This
episode of Pop-Culture Attorney is dedicated to my sister, who has adamantly
refused to read any of my previous work, despite the fact that I am always
reading her awful bullshit grad-school papers and trying to make them resemble
logical thought. I feel free to voice
these opinions here because even if she did read my other stuff, she’d never
touch this: Pokémon and Digimon.
Right,
I am a major fan of Pokémon. Those of you who are my personal friends may
remember not reading my various statuses relating to times that I’ve made a
particularly epic capture, or the time my Azuril ScaryJane came out of the
closet as being transgendered (that wasn’t a joke by the way, she actually evolved into a male Pokémon). Funnily enough, I never had a portable system
growing up, so while lots of people out there equate the games with their
childhood, I got my first Pokémon game when I was 18, and only then because I
was feeling particularly nostalgic. It
was the remake of Pokémon Silver, one of the old-school games, and I suppose I
was one of those “genwunners” that only liked the older stuff at the time. I had gone through a long period of time
where I didn’t like Pokémon at all, because the show had started, in my
opinion, to degenerate in quality a bit after they replaced Misty with
May. I don’t blame May, I blame lazy
writing. But we’ll get to that.
The
worst part of the Pokémon fandom is the genwunners. They assure us that the only good games in
the series were Red and Blue, and
possibly Gold and Silver, and they
generally can’t be assed to remember Yellow
or Crystal. Like I said before, I was in this camp once,
but that’s only because my only exposure had been to the anime. I never thought that the newer Pokémon were
bad or any such thing, but I associated the drop in quality of the show to a
drop in quality in the games, so even when I got myself a portable system I
avoided the games. But, with a mind
unclouded by nostalgia, I can safely tell you that the games are all similar
enough in game-play and style that I have no clue where these people get
off. Do they want Nintendo to just
completely overhaul the series and make something completely different? No, because Black and White was different and the genwunners hated it because
you couldn’t catch any Pokémon from the Kanto region. I swear, the games just sort of continuously
build on the previous ones without removing anything of merit. Sure, around the fourth generation, some of
the monsters started looking a bit goofy; you’re trying to tell me that some
robot brontosaurus is the god of Space and Time? I’d find a kindly British gentleman in a
police box more convincing. There were a
few mechanics introduced that weren’t all that good either, like the goddamn honey trees. I so wanted a Munchlax but the only way to
catch one is to smear honey on a certain species of tree, wait eight hours, and
hope that the tree you chose is one of the four randomly selected trees in the country capable of attracting a
Munchlax! And you might not get a Munchlax even if you picked right! And the computer selects which Pokémon will
be attracted to the tree as soon as you apply the honey, so you can’t just
reset until you have a Munchlax! It
would literally take days of trying to get a Munchlax! Fuck,
at this point it would be easier to join Team Rocket and try to steal a
Munchlax, and they never succeed at
anything![1]
But do
you know what show didn’t degenerate in quality (at least not completely but
we’ll get to that)? Digimon. As Bryan Chow once put it, “at its best that
shit was like the Matrix but with monsters”.
A more perfect line was never said, and I don’t think I have to keep
writing after that, but if you insist I’ll go on for at least eighteen pages,
1½ spaced, 12 point, Times New Roman, Justified alignment. Because it was very important that you know
how I like to format.
So I
loved the first four seasons of Digimon (technically they were different series
but were billed as the same series in the US; Adventures 01 and 02, Tamers,
and Frontier), and I will be talking
about those mainly. There were
apparently Digimon games but I haven’t played any of them, so sadly this
article will lack a touch of my normal completionism. Microsoft Word recognizes Pokémon as a word
but not completionism. God damn it
Nappa.
There’s…actually
very little hatred among the fandom for anything overtly dumb. Actually, most of the people who think Digimon is a rip-off of Pokémon are fans of Pokémon. Most Digimon fans like Pokémon. I assume that
these fine folks are already enlightened as to what will essentially be the
contents of this article, and as such they may leave now (just kidding, you
guys stay longer). Well, there is the
matter of Adventure 02’s ending, but we can all agree that
that was bullshit.
Now,
it took me quite while to come up with this idea, and those of you who are
savvy will think I’m an idiot. Why the
Hell didn’t I come up with this as my very first article? It’s so goddamn obvious you dumb shit! Two anime series that premiered in America at
almost the same time, that starred shonen-y young children and adorable monster
companions, and with parents nowhere near as concerned as they ought to
be? Haha, that’s where the similarities
end, and you are the one who is a dumbshit.
The two shows are almost nothing alike.
Because
of the sheer amount of content that both franchises have managed to churn out
in their fifteen or so years I can’t be arsed to look at each and every little
bloody thing. Pokémon alone has dozens
of games, hundreds of episodes, Japan only spinoff mini-series (which look
awesome by the way, but again I can’t be arsed), and a bunch of movies. Digimon
has hundreds of episodes as well, and some games apparently, which once again I
can’t be arsed to play. Furthermore,
since Digimon is several series instead of one continuous one, I can’t do a
character head to head, because it’ll amount to Ash and Brock fighting like
twelve guys and Ash’s female companions (heretofore referred to as Ash’s
Angels) going up against a dozen other girls.
