I love Pokémon, it’s my special interest, I’ve been playing since Gen 1 and have pretty extensive knowledge about the Pokémon world.
However since becoming a communist I’ve realized that a lot of things are missing from the world, including basic functions on how everything works. Just the presence of police implies there are laws that have to be enforced, which in turn implies people write those laws, etc. We know that there was an industrial revolution, which led to capitalism, being the economic system in all Pokémon regions, meaning all of the contradictions that come with it. There was a war that took place, as alluded to by Lt. Surge, who might actually be from Unova.
In the manga there’s the Pokémon Association (PA), a legislative body that determines the laws involving Pokémon, similar to Congress here in the U.S., with each region apparently having its own PA.
In the anime they have the Pokémon Inspection Agency (PIA) that inspects Gyms to see if they’re up to par.
They don’t explicitly talk about politics and political views (obviously because the series is marketed to kids) but I think exploring these mechanisms could be really interesting, if not for the fact that Pokémon adds another layer to politics because they’re creatures with a material effect on the world.
Some people might be more left leaning when it comes to economics and social issues, but might be more right leaning when it comes to trainer regulations.
I’m curious to know what other people think, I’m actually writing a story that explores some of these themes so I’d love to get some ideas!
The Pokemon world is so empty of non-battle things that it’s hard to talk politics at all. I think the game that had the most substance was Legends Arceus with its parallels to Japanese colonization, but even then it was all subtext.
Besides that, there’s an international police with Looker and I think a PokeBall monopoly based in Kalos. Also there was that Pokemon world war that took place 3,000 years ago (I forgot what it was about though)
The Pokemon world is so empty of non-battle things that it’s hard to talk politics at all.
Really? There are people who love Pokémon so much they might want to restrict or ban battling, if they all came together couldn’t they make a political party? What about trainers who don’t want the government interfering in how they train Pokémon? What about regulations that might be necessary to improve the lives of Trainers and Pokémon alike?
There’s actually climate change affecting Pokémon, a consequence of the industrial revolution.
Idk, I think there’s a lot to talk about. Maybe it’s just me that thinks about this kinda stuff.
I meant institutional stuff, there’s usually not much more than the gyms and bad guys. I don’t think there ever has been a government in a Pokemon game besides, arguably, the champions and gym leaders.
Regarding climate change, aren’t all the pollution Pokemon a direct result of human wastefulness? I mean the Muk, Weezing, and Garbodor lines + their variants. There’s also trash cloak Burmy and Wormadam. Though idk if these Pokemon are meant to be a critique because they’re treated the same as any other Pokemon, really.
Yes I also meant institutional things…that’s why I mentioned police, with police there are laws, where there are laws people have to write them, and so on…these things aren’t explicit like I said, they’re implied…
Yes, the pollution Pokémon are result of industrial waste, and now they rely on the same waste that caused them…isn’t that dialectical?
I’m also pulling my information from the manga, which also provides a better idea of how the games would look in real life.
Oh, I haven’t read the manga I’ve only played the games (mostly on 3ds).
The thing about the regular police is that you never get to visit their stations or see them in action so we have to guess at what they’re doing and why. Same goes for most other professions that show up as trainer types - they’re just set dressing. Within the games, anyway. I’m sure there’s a lot more worldbuilding in the manga and anime.
And something I find weird about the pollution Pokemon is that they low-key portray pollution as a good thing? What I mean by that is that they’re treated as just another Pokemon to adopt, befriend, battle, etc. So contaminating the environment creates more Pokemon to collect! And cleaning things up will lead to their extinction, so pollution is necessary for their conservation. Kinda puts Pokemon professors (and the player by extension) at odds with environmentalism 🤔
There is a lot of worldbuilding if you look at the manga, games and anime alongside each other and use what makes sense…unless it’s Thunder Armor 🤦🏿♂️
I don’t think Pokémon portrays pollution as a good thing, Pokémon as a result of pollution is considered to be a problem, and because they can’t be exterminated there needs to be a balance between them and humans.
The manga explores this, it’s actually why the Elite Four want to literally genocide all humans, because they honestly believe a world without humans would be beneficial to Pokémon.
Pollution Pokemon can’t be exterminated? I thought there was a Pokedex entry that said one of them is soon to go extinct but I could be wrong.
Which elite four do you mean? Are you talking about the plot from black and white with Ghetsis and stuff? Tbh he makes good points about Pokemon cockfighting that go unaddressed.
