Tajiri's Box, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and Se Jun Park: an Introduction

In 1996 Satoshi Tajiri unleashed a terrible and profound chain reaction that threw world culture off its axis. I cannot imagine going into a 2015 without Pokémon; the franchise has deeply affected my generation's views on materialism, morality, animal rights and competition. Between 1996 and 2000, 46 million first generation Pokémon games were sold, and much of the intrigue behind the Twitch Plays Pokémon social experiment earlier this year rested on the 1.16 million people that collectively participated in a playthrough of Red and Blue. The rapid, ravenous growth of the video games into a global phenomenon and its subsequent deathgrip on humanity can be understood as a kind of Pandora's Box from which all things Pokémon spread. While the nostalgic appeal of the original games may be reduced to mobilizing just 1/46th of its original audience and the much-maligned "genwunners" were already being discredited as they came into being, the relevance of Pokémon in contemporary times is indisputable.

To claim otherwise would be to ignore that Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire's first week in 2014 sold approximately five times the units of Red and Blue's first week twenty years ago. Every day new trainers are recruited into the ranks of Pokémon Leagues around the world, participate in a global trading network, and compete for regional titles at Nintendo and fan-sponsored conferences. Each year a handful of successful trainers are cheered on at the World Championships while their matches are streamed live to anxious fans, and are then awarded scholarships worth several hundred thousand dollars for their skill at the games.

Artwork by 12m, used with permission.

Pokémon has changed the ways in which people relate and interact with one another, and attracted a periphery audience of onlookers vastly exceeding the scope of the 1990's arcade audiences. Consider the success of the 2014 Pokémon World Championships. Illustrating the climactic moment in which, against all odds, a squirrel held up the entire world on one finger quickly became a rite of passage for Pokémon fanartists. The livestream of the 2014 world finals drew over 4.6 million views and almost 450 thousand more between its multiple YouTube recordings afterwards, making it the most watched Pokémon battle in the world. World champion Se Jun Park has become a minor cultural icon to South Korean fans. For the Karenites, a faction opposed to traditional competitive values comparable to Super Smash Bros.' "tiers are for queers" crowd, Park is a heroic example of a trainer that plays their favorites instead of what's strongest.

(This last point is counterfactual to history. Se Jun Park was and is a competitive player who carefully selected and bred his Pachirisu for a deliberate strategic purpose that catered to the VGC's double battle format.)

Artwork by pictolita, used with permission.

Park's achievement shook the world much like Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's 1972 chess match. More people were tuned in to a single Pokémon battle than ever before. Any trainer that sends out a Pachirisu in-tournament again will be doing so in his shadow. Competitive Pokémon has become a spectator sport that fans bite their nails over, rather than being confined to the competitors' experience.

Going back to the Twitch Plays Pokémon example, no one would be worshiping Lord Helix if Ken Sugimori hadn't sat down and drawn an ammonite Pokémon in 1990. The popularity of each respective generation in comparison was made clear during the height of the TPP streams. TPP Red averaged 80 thousand continuous viewers during its initial run, but by the time the stream got to Crystal there were already complaints about a lack of participation. Some qualia about Red and Blue still resonates with those that experienced it at the turn of the millennium, and the games stopped retaining this in Ruby and Sapphire, if not earlier.

There's been a lot of speculation about why Pokémon took off as it did, and what it was that the series tapped into in the children of the world. I'm concerned less with how Pokémon's become a front-and-center feature in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and more with the consequences of it upstaging Santa Claus. What values did Red and Blue instill on the children of the late 90's, and the adults that they've grown into today? Pokémon is part of a grandscale Japanification of the entire western world that's been going on since Voltron hit in 1984 and has continued to the present. In 1975 Japan was grappling with Americanization; forty years later in 2015 the pendulum has firmly swung in the opposite direction. Today in the United States you can buy children's jerseys with "super kawaii" on the back, when prior to 2000 the most prevalent Japanese word in the American lexicon was tycoon (大君 taikun) brought over in 1857.

I have always thought of Pokémon more as a kind of time, setting or place rather than as a story or narrative. The fact that it was born, died and gave way to a restoration of itself is testament to the games' cultural footprint. The first Pokémon games were the beginning of an experience from '96 to '04 that brought a close to the cultural 90's, the tail end of which dragged into the release of Pokémon Emerald. I'm not in a position to say whether the changes brought on by this experience were positive or negative. But I can interrogate how they have reshaped my home country.

Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have been out for a month now, but for me they're still on the horizon. I know that once I have them I won't want to put them down for a while, so in the spirit of the season--not of Christmas nor Saturnalia but of Pokémon--I want to jump headfirst into 1998 and illustrate the cultural impact of the original games on today's USA, and to a lesser extent on a global scale. I should clarify that I am not a competitive Pokémon trainer, no matter what aspirations I held in my youth, but because of the unique concessions and simplicities of Red and Blue it's easier for me to grasp them than the later games. I am more comfortable as a Pokémon naturalist. I enjoy capturing the image, spirit and personality of the species. So my position is not one of total authority on the subject, but with all this said, I'm ready to go back down the rabbit hole.

Index

Chapter 1: Interpretation, Nostalgia & EarthBound (Pallet town through Viridian city)
Chapter 2: Forests & Representation (Viridian forest)