Another thing is that the monsters in Pokémon are basically very clever
animals while the ones in Digimon are fleshed out characters who can talk and
everything. So, I’m just going to talk
about the first few seasons of the Pokémon anime, the first couple of movies,
and the games, as compared to the first four Digimon series. Fuck, that’s still a lot of shit.
The
Pokémon anime is essentially a slice-of-life piece set in a world where people
raise monsters to fight each other for sport.
Ash is just some random kid trying to succeed at his chosen career. Sure there are dangerous types out
there. Mewtwo is a hyper intelligent
bio-engineered super-soldier bent on the extinction of human life! Team Rocket is an international syndicate of
monster-stealing criminals fronting as a legitimate Pokémon organization! But they take the back-burner to Ash and his
life, and the way he deals with his friends and Pokémon as he leisurely travels
from town to town, region to region, trying to advance his career. Sure he foils Team Rocket whenever they rear
their ugly, rhyming heads, but he never vows to take out their organization and
invades their headquarters and takes out all of their dudes and kills Giovanni
in a single-stroke battle then walks out and says “bang” before succumbing to
his wounds like Spike Spiegel or anything like that but oh my God what if he did fanfic that shit.
Anyway, what sets the Pokémon show apart from other
mon-collecting Shonen anime series is the fact that the monsters are just as
I’ve mentioned, animals that exist in the world. They’re not space invaders or from another
dimension or bio-weapons from Atlantis.
They’re just more interesting versions of real animals. And plants.
And rocks. And…Asian and American
stereotypes, I guess. Now, Pokémon is
merchandise driven, but other merchandise driven monster type anime are so much
more blatant that it’s sickening. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Bakugan, all that other shit,
is basically a bunch of kids using magical versions of the toys they show’s
supposed to be shilling. Pokémon however, tries to get at the soul of the games, so instead of a
couple of kids with obscenely pointy hair whipping out their Gameboys (upgraded
to DSs in the later seasons by some fairy perhaps) to summon six foot tall
Pikachus from the Shadow Realm, you get Ash and company traveling the land and
befriending monsters.
I can
say that there are legitimately touching scenes in Pokémon. The show made us
care about these little freaks of nature that could only say their own names
because legitimate personalities shown through.
Pikachu was a trickster archetype.
Charmander became a narcissist as he evolved into Charizard, but with
genuine goodness. Squirtle was a paragon
of manliness, the badass leader of the Squirtle Gang whose legacy echoes far
and wide across the Kanto region! I know
I was sad when Butterfree left the cast so he could start a family of horrible
little grubs. Whose heart didn’t break
when Ash left Charizard behind at the preserve and you realized too late that
they really did love each other? And
again when the original gang split up?
There
were some episodes that were just damned creative and awesome. Like the whole Sabrina story arc. In the games she’s just another gym leader, but
in the show she used her psychic powers to terrorize the whole town and warp
people’s perceptions of reality. She
made Misty and Brock think they were trapped in a doll house while a
manifestation of her inner evil tried to crush them with a rubber ball. Then the three of them ran off to get some
Ghost type Pokémon, the only things that can beat her, and Ash and Pikachu have
an out of body experience. Then they
return with a Haunter, who instead of fighting Sabrina dicks around like a
Chick Jones character until she laughs and comes to terms with her inner
demons! Then she just gives them the
badge!
That’s
another thing that set the Pokémon anime apart; Ash was not some pointy-haired
badass chosen one superhero. He was just
some guy. More often than not, he would
fail at something the first time around, and half the time he got a badge it
wasn’t won in a proper battle but given as a gift for services rendered. In his very first Gym battle, he goddamn
surrendered! Brock gave him the badge
anyway for reuniting him with his estranged father! That’d be like if you bowed out from your
first boss fight in a Zelda game, but the Armored Parasite Ghoma gave you a
piece of Heart anyway for….reuniting her with her estranged father. Furthermore, I don’t fallow the show any
more, as I have said, but I have it on good authority that Ash has yet to win a single championship. Those goddamn things that they spend the
whole season building up to? He never
wins them.
Now
I’ve spent enough time gushing about the Pokémon anime. Except for one thing. Remember that episode where they visit the
haunted Japanese-style village on the beach and they learn about a legend
concerning some star-crossed lovers, and the girl’s ghost haunts the town to
this day? And Brock falls in love with
her ghost and they have to tie him up?
And an unusually powerful Ghastly starts haunting them and speaking in a
creepy voice and transforming into monsters and generally being unbeatable
until the sun rises? And at the end it
turns out that he was responsible for everything that happened in that town and
that he was guarding the girl’s tomb or something, and the gang never quite
figures out what happened, and Ash and Misty dance together and she wears a
Kimono and looks adorable? I like that
episode.