I mean…why would they do that? There’s no active extermination campaign going on as far as I’m aware. Instead they leave places like the Power Plant in Kanto as a wild habitat. I’m not sure which one you could be referring to besides prehistoric Pokémon.
The Kanto Elite Four served as the primary antagonists for Yellow in the manga, seeking to wipe out most of humanity in order to create a utopia for Pokémon.
Also…no, Ghetsis does not make any good points because 1) Pokémon battling isn’t just cockfighting as they already battle in nature, it’s humans that are able to bring out their fullest potential, and 2) because the idea of “is it okay to own Pokémon” has probably long since been talked about before and addressed already, and the fact that humans and Pokémon have been living together for thousands of years even before modern battling and the Pokémon League.
Quoting Drayden, Gym Leader of Opelucid:
The cooperation of people and Pokémon is how Unova came to exist to begin with. If a Pokémon really didn’t want anything to do with humans, it would simply leave… Capturing a Pokémon in a Poké Ball doesn’t mean you’ve captured its heart.
aside from the very ham-fisted stuff in B/W/B2/W2, the closest thing to a political narrative (certainly not communist, but fairly interesting) in Pokémon I’ve seen is a ROM hack called Rocket Edition
I’ve played it, it’s really good in terms of offering some explanations to some of the narrative that isn’t explained in the original games, and is actually what kinda inspired me to write my own story since in that game the Champion is kinda like the head of state.
Also I’m not talking about any political narratives in the games, I’m talking about what political positions people might hold in the Pokémon world itself, what could be considered left or right, since Pokémon add a completely different layer to politics.
any serious political story would need to disregard some things from the games (the minuscule “cities”, the NPCs who stay in the same area forever, etc.) and then explain how 10-year-old children can safely roam around holding animal fights, whether Pokémon are sentient (and why Pokémon can be stored as data, although you could probably discard that plot point), etc.
in terms of political alignment, considering there doesn’t seem to be much work being done by humans, left-wing movements would likely be focused on the material conditions and rights of Pokémon
Of course. The games are like that because they’re handhelds (meaning a limited population; the entirety of the Unova region is 949!) with kids (hence the 10 year olds) as their target audiences. I’m obviously not a kid, so I’m bound to think about these things in more detail. The anime and mostly the manga give a better practical insight on how certain things would work.
There are humans who work plenty of non-trainer jobs, who else would make the goods necessary for trainers to use them? Pharmaceutical companies would be the ones making the Potions and other health related items. Silph Co in Kanto effectively has a monopoly on Pokéballs, which were originally made in Johto by hollowing out Apricorns.
A company having the ability to mass produce this many Pokéballs would certainly have workers in them, there’s even a factory in Kalos. Would the mass production of these things cause an ecological crisis because of the amount of Apricorn trees that would be necessary to make them or would they have to invent another method that might cut corners on safety or workers rights for the sake of making a profit?
i don’t like the whole “red is a robot” theory, it’s stupid in all honesty
There isn’t even any evidence pointing to it lol your character is the classic silent protagonist 🤷🏿♂️ he has an actual personality in the manga
I’ve been wanting to do a pokemon fan comic for a long time that deals with this, even before I became a Marxist.
The way the pokemon league works is often very up for interpretation, is it functionally the government, or are things like government elsewhere, but just not mentioned because these are kid’s games. Normally in an RPG game, lacking this stuff doesn’t matter, but pokemon takes place somewhere analogous to the real world, but is lacking a lot of the structure of the real world. We see things like construction workers and miners using their pokemon to help them with their jobs, but we also don’t really see much talk around that. I believe in Diamond and Pearl, an NPC mentions these miners “sneaking” their pokemon into work, which implies that they aren’t supposed to be doing that, but it isn’t clear what authority will punish them, or if it is actually against the rules, or if it is just frowned upon.
One universal trait of the pokemon games is a general laid-back attitude. People rarely ever seem stressed or overworked, pokemon receive free healthcare (so presumably humans do as well). And if the pokedollars are supposed to represent yen, goods for a pokemon trainer like potions and pokeballs would only cost the equivalent of a couple of dollars.
Additionally, while there are police officers in some of the games, we don’t see any organised attempts to stop any villainous teams. Team rocket can take over an entire building to steal their technology and no one tries to stop them, despite their defense being a single sleepy guy on guard duty.
Of course, out of narrative, this can all be easily explained with “it’s a kid’s game, don’t worry about it. It would be boring if the player didn’t actually solve problems themselves and had others show up to solve them instead.” but that isn’t very satisfying for a lot of people. If the devs of pokemon “didn’t think about it” then that is an excellent opportunity for fans to think about it in their own fiction.
