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Chris Nathan's avatar

This is beautiful, thank you.

I remember taking my own children to the Mall of America for Pokemon events, and later, Magic the Gathering competitions. As much as I love games, these were worlds that - though I tried - I couldn't really enter, understand or belong to. My boys, however, inhabited them with great focus, enthusiasm, exuberance, even joy. In retrospect it is probably better that they belonged only or primarily to childhood. The beauty of Pokemon was evident to an adult, as were the mythical narratives and stylized emotional patterns, but the magical part of it belonged exclusively to the child.

I wonder if the upset people feel about what they perceive as Pokemon violations in subsequent iterations of the franchise is due to the sadness one feels when facing the loss of childhood itself. Your description of your son's "purity of joy" and then the aftershock of your own joy echoing his suggests the exception which proves the rule. In Bob Dylan's great "Mississippi" he sings 'Well the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay / You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way.' We can remember innocence, but we can never really recover it.

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