And
they never made anything like it again, and likely never will. Around the time Ash got to the Hoenn region,
the show got really formulaic. Oh hai new trainer whose design is inspired
by an NPC from the latest game and/or Pokémon who is trending as “popular” in
Japan! You have problems? Let’s solve them with friendship! About 500 times. Apparently the recent episodes set in Unova
Region are getting good, but I have yet to see any of them and have no plans
to.
In
contrast, the Digimon animes are child-epics in the vein of Narnia, if Narnia
were some freakish representation of the internet post-singularity. Or something.
It’s never made all that clear really.
Now, while the shows are definitely merchandise driven, they eventually
became merchandise in themselves, if that makes sense. At some point they stopped being 22 minute
commercials for a Tomagachi knock-off and became the main draw of the franchise. The third series was written and directed by
an award winning director and has been heralded as one of the best anime of all
time and “the Evangelion of monster
anime” (for those of you not in the know, Neon
Genesis Evangelion is an anime series heralded as being not only very good,
but artistic and even painful, relying strongly on Christian and Gnostic
symbolism to brutally deconstruct the genre and make you beg for the sweet
release of death, the Paradise Lost[2]
of giant robot cartoons). Some of
those things were said by me.
But
we’ll start with the beginning: Adventure
01! For those of us way back in
90something when this came out right after Pokémon who didn’t think it was a
ripoff, we had our minds blown. Let me
tell you, Digimon just generally looks
like they spent a bit more money on it.
It doesn’t look like something from the 90s while the earlier seasons of
Pokémon absolutely do. Now, anyone who’s spent any bloody time at
all with both franchises knows that they are nothing alike. So I’ll talk more about the fundamental,
“big-picture” differences than say simply pointing out that DA01 has 8 protagonists instead of
three, with one Digimon each instead of full teams.
Now, Pokémon could definitely have passed for
an American cartoon, but not any version of Digimon. Those of you familiar with the medium will
understand that it is divided up into demographics rather than genres, and
Digimon fits squarely into Shonen
demographic: young teens and boys, and young teens and boys like huge
explosions, pointy haired protagonists of their age group pumping their fists
at things while wearing goggles for some reason, girls who could be arguably
called cute and could potentially become love interests but you don’t make a
thing out of it man, this ain’t Shojo
demographic get that gay relationships shit out of here, and of course monsters
that transform like sixteen times to fight in battles that take like half the
season, and it looks like your losing but you see the enemies weakness just in
time and BAM take the motherfucker down in like one shot with your most epic
godly giga-laser (you need to prefix your lasers to make them sound cool). Is that a bad thing? Fuck no.
This is DA01, not Tamers; you get that Oscar winning makes-you-cry-at-the-last-episode
philosophy garbage back where it belongs and watch this:
Cyborg tyrannosaur.
Your argument is invalid.
Adventure 02 however is where my
troubles with this franchise really began, much sooner than the ones with Pokémon as you’ll notice. It was certainly just as good looking as the
previous series (or “season” as they told us in the US, seeing as Fox thought
kids couldn’t handle subtitles) and the fact that it continued the adventures
of the previous series certainly kept us entertained. The “game mechanics” so to speak were
different this time around, but I suppose that can be forgiven. I didn’t like the new monsters as much, they
seemed to lack the same personality, but it’s okay because the older ones were
still around. The new main protagonist
Davis had all the worst qualities of Ty from the previous series and none of
the good ones (well “bravery” I suppose is a prerequisite and shouldn’t count),
but the other new characters were fine.
Honestly, I stopped watching towards the end of the series when the
story got bogged down with this subplot about Black Wargreymon, whose name is
entirely too long. The thing is, it is
exactly as if the guy you thought was the final boss of a video game kicked
your ass and then suddenly you played as him for most of the third act. Just goddamned bizarre.
In a
way, I can say that by skipping on Digimon until Tamers came out, I was spared for a few years at least until I saw
the reruns of the last story arc on Disney.
I wanted to throw things by the end.
Why is the bad guy turning good?
Why are we still talking about
Black Wargreymon? Why did they feel the
need for the villain of a story arc from the middle of Adventure 01 to
come back and secretly be behind everything ever (in the third act of the last
episode)? What’s this bullshit, the
human antagonist was just jealous because he wanted a Digimon too? DID THEY
GIVE HIM ONE AS HE DIED? Is this one of
those end-montages? Well I suppose it
would be nice to see what happens to them later in life, get some closure on Adventure 1 at least. Yolei and Ken got together? That dude’s totally gay for Davis, but Yolei
deserves to be happy as one of the few characters who didn’t wangst as much as
everyone else. How about Joe and
Mimi? Not very clear, huh. But that one seemed obvious! Ah well, just tell me how many kids Ty had
with Sora so we can get on with our liv— You….animals. What.