Exactly! There’s so much that isn’t explicitly given to us but we know there has to be ways that the world functions… otherwise it just doesn’t function.
I can’t accept that everything is happy go lucky and no one has any real problems, which is why I like to use the manga for more reference in how the world could work in a more practical sense (ignoring, of course some of the ridiculous nonsense that it sometimes peddles).
Indeed, my (planned and probably never complete) comic is directly inspired by the manga more than anything else, as it tends to have the most substance and also the most stakes and character.
Have you looked into the modding scene much? I think there’s a lot of fan content that explores different aspects of the world. Though I can’t say I’ve played much of them myself.
I have but a lot of them feature really badly designed fakemon or artificial difficulties, none of the explore any interesting themes aside from Rocket Red, which was very intriguing cause it attempted to fill in some of the blanks in the world that the games seem to have.
Setting aside the political system in the fictional setting of Pokemon, its theme did have universal government regulations of Pokemon battles, animal violence, reduction of Indigenous groups into restrictive stereotypes, commodification of nature in the form of pokemons, and monopoly of the Pokemon battle system. The idea that a society can transform nature and Indigenous people into systematic tools of violent entertainment without opposition is highly immoral and disrespectful in reality. That is why I like to watch parody of Pokemon that expose the irrationality and cruelty of the Pokemon setting.
Except it’s known in the Pokémon world that they aren’t just “animals fighting”; they aren’t even animals, considering there are actual animals like rodents, birds and fish in the Pokémon world. They do have intelligence since they can understand humans, and will actually not listen to you if you mistreat them, or if they don’t respect you they won’t even be caught.
The idea that a society can transform nature and Indigenous people into systematic tools of violent entertainment without opposition is highly immoral and disrespectful in reality.
What are you even talking about?
“considering there are actual animals”
although nintendo might have shown real animals in early gens, nintendo retconned that out in later gens and it’s no longer considered canon
“indigenous people” ???
Pokémon Sun/Moon is based off of Hawai’i, maybe they mean that, since the depictions are your typical aloha stereotype.
Yeah really, make this make sense.
I’m guessing they’re basing it off of pokemon Sun and Moon, which is based on Hawaii, and in turn was apparently colonised by people from Johto in the pokemon universe.
The games show this as an unequivocal “good” and simplify local indigenous culture into a few basic rituals, local food and a slightly different pokemon league system, with no actual analysis of mistreatment or colonialism. It very heavily whitewashes it, as all children’s media does in the west. I don’t know why this is a shock to people. It isn’t good, but it is expected.
Basically, the devs of the game based their region off of a fun holiday they had to Hawaii once, instead of the game focusing on the very real problems native Hawaiians face. Considering they are made by a bunch of aging Japanese guys who have never expressed strong politics in their games before, it’s hardly surprising that their view of a Hawaiian inspired region is so “touristy” (In fact, that’s one of the reasons I would argue that the newer regions feel much flatter and emptier, they aren’t based on regions these people have lived in, like the ones based on Japan, but are just based on a tourist’s interpretation of a country.)
Honestly this is the first I’m hearing about this whole thing with the devs. I was more expecting a conversation about the inner workings of the world and how it would work.
I never heard about Alola being colonized by Johto, where did you read that?
One of the cities in Alola (I forget which one) was directly built to be like the ones in Johto and an NPC somewhere there mentions how they settled the region or something.
There isn’t much to really go on with the worldbuilding, because pokemon has almost none. There’s no attempt at cohesion or messaging, it’s just kind of empty. That isn’t bad or anything, just that I don’t think the devs ever really thought deeply about the ramifications of the pokemon world and just kind of made it up as they went along. A lot of creators work like that.
The closest thing I could find to anything resembling that is Malie City which is said to be inspired by Johto, and Heahea City being founded by Trainers from Kanto and Johto. Is this what you mean?
Maybe it did happen, idk. It could be an interesting theme to explore since my protagonist is actually from Alola.
I don’t agree that Pokémon has no worldbuilding, there’s plenty to see if you pay attention and look at the subtext and implications. Just because something isn’t explicitly stated doesn’t mean there’s nothing, if anything that means there’s a lot there that hasn’t been thought of yet.
Yeah, those are the ones I’m talking about. It’s something some random NPC mentions that probably wouldn’t get noticed by most people, I just remember it because it really stuck out to me for some reason.
