With the upcoming release of Pokemon Sun and Moon, it’s gotten me thinking about this terrifying series again. “Maybe I had it all wrong,” I thought, “perhaps I’m just thinking about this way too hard and it really is just a harmless kids series of cartoons and games.” Then it occurred to me that, as scary as I made it out to be, it’s actually way worse than what I already believed. It’s as though Nintendo have been working with Guillermo Del Toro since the series’ conception, slipping in as many subtle, disturbing ideas that his greasy, frightening brain could create. Dog fighting for money? Rogue, God wielding pre-teens? That’s nothing when you consider the even deeper layer of what’s actually going on here in this so-called “children’s fiction.”
I know it’s a kid’s show but I’m simply amazed that all of this has never been openly discussed. We see Pokemon fighting one another all the time – after all, it’s the favoured past-time of everyone in this world to make animals brutally beat the piss out of each other for kicks. Pokemon also fight in the wild, as wild animals will do, and this is even shown sometimes in the show, manga or games but it’s not the same as when they do it for their sadistic masters. Like any living being, they need to eat, and each species will have different dietary requirements. Maybe it’s roots and berries, I’m pretty sure some have been said to eat rocks and other minerals, and sometimes it’ll just be chowing down on Eevee.
Look at this thing. I bet it’s delicious.
It’s very likely that, at some point, Pokemon ate (eat?) humans, too. The Pokemon world is full of hapless individuals, mostly poorly trained and inexperienced children, that wander around on their own in the wilderness. As I said in my last article about the Pokemon world, kids are pretty much allowed to walk around unchecked, marching through the territories of Pokemon that, by the series’ own admission, are pretty dangerous. Drifloon looks like an S&M fetishists pet that literally drags off unsuspecting kids; Cubones wear the skulls of their own mothers, Christ knows what it would do to unattended children. I would be surprised if there wasn’t random piles of human bones scattered just everywhere.
That’s all just natural though, right? It’s how the world works – Pokemon, like animals, are plotted along a food chain, with some acting as predators to others, and humans are the alpha-predators at the top. Meat absolutely exists within the Pokemon universe, we’ve seen characters eating it all the time; we’ve even seen Brock in the cartoon series feeding it to other Pokemon. Unless the humans are eating each other (and honestly, at this point, it wouldn’t shock me), it has to be coming from somewhere and the likeliest answer is Soylent Pikachu. There are ranches where Pokemon like Tauros, Bouffalant and Miltank are kept in herds and I doubt it’s purely out of love for these tasty, tasty creatures.
I eat my Tauros with BBQ sauce while wearing my Tauros leather jacket. Sometimes, I make my own pet Tauros watch! I love Pokemon!
None of this would be particularly shocking to people that make animals fight for sport but it should be a stark and shocking realisation for fans of the series. Meat, leather, and other Pokemon by-products are all over the place, right under the viewer/player’s nose, and they’re complicit in all of it. This is just tip of the iceberg stuff, however; just like our own world, the implications of using and abusing Pokemon don’t just stop with food, fashion and blood sport. The Pokemon world has some pretty amazing technology but I doubt there were many human volunteers for testing. How many prototypes of the Full Restore did they go through before it stopped melting Pikachu faces? What came first, exactly – Vanillish, or Casteliacone? Is there a mass grave somewhere of mutilated Rattata’s that underwent “treatment” in the first Pokemon centre healing machines? Or Pokeballs? Sweet, merciful Arceus, the Pokeballs… Hey, speaking of Arceus!
By now, I should have well-established that the world of Pokemon is anything but wholesome; surely, someone would be trying to fix it… Right? In the last article, I wrote about Pokemon like this, I pointed out that, a lot of the time, children are just wandering around on their own and sometimes with the literal power of Gods in their pockets. That’s a scary prospect on its own but the implications are downright horrific when you follow them through to their logical conclusions. Some of these creatures can destroy entire towns with a flick of their wing, some can literally control the weather and environment, others still can warp time and space itself. That’s a lot of power to put into the hands of someone that hasn’t even begun to mature as an adult, or even finish growing into one.
Plus, what’s up with the having no father trope? …. Waaaait a minute..
What happens when these kids have a pubescent, hormone-driven temper tantrum? A meltdown for them could mean a literal meltdown for some unsuspecting city while one of these God-beings goes ape-shit on behalf of their owner and burns the place to the ground. An entire continent could find itself frozen and burning in multiple places as these all-powerful children rage their way across the lands. Given enough power and emotional grief, they might even go so far as unmaking reality itself. Weirdly enough, it’s likely that that’s already happened – not just once, but (at this stage) probably about eleven times that we’re aware of, at least.