The. Fuck. She. Marries. Mat.
That prick. No, shut up show, I
know you said they went out on a date once, but fuck you. Ty < 3 Sora have been building up for the
whole damned franchise, you miserable, vile abomination. You just threw in the Mat bullshit to get Ty
some pathos, and next thing you know they’re getting married and having
children! You tell us this in a fucking
montage as if destroying the alpha couple were no big deal!
Okay
yes fine this is Shonen show for kids
and I was a kid when I watched it so why am I getting mad? Dear reader, imagine if that beloved anime
Romance (in both senses of the word), that perfect blend of Shonen and Shojo demographic appeal Inu
Yasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale, ended with a montage in which we are told rather than shown that our heroine Kagome
ran off with Miroku the lecherous priest while his love interest Songo had babies with Inu Yasha. The only foreshadowing we receive all series
is those times that Miroku grabbed everyone’s ass. See how much that would suck? I know some girls just went into a blind rage
over the thought (while others let out a hearty “SQUEEEEEEE < 3” and set to
fanfic writing). Incidentally, keep a
look out for Inu Yasha vs. The Lays of Marie de France in which I
compare the tropes of anime with medieval European Romance.
But
while Adventures 01 and 02 were certainly more serious fare than
Pokémon, they were still mostly about having a good time. They had their dark moments sure, but it was
all still grade-A Shonen stuff. No real
departures from the demographic, much less the genre. This of course brings us to Digimon Tamers, the Evangelion of kids’ shows!
But first we’re going to talk about the Pokémon movies.
I’m
sure you were all psyched up about reading some more Digimon stuff (sarcasm)
especially after how I’ve been gushing over Tamers
and all. But this really is as
appropriate a place to talk about it as any other, especially since the Pokémon
movies, like Tamers, were a big
departure from the original stuff. Ash
Ketchum does not save the world in the show.
He does in the movies though.
Several times. The franchise goes
from slice-of-life-with-monsters to straight up delicious Shonen action with a hint of….pathos? This is less so in the third movie onward but
damn.
Raise your hand sheepishly if the first time a movie made you cry was
the climax of Pokémon: The First Movie.
Fuckin’
pansy. But seriously, while many other
movies aimed at children over the years have had messages about how differing
combinations of friendship love and fun are good, this one is about a genetic
abomination with godlike power trying to breed a master race of super-mutants
to inherit the earth after he destroys it by flood from his eerie glowing green
throne like an old-testament God if he were a kitty. In the original Japanese dub it’s made even
more jarring by having Mew, Mewtwo’s legendary progenitor, being equally
disdainful of Mewtwo and his creations!
Not only does the film deal with racism, it deals with two-way
racism! It also featured a scene where
it’s explained that Mewtwo was created as a side-project to creating a clone of
the scientist’s dead daughter! And the
girl clone died! And it takes the death
and miraculous rebirth of a main character to set things right again at the
end! Now, I’m not saying that this movie
should get any Oscars, the message of tolerance itself was delivered somewhat
heavy handedly (apparently the Japanese think kids can handle racism and intolerance
but not subtlety) but it deserves
some acknowledgement for having some goddamned
balls!
Pokémon 2000 upped the stakes again by
making Ash the Chosen One who can bring balance to nature. Now, an ecological message is a few rungs
under racism on the scale of “message risk-taking in a kids’ movie”, but
everything else about the movie was bigger and the people who made it still
clearly gave a damn. And if straight up
calling Ash the Chosen One is a bit corny, remember that the last movie
basically made him the Messiah anyway.
Furthermore, Pokémon: The First
Movie was essentially just a tournament story-arc like the ones at the end
of every season of the show, but with higher stakes. Ash doesn’t even technically win—again. Shit, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that
Pokémon 2000 is good just because Ash succeeds at something
important instead of choking at the end like a punk!
But I
digress. While The First Movie was another tournament, 2000 is an epic disaster movie featuring global catastrophes such
as hurricanes, whirlpools, and winter storms in the middle of a tropical island
chain. It features a scene where Ash’s
tamed monsters pull him across a frozen sea like huskie dogs, a magical ocarina
song (a pretty good sound track too now I think about it) a huge fucking
airship full of antiques and Renaissance paintings, and one of the rare talking
Pokémon. I don’t know about you guys,
but whenever I saw a Pokémon actually talk it was amazing! The villain too was unique in that he was a
legitimately cultured badass who was also
a huge nerd. Usually having a “culture”
character in Shonen anime means he’ll
drink wine and be dubbed over as British.
The villain here owned a goddamed UFO that looked like the Dodge’s
palace inside and he stuffed the damn thing with Pokémon paraphernalia. Mind you in this world Pokémon are a real
part of daily life and there are bound to be like ancient Etruscan artifacts
featuring the king of Italy with his Gyarados and suchlike, but c’mon. C’mon!
