Pokemon Fans Hate Pokemon

or, growing out of a franchise is not bad

Pokemon has been a part of my life since a kid my mom told me was my friend who I definitely did not want to be friends with asked me if I wanted to watch something cool. I was eight or nine years old, trapped at this strange kid’s house — her name was Andrea — and didn’t care what Andrea thought was cool but I also had nothing to do but spend time with Andrea until enough time went by that I could awkwardly ask to call my mom, and watching something cool seemed like a better idea than actually playing with her.

Andrea took out a VHS, popped it in the tape player, and I saw Pikachu for the first time.

This was several months before Pokemon premiered in the US. I remember that day, too, because commercials told me it was going to happen. I remember begging for a Gameboy just so I could play the game when it was finally released. I met a girl at a Pokemon event at the Mall of America who remains one of my best friends to this day.

I watched every episode of Pokemon, often racing home from school to catch it. I bought Pokemon cards and learned how to compete against my friends. I discovered years later that most people only collected the cards and never bothered to actually play the game. But my friends and I lived Pokemon cards. We even adapted the rules so four of us could fight simultaneously. When we were apart, we meticulously built our decks, determining just how many potions and energy cards we needed. I formed a killer Grass Deck while my little brother had an amazing Water Deck. Together, the two of us made an almost unbeatable Fighting Deck with the cards left over. But all our decks were nothing compared to my best friend’s Normal Deck.

She was unstoppable, with her Fearows and Likitungs and Snorlaxes.

At night I dreamt of a different world. A better world. A world where Pokemon were real. Where young kids who were my age ventured off into the world with their very own Pokemon to enter a world of Pokemon battles and self-sufficiency. A world where I collected Pokemon, collected badges, formed my own unbreakable friendships with my lovely and powerful pocket monsters. I dreamt of friends who joined me on my adventure, the way Misty and Brock joined Ash Ketchum.

I played and watched Pokemon until it was painfully uncool, which happened shockingly fast. Years later, almost everyone my age admitted to never really giving up on Pokemon, even as we mocked people who openly loved it. But I still replayed Blue and Red and Yellow, still dreamt of a better world than this, where Pokemon lived and children like me went off alone into the world to become Pokemon Masters.

It wasn’t until some strange and minor episode of Satanic Panic ripped through the Catholic community my parents belonged to that Pokemon were largely severed from my life. Pokemon were, of course, evil, and so all those decks we built so carefully were taken away and burnt. We were banned from Pokemon in all its many forms, but I learned, then, to lie and hide my life from my parents. My brother and I didn’t get rid of the Gameboy games. We could give up the cards but never the games. But the ban at home and the social pressure outside it did cause Pokemon to fall away from my life.

When Pokemon Sword and Shield were announced, all those old dreams hit me again. It wasn’t just that this was a 3D version of those older Gameboy games. This was one that promised a more open world approach to the series, where Pokemon wander the wilds. You can see them! You can try to catch them! Some of them sometimes get huge!

It had been nearly 20 years since I played a Pokemon game but I was sold. Didn’t even have to think about it. I wanted it.

Imagine my surprise when I saw how Pokemon fans responded.

Anger, hatred, disappointment. These diehard fans who, unlike me, never left the world of Pokemon behind, were irate over the promises of this new game.

I honestly couldn’t understand. The game wasn’t even out, had only just been announced, but people were so certain that it was some kind of betrayal. Mystified, I just stepped away and ignored all this, excited to finally play Pokemon again.

And I did play it. I played the shit out of it. My wife and I gifted each other the two games for Christmas so we could play simultaneously. That Christmas season, we sat on couches next to each other and played Pokemon for the first time in years. We talked strategies against Gym Leaders, traded Pokemon, marveled at the sheer joy of being, finally, a trainer in the wilds.

Sword and Shield are not perfect games. They’re light on story and aren’t nearly as open as I hoped, but I honestly enjoyed just about every minute that I played. Having not played a Pokemon game since Pokemon Yellow, it was exciting to see all the new systems, all the new types of Pokemon. The last time I played Pokemon, there weren’t Steel or Dark or Fairy types and there were only 151 total Pokemon, so I fell in love with the bounty of newness before me. There was a real joy to collecting Pokemon and leveling them up, coming to learn their idiosyncrasies. It’s a feeling I had forgotten. One I hadn’t felt since the last time I’d played Pokemon.

You see, I’m not really the collector type. I don’t try to 100% games or collect medals or badges to attach to my gaming profile. I honestly couldn’t care less about that aspect of gaming which seems so popular right now.