“But Paddy,” I hear you crying out, hypothetical reader, “Surely if the universe had been unravelled by moody pre-teens and adolescents, then there couldn’t possibly be more games!” That’s where you’re wrong, readers not deranged enough to see where I’m going with this! Apparently, every time this happens, things coalesce back together and the cycle begins anew, with two possibilities as to how this happens. The first is that being a God and creator of all things in Pokemon, Arceus himself survives and is freed of his angsty master or mistress, allowing him to restart the universe. The second and far more likely answer is that after completing their dark, destructive work, the Harbinger-tot of the End uses Arceus’ power to remake the universe themselves but according to their ideals.
“Man, F*** this universe, I’m gonna make my own, with Voltorb flip, and Jynx’s! …. Jynxes? Jinxi? Whatever, there’s gonna be a lot of them and ALL UP IN MY FACE.”
It would certainly explain a lot of things about the inconsistencies of the series, or how “remakes” of past games (for example, Gold and Heart Gold, or Ruby and Omega Ruby) aren’t exactly the same. Better yet, it would explain how a few hundred species of Pokemon are just able to “appear” between each generation, as though they didn’t exist before that point. That, more than anything else, is the biggest supporting point for this theory. The Pokemon world is much like our own; it’s been explored, settled, and made to bend to the whims of humanity in whatever unnatural ways humans see fit. There’s no possible way that a few hundred species of large, powerful animals could go unnoticed for so long unless they were suddenly brought into existence by an external force. Before you let your head spin off your neck like a rotor blade, however, that’s still not the worst part about all of this.
If you had the chance to remake the universe, the chances are good that you’d at least try to make it a better place. The definition of a “better place,” however, would vary wildly with whoever had that power. With everything we’ve discussed so far, however, I think that we can all agree that the children of the Pokemon world are monsters that would make Hitler crap several Stalins. For all the inconsistencies of the series, there are still a lot of insane consistencies that probably shouldn’t exist in a just world. I mean, the dogfighting based economy, the general treatment of Pokemon, and creatures that defy the laws of physics while defiling those around them? These would be bad enough on their own, but it just keeps getting worse.
Seriously, what is WRONG with these kids!?
Clearly, giving up the power over Arceus is part of the deal here, since he buggers off somewhere and the previous owner disappears into the new world, allowing the cycle to potentially begin once more. How do I know this? Well, the opportunity to obtain him has cropped up in a couple of games and this just wouldn’t be possible unless his previous master had either died or relinquished power. So, what else can we take from this revelation? How about the fact that governments still don’t really seem to exist in any official capacity and the world is always in a weird state of anarchy? At best, corporations and feudal lords, in the form of Gym Leaders and Pokemon Leagues, appear to be in control though that’s about it. That is unless you count the creepy, shadowy agents of some unknown authoritarian force that always show up.
Doesn’t this all sound exactly like a child’s vision of how the world works, especially since the consequences have been completely ignored? There’s no controlling authority but everything still seems to run fine. The rampant animal abuse that everyone seems to be totally okay with, going so far as to use it as the basis for an economy because “It’s pretty cool.” Terrorists are still running around doing vaguely evil shit but they appear to be getting progressively worse and far more bent on destruction, instead of control, with each passing generation. Are they aware of something the rest of the Pokemon world isn’t? Is that why they have such a cult-like conviction? Because they don’t want to be sent to oblivion like countless others?
Suddenly their willingness to off a child makes a lot more sense and did I just write that?
Who knows how far back these “resets” even go? It could be that some approximation of their own world spontaneously reforms at a point similar to what they’ve known, or history could have been sent back to the Pokemon equivalent of the stone age. Is there an earlier, more brutal time during which humans treated Pokemon even worse than what they presently do that’s just repeated over and over? Worse still, there’s still a suspicious lack of father figures and old men around the place in all of the Pokemon games – how many times has the Pokemon War happened? This is all just the stuff that we know about, as well. I’ll let your imaginations fill in the possibilities of all the “versions” that we haven’t been treated to, and the horrors contained within.
THAT’S what’s up with the lack of older men thing! Holy crap, Nintendo, whyyyyyyyy!?
Author’s Note: Special thanks (and part blame) to GameCloud’s own Ellis Longhurst for helping to inspire the terrible revelations you’re about to read. She was unsettlingly cheerful about all of this.