All in all, the second movie was bigger and better than the first one,
though it did not quite have the same gravitas.
As for
the third movie, Curse of the Unown:
it existed. Haha, I liked it and all,
really, but not much about it can be said that can’t also be said about either
of the previous two movies. It’s
probably the best looking of the three theatrical films (of course there were more movies, it’s just that America stopped
caring enough to release them in theaters).
It also tried to variate on the theme more, like the second movie,
incorporating aspects of fantasy and even horror into the film. Horror?
Yeah, a little girl meddles with things she oughtn’t to have and gains
the power to warp reality around her as she begins to think of a wish-granting
monster as the ghost of her father and encases her whole town in heavy crystal
to look like her ideal fantasy land (which is creepy as hell to everyone sane)
while a swarm of psychic three-dimensional letters hums a creepy tune in the
grand foyer. Horror. But, the threat is scaled back from the
previous two films. While the crystal
menace could spread it never does go
far beyond the town’s borders and as such the threat is limited to one small
town. It certainly gets props for the
creepy “Entei is my daddy” subplot, especially when he starts believing it!
Also, Charizard comes back! A
fact that means nothing to the parents that merely got dragged to see these
movies and don’t follow the show at all.
“Why was he gone? Didn’t he used
to pull the sled?”
Now
for that epic: Digimon Tamers! It was okay.
I’m just joshing it was the best season of Digimon ever
made.
Presumably
Chiaki Tonaka, the new creator I mentioned (who by the way writes stories for
the Cthulu Mythos) was just as pissed off by the end of Adventure 02 as I was
and decided to do away with it. In some
ways Tamers is a response to the previous series, and anime in general, poking
fun at them by actually making them a TV
show that the new cast watches religiously.
I find that hilarious. The new
protagonist Takato wears goggles for example, but only once he gets himself a
Digimon, and only because Ty and Davis wore goggles and he wants to emulate
them. Ironically, he’s nothing like
them. In many ways he’s more like Ash,
in that he’s a lovable loser.
In the
previous Digimon series, the kids were kind of unnecessary. They were important because the plot said
they were, but the monsters did all the heavy lifting. At best, they were the brains of the operation;
at worst they were emotional support.
Here though, the kids play a much more active role. Part of this has to do with the simple fact
that the premise is that they live in the “real world” and were fans of Adventure 01 and 02, meaning that they
know about Digimon and how they work and what kinds of threats they’re going up
against, ironically being more well prepared for the things they haven’t faced
than the ones who’ve experienced it. The
biggest thing though, is that they can actively help their Digimon by using
their trading cards to give them new weapons and abilities and no this is
nothing like Yu-Gi-Oh! because Yu-Gi-Oh! sucks. Eventually, they even merge with their
Digimon and fight as one against the main threat: not a mere villain but an anti-virus
program that invaded the real world becoming an eldritch abomination called the
D-Reaper that assimilates everything in its path to retard the evolution of
intelligent life on all layers of reality.
Badass.
“But
Tony,” you say, “while that does indeed sound badass, it doesn’t seem nearly as
earth-shattering as you made it out to be!
Could it be that the blinders of nostalgia have elevated this show
beyond its logical place in your memory into something not worthy of the praise
you laud upon it?” First of all, none of
my friends are that eloquent so bugger off.
Second of all, what would you say if the comic relief in…any given show
really, was some annoying little guy with a big opinion of himself? The main characters make fun of him and the audience
gets a laugh out of his antics for say half the series. Then, he gets an episode or two to himself,
and we see that he takes it personally when we laugh at him. He just wants to matter god damn it! So he makes himself a deal with the devil so
to speak, power for servitude. But
somehow, our comic relief got the long end of the stick for once in his life
and he goes rogue. Then he goes on a
goddamned killing spree. He’s finally
strong enough to destroy everything he hates, and what follows is the death of
a major character, followed by what is tantamount to the destruction of his
soul—Digimon reincarnate, but another Digimon can absorb their “data” and
prevent it from happening.
This
dead character was a warrior of true bravery and knightly virtue and there is
no way he is coming back. And his human
partner, yet another comic relief
character, is now left bereft alone, robbed of the friend and companion she
always dreamed of, and she doesn’t smile again.
And then the D-Reaper gets her.
You may have heard the phrase “shoo out the clowns” in regards to when
the comic-relief characters are removed from the action to allow for a serious
moment. This show doesn’t so much shoo
the clowns away as much as it traumatizes them until they’re incapable of being
funny.
All of
this is to say nothing of the fact that show deals with what would actually
happen if extra-dimensional monsters started psychically bonding to children in
modern day Japan to fight off yet more monsters along with a cosmic horror for
flavor. Government cover-ups that entail
the killing of all Digimon who enter the real world be they good or bad, for
example. Mind you, there’s no way to
keep this all out of the public eye once a wild boar the size of a city block
destroys half the town.
