmark’s “son” Christiania, a small, self-declared autonomous neighborhood in Copenhagen of less than 1,000 people. In the comic, countries are referred to as people while hyperboling the countries’ stereotypical attributes. Japan is, in a way, parodying the Stereotypical Asian Father meme when he asks Denmark how frequently and in what capacity the young Christiania has saved the world, leading Denmark to panic over his son’s development.
However, the amount of stupid prevalent in this show makes it incredibly fun to watch an episode or two just to complain about the level of stupid. This is why it’s so easy to find Pokemon drinking games on the internet. But I’m still mildly confused as to how this made it into part of our culture. It essentially uses animal cruelty to promote “good values.”
At least in Digimon, they exploited the unnatural concept as far as it would go, rather than attempt to hide it. “Digimon” is short for “digital monsters,” as “Pokemon” was short for “pocket monsters.” It was explained early on that Digimon were essentially sophisticated AIs that were created and programmed inside a massive computer program, which, if I remember correctly, essentially existed on a partitioned piece of the internet and could interact with the real world via the internet.
It was a world you could visit, but being in that world was essentially like being on the Holodeck of a Starfleet vessel post-2350; you could interact with and even touch objects and creatures in the world, but at the end of the day they were just bits and bytes and lines of code.
Monsters leveling up and changing made more sense because the entire concept exploited the idea that these things were unnatural. They were artificially created, knew they were artificially created, and exploited the fact they were artificially created. There was no attempt to rationalize them with the real world, which made so much more sense to me, even now, than Pokemon ever could, except maybe (and this is a huge, Godzilla-sized maybe) that They Came From Outer Space, or some other such nonsense.
Why, you probably ask, am I comparing the merits of the two universes surrounding two children’s television shows? What do they have to do with geekdom? A lot, actually. If you surveyed ’90s nerds what their first geek incarnation (read: obsession) was, many will tell you either Pokemon, Digimon, or both.
These universes, especially Pokemon, hold such a fond place in their hearts that their fandoms survive even stronger today than it did back in the day, with the internet and all its resources keeping it all just a click away. A prominent couple in my corner of the nerd/gaming community actually cosplayed as the Pokemon couple Embreon and Espeon, inspired by a beautiful work on DeviantART. Emulators now allow for anyone to relive the fun of the original console games on their PCs. Some nerds will rewatch entire seasons of the show and talk about them with their friends.
I am not this level of nerd, even with Digimon, and the only time I revisited the series was to show part of the pilot to Alex, who found it about as dull and stupid as I found Pokemon. This might turn into an epic conflict between us, in the way Michigan fans fight with Ohio State fans. Having come from Ohio to attend the University of Michigan, I can completely understand how far this could go.
Luckily, it appears neither of us cares quite that much.
Captainess Kirk a column on Kate-book.com that runs every other Thursday at 10:30 am. It is written by the fascinating Kathleen Kirk. For more of her adventures, follow her on Twitter here and check in for future columns.
Got a Kate-
I don’t know anything about Digimon or its origins, but I’m pretty sure that the Pokemon anime show was created because of the popularity of the original Gameboy Game (which is awesome. I still have my Gameboy color and I’m in the middle of beating Pokemon Blue again right now, so this post is pretty timely).
Anway, if you look at the show as the product of a video game idea, it makes significantly more sense. The battling and leveling up of Pokemon isn’t unlike the battling and leveling up of characters in, say, Final Fantasy VII. The concept may seem weird if you’ve watched the show but are unfamiliar with the game itself.
I was a bit old for the Pokemon show, when it finally started playing frequnetly (I think it was on Cartoon Network?), but I still watched a lot of episodes. I even saw both movies in theaters. It’s a goofy cartoon, but rather than focusing on the violent lives of the Pokemon, I think the point the show wanted to stress was the friendship bonds of the Pokemon and their trainers.
The relationship between Ash and Pikachu changes over the course of the show, starting with Pikuachu’s complete, utter disobedience (and subsequent electrocution of his owner) to begrudgingly obeying, and finally coming to love his owner as a friend and faithful companion. Their love is stronger than that of a typical human and pet relationship because Pikachu willingly goes into battle for Ash, and vice versa.
If you’re just now getting interested in Pokemon, I implore you to pick up either Pokemon Red or Blue and play to your heart’s content. There’s nothing better than the original games. : )
Then you’ll really understamd the desire to “catch ‘em all!”
I know it came from the game. In fact, Pokemon Yellow was another way I was just introduced to Pokemon now. And I have definitely caught that “catch ‘em all” bug.
I’m possibly reading too much into this when I analyze it, but I come at it from a screenwriter’s perspective, and in some ways Pokemon exploits its development from the game very well, like in the repeated use of the Nurse Joys and Officer Jennys, but overall the plot seems to be one that sprung from laziness and convenience.
There surely had to be a better way to tie everything back together in the universe.
To be fair, it’s been years since I’ve watched the Pokemon anime, and I’m sure (like you) I’d see things with a very different (more scholastic) perspective now than I did when I was, say, 11.
I do have to say when I first started watching the show, I was completely confused by the Nurse Joy/Officer Jenny gimmick (although I grew to love it and still think it’s hilarious. Brock is the best!) Those characters were added for Pokemon Yellow and did not exist in Blue or Red. In fact, the nurse at the Pokemon Centers didn’t even have that loopy Nurse Joy ‘do and all of the police officers were male. The Team Rocket members were also male-only. Very interesting distinctions.
Jessie and James were also added for Pokemon yellow, which is awesome. They’re the best part of the show by far.
mmmmmmmmmm i think digimon will win