And
then there’s the ending. Usually a show
like this would end with the kids and monsters separating from each other with
a few good natured quips, after which they emerge as better people and move on
with their lives. Well, this show
reminds us that they essentially went through a war together and bonded in ways
that few people ever do, having actually become the same being on multiple occasions. Why would they separate at all? Because the Digimon have become infected with
the same weapon that killed the D-Reaper, which wasn’t destroyed by a well
placed gigalaser[3]
but by a team of scientists working round the clock to invent a
counter-anti-virus while our brave heroes stalled for time and kept the thing
from expanding. The monster friends will
die if they don’t leave our world forever.
No one bothered to tell the kids this until the last minute; why tell
children anything really, even when they risked their goddamned lives for the
sake of every living thing more complex than a few cells? The kids are understandably pissed, and the
last we see of Takato he is a broken young man (at least until the really out of place movie).
Oh
yes, and to quote TV Tropes: “There isn't a single drop of blood on this
series, making it suitable for
7-year-old children and above.” Don’t
click that by the way, Tv Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.
Right,
now we’ll walk off that emotional roller coaster ride with some good old
fashioned Pokémon video games! Before we
get started, let me share this conversation I had earlier this year (names
changed for protection):
Woodrow Baghoul
Wilson: Every game that came out this year has a sad or disappointing ending
L
ME: Pokémon White 2 ends with you busting an
international crime-ring, becoming a multi-billion dollar movie star, and
Pokémon league champion.
Now
Digimon has been dominating the majority of this list because it actually has a
plot and is longer than 90 minutes. But
the games are where Pokémon shines, and where people forget that Digimon is a
thing. What’s interesting about the
games is that the basic structure of each game is about the same: pick a
starting Pokémon, go on a journey, collect eight gym badges, go to the League
and fight the Fantastic Four I mean the Elite Four, and at some point you foil
an international crime ring. Wait
what? See the plots of each game are
vastly different even though each one has all of those elements in that
order. It’s like it’s trying to be a
slice of life piece like the anime but all this plot keeps getting in the
way. “Ugh, I’m trying to win a Pokémon beauty contest but this terrorist cell
that’s been haunting my every step for the past few miles is holding the
television station hostage! Snore.”
Even
the plots are somewhat generic: every terrorist organization you fight is
called team something or other for Christ’s sake! But it’s not the elements that matter so much
as the variation. Red and Blue, the
original games, have you fighting Team Rocket, which is essentially the
mafia. They racketeer Pokémon while
masking themselves as a legitimate business, such as a department store or even
the last gym battle! Giovanni, their
leader, even looks like a pimp!
Gold and Silver deal with the fallout of your actions in Red and Blue, as
the internal conflict within Team Rocket following your defeat of Giovanni has
caused them to splinter and scatter themselves across a new region, with everyone
from petty crooks selling bullshit cures to animal abusers to violent thieves
and terrorists sporting a Team Rocket logo.
They actually do take over a radio station, in hopes of finding their
beloved boss Giovanni (they don’t know how radios work). But that’s not all, your rival Gary FUCKING
Oak, while entertaining, has been replaced with a character named Silver who
PLOT TWIST is also looking for Giovanni because PLOT TWIST he’s Giovanni’s son! And the final boss is PLOT TWIST Red, the
protagonist form the previous game!
Aughughallgh!!!!11
What’s
that? You don’t know who that is? What happened to Ash? Oh, Ash is one of the possible preprogrammed
names for your character in the original games.
I don’t know why they even had those because you were free to make up
your own name from the very beginning.
Canonically, the character in the game is named Red, in Gold and Silver his name is Gold in the original and Ethan in the recent
remake. Unlike in the anime, you get a
new character in the beginning of each game instead of it just being the same
guy traveling from town to town and abandoning his Pokémon. Incidentally, Ash is named after Satoshi
Tajiri, creator of Pokémon, and Gary is names after Shigeru Miyamoto, who
basically is Nintendo.
Anyway
the third generation of games, Ruby and Sapphire, nixed Team Rocket altogether
and replaced them with Teams Aqua and Magma, who are essentially warring cults
venerating different legendary Pokémon, trying to awaken them and use their
power to change the world in their own image.
Aqua wants to flood the earth, and Magma wants to dry up the seas. Naturally, you cram their respective deities
into tiny balls and force them into dogfights for your amusement. Naturally.
The
fourth generation, Diamond and Pearl (and Platinum) which as I’ve said before is where I stopped caring but
it turns out to be really fun, is sort of self-referential and
tongue-in-cheek. It’s like, yeah, this
is a Pokémon game, lol. But not in a bad
way. The individual members of Team
Galactic make it clear that they are hapless losers whose only purpose is to be
beaten up by you and NPCs openly make fun of the more convoluted game
mechanics. Oh, but it’s also probably
the darkest Pokémon generation until the next one. The leader of Team Galactic, Cyrus, is
essentially space-Hitler. No seriously,
the creators of the game said in an interview that they wanted to capture how
Hitler managed to turn a crippled nation into a horrific killing machine. You seriously walk in on a Galactic Rally
that’s like Triumph of the Will but
with a bunch of losers in bowl cuts instead of Germans. His goal is to capture Arceus, the Pokémon
who is essentially God. No seriously.
Our
Pokéfather
Who
looks like a mechanical deer
Hallowed
be they name
Arceus,
who created the universe
Divider of matter and anti-matter
Who gave the physical world to the
two Pokémon of Space and Time
(Who
look goofy as hell, sadly)
And
who gave anti-matter to Giratina
(Who
looks badass and is Ghost/Dragon type)
And
when Giratina did misbehave
He did
banish the Ghost/Dragon for his sins to dwell forever in the Reverse World
To
languish in a realm without the laws of physics
Yours
is the Time
And
the Space
And
the Anti-matter forever and ever, Amen.
So like a punk Cyrus tries to summon robot-deer God and
the ritual goes wrong. How the Reverse
World else could it have gone? He
doesn’t summon God, he summons the Pokémon equivalent of the Devil, and the
game proceeds to show us that we are but worms when Cyrus, the man who has been
a scourge and a terror upon the fair land of Sinnoh, is devoured on the instant
by the Father of Lie types.
Needless to say, you can cram both God and the Devil
into tiny balls and make them fight for your profit and amusement.
Now
the final and (in my opinion) best generation is the fifth one, comprising of Black and White versions and their
direct sequels. White 2 by the way is the only time I’ve used the female
protagonist because the male protagonist looks like the king of Douche Island
(I now love Microsoft Word because it insisted that Douche Island be
capitalized). Why is this generation the
best? Because you get to fight PeTA.
Team
Plasma is a parody of PeTA, let’s just throw that out there. They make you question how exactly all this (gestures at Pokémon world)
works. You say you’re befriending the
creatures and helping them achieve their true potential, but they don’t really
have a choice in the matter do they? Do
you like Mudkips? Does your Mudkip like you, or is that just the Stockholm
Syndrome talking? Where do you get off
man?
Of
course, they come across as self-righteous assholes because if you don’t fall
for their shtick they sic their own Pokémon on you and try to steal your for
their own good of course. But it soon
becomes apparent that their whole plan is to become the dominant philosophy in
the region, and then as the old adage goes “if you criminalize guns, only
criminals will have guns” though “guns” is replaced with “electric rodents and
fire-breathing dragons and horrible rock-men, oh my”. But not all of them are like that! N, one of their leaders and essentially their
messiah, truly believes that Pokémon would be better off without humans
interfering in their lives. You still
fight him of course, but he has a different team every time because he
befriends local Pokémon and asks them
to fight with him once. By the time the
sequels roll around, N has split off from the original Plasma and once again
there’s a Team Civil War on our hands, but this time its animal rights
activists vs. animal abusers! It’s
brilliant.
And of
course there’s the whole thematic struggle of the generation: Truth versus
Ideals. Is it foolish to try to impose
our will on reality or is it a misery to accept the world as it is? Now of course this is a kids’ game so there’s
never any real Pokémon vs. People violence and they try to portray the world as
a happy little paradise where everyone becomes BFFs with their chosen monsters,
but there are always horror stories at the very fringe of the games if you look
closely enough. Species of Pokémon that
stalk people out in the in the desert, a trainer that was left in a vegetative
state for abusing his telepathic monster, Team Rocket cutting off the tails of
wild Pokémon to sell as a bullshit herbal medicine, Pokémon Devil eating Space
Hitler alive (oh wait that happens right in front of you, never mind). The world of Pokémon as presented to the
player is in itself an ideal of what it ought to be. Is it wrong to hide the uglier truths of the
world, or should you hold onto your ideals in the hopes that one day they will become truth?
Oh
shit, that got all heavy and philosophical, here’s a penis joke. That was it.
Now
the fifth generation is somewhat controversial because it tried to sort of
start over, with all new Pokémon, and none of the previous ones available until
the aftergame, and a few other changes that only people who play competitively
will notice but who cares those guys are losers. EV training?
No thank you, I enjoy video
games. So that’s as good a segue as any
into our final topic, Digimon: Frontier!
Frontier is considered the black sheep
of the Digimon franchise because it actually tried to take the series in a new
direction. I mean, I love Tamers but that show still followed the
same formula of “kids and monsters travel between their world and ours to fight
off evil monsters except there’s LOTS OF FEELS IN THIS ONE”; Tamers was brilliant because of the
difference in the details, it was a
favorite dish prepared with exotic new ingredients. In contrast, Frontier was a completely
different meal that featured the same main ingredient; one could say the
difference between a hamburger and a steak sandwich. Hmm, now I’m hungry….
One hamburger
and several cheap cuts of beef later, I’m here to tell you that Frontier gets a lot of undeserved flack
for being different. Honestly it’s a
different kind of story from the ones Digimon is used to. Not as tonally dark as Tamers but not as light-hearted as Adventure 01 and 02, and
for the first and only time in the franchise, our heroes do not receive monster
companions. As the chosen ones, they can
become Digimon! This is just the logical conclusion of the
increased interactivity started in Tamers. Since most Digimon are sentient beings, it
doesn’t really make any sort of sense for them to need human companions, unlike
Pokémon who as I‘ve said are simply very clever animals. By making the humans and their partners one
and the same they get to be relevant.
Another
thing that’s different is how “the call to adventure” as TV tropes would call
it, is made. In Adventures 01 and 02, our heroes just stumble into the magical
Digital World. In Tamers, the kids bring
the Digital World here when Takato accidentally creates his companion Guilmon,
and they only journey there for a single story arc. In Frontier, a literal call is sent out to
hundreds of kids’ cell phones asking them to go on a journey. Someone in the Digital World knows that
humans will be significant but not who or why, so they try to recruit as many
as possible. The kids pile into a train
station that wasn’t there the other day, filled with trains that lack
conductors and have faces like monsters and animals. Then they set off into the unknown, to a
Digital World that has literally been dissolving for ages now, with huge gaps
in reality passable only by the Trailmons’ rails, which inexplicably crisscross
even the emptiness in space.
The
story of Frontier seems more like a
classic children’s adventure fantasy than a monster anime. I have made vague allusions to Narnia
throughout this essay, and I can say that Frontier
is the one series that comes close to capturing the same feel. Just a sort of otherworldliness that doesn’t
come through as much in the other series.
The Adventures’ Digital World
for example didn’t seem to have much of a history behind it. There were allusions to event that happened
long ago but these are almost all things that impact the plot directly. The main eight Digimon for example were all
raised together so they could be together when their kids came. In Tamers, the Digital World is a bit more
fleshed out; it is ruled over by several Digital Sovereigns who venerate the Catalyst,
a program that makes evolution possible (I refuse to say “digivolve”, wait
dammit), with the admin programs called “digi-gnomes” acting like angels or
fairies and the D-Reaper being like a devil figure, but this is all somewhat
undercut by the fact that Tamers plays up the fact that these are all mere
representations of data from the real world and all their vast history only
dates back to the early 90s.
The
World of Frontier however, feels like a real world that has existed longer than
say, Mario. We learn that the central
conflict of the first story arc was caused by a love triangle between the three angelic rulers of antiquity. When Ophanimon chose Seraphimon, Cherubimon
thought that it was because they were both humanoid creatures and he was a
beast-like Digimon, which led to a massive war between Beast and Human Digimon,
resulting in the death of Seraphimon, the imprisonment of Ophanimon, and the
subjugation of the world by Cherubimon and his beasts. Devine warriors from both classes who sought
to end the conflict were martyred, but
their spirits are still out there somewhere, and whoever finds them will be
able to gain their power, perhaps enough to kill an Angel. Nowhere in that summary were the key words
present in the back stories of the other series; evolution, human children,
evil, the word digital. Anyone could
claim a spirit by the by. There’s a
whole story arc about an opposing team of Digimon who possess all the Beast
Spirits.
If
this show had not been about Digimon, the plot could serve very well as a
regular fantasy series. Children from
all over the world get a call to go on a journey and take a train ride to a
magical land with a back story of love, betrayal and racism, in order to claim the
spirits of fallen heroes in hopes of becoming them? Fuck.
Yes. Oh and the finally got rid
of the damned “digi” appended to every instance of evolution, calling the
process of becoming a Digimon “Spirit Evolution”. I’m not one of those guys who get pissed off
whenever they change a term slightly in the American dub of an anime, but the
“digi” attached to bloody everything
in the previous series made me very aware
that I was watching a cartoon. We get it
you’re not Pokémon, move on. Finally, as
one last reason that Frontier was
awesome, they finally changed the dopey theme song into a vastly superior one
that at least gives you some inkling as to what the show is actually
about. Behold: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eOJsm9ubGk
So in
conclusion, I am a manchild who watches children’s television programs and
attaches deep meanings to them so he won’t feel dumb while also playing
children’s video games and bonding with imaginary spark-mice and transsexual
frog-rabbits BUT GOD HELP YOU IF YOU JUDGE MY BABY. Also, remember Monster Rancher? I liked
that show.
Oh hey, Tamers
wasn’t all that dark; everything I
said was true but it’s still a kids show and full of goofy kid things and
adorably cute moments. Behold:
OH GOD NO THE FEELS MANAGED TO SNEAK IN THERE IN THE
MIDDLE
[1] Munchlax
[2]
For those of you not in the know, Paradise
Lost is an epic poem by John Milton heralded as being very good artistic,
epic in scope and grandeur, the Lord of
the Rings of epic poetry.
[3]
This made up word makes this comparative essay officially longer than any other
one I have written for this blog. Yay?
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