I have never Platinumed a game. Probably I never will.

But here, with Sword and Shield, I fell into that addictive loop. I didn’t just want more Pokemon — I wanted every Pokemon! I wanted every evolution! I’d feed them curries and make them love me! I’d pet them and throw balls and berries just to make them love me even harder!

Fifty hours sailed by me while I played. My Vulpix and Rillaboom and Corviknight and Pangoro carried me through so much of the game. They were precious to me in a way digital monsters hadn’t been for decades. They had seen me through so many difficult spots, so many battles, so many hours of wandering the wilds.

When I finally beat the game, I only felt joy. The story had been barebones, but it came in strong at the end, telling a devastating story of hubris and hope with strong ecofascist underpinnings that I simply did not expect to see in a game made for children.

I was satisfied. Utterly. Part of me wanted to start again and play all over. Play differently. Maybe specialize rather than try to collect every possible Pokemon.

Now that the game had come out, I assumed the fandom had calmed a bit, come to love the game they hated before they could even play it.

But no. The hate was somehow intensified.

Now with a trailer up at the top for Pokemon Legends: Arceus, I’m seeing much of the same. People are just pissed! They think it looks like garbage, that it’s being rushed, that it’s another cashgrab by a series that they both love and hate.

But when I saw that trailer, honestly, I got chills. More than Pokemon Sword and Shield, this is the Pokemon I’ve always wanted. The one I dreamt so long about. I don’t like Open World games (don’t get me started or I’ll write thousands of words about this too), but if there’s a series that would benefit from this approach, it would be Pokemon. Pokemon had always been light on story, with the real narrative beats coming from generative gameplay. You are the author of your own adventure. You choose what to specialize, what to catch, how to tackle problems, how to raise your Pokemon. But, previously, you always had to follow more or less the same path as everyone else who played the game.

Now we’re being offered the entire world and so many of the most diehard Pokemon fans are saying No. More than that, they’re saying Fuck No. Fuck you.

Fandoms are strange things. People have written millions of words about the toxicity of these kinds of communities and much fewer words are spent on why these communities are so important and powerful to so many people for so long. I don’t really want to talk about either, but I do think there’s one interesting aspect to the Pokemon fandom that is shared with a few others.

Pokemon is meant for children. It really is. I find this undeniable in ways other fandoms can sometimes skirt around. But I think that’s the important thing to remember here. While the original Pokemon fans may have grown up, the series has not grown up with them. This is quite a bit different from, say, Harry Potter, which really did age up with its original readers. But I think Star Wars might be the best analogous fandom.

Star Wars is a simple folktale set in a science fantasy universe. Wizards wielding swords of light battle robots shooting lasers. There’s Good and there’s Evil and people can slide between those poles, but most people are rooted on one side or the other.

Star Wars is made for children. Some will read that and feel offended. They shouldn’t. They probably first fell in love with Star Wars when they were a child. The fact that they’re 40 or 60 now and still cling to it, even as they hate more and more what it’s becoming, doesn’t change the fact that it’s made for children.

I’ve watched, in my lifetime, the loathed prequel trilogy become elevated by people my age. You know, people who were Anakin’s age when The Phantom Menace came out. They found a world worth falling in love with because that world was crafted for the 10 year olds they once were.

The same is going to happen with this sequel trilogy everyone hates (this is something I definitely will not ever write about).

You know who probably doesn’t hate it? Some 8 year old girl who will one day be a 28 year old woman writing a book about how, actually, the sequel trilogy is good.

I don’t care about Star Wars. I think the sequels I’ve seen are largely bad and the prequels I did see were mostly nonsense, but I also think the original trilogy is just okay. Even when I was a little kid, the only thing I liked about Star Wars was Darth Vader because there seemed something beautiful and horrifying about the tragedy of his caged body (I was a very strange child, yes).

But Star Wars is the only other fandom besides Pokemon that I can think of where adults still feel ownership over a franchise designed for children. The only fandom where the adults feel betrayed by the franchise ignoring their very adult wants and expectations out of a franchise they’ve given so much time and energy and love to.

Both fandoms, I think, have very real grievances. George Lucas may have had grand visions, but he was a bad writer and bad thinker and even worse director. He turned his work of love into a billion dollar business by exploiting the love and hope of those kids who fell in love with his original and groundbreaking movie. Disney swooped in solely to capitalize on the attachment people have for the franchise. The clumsiness of the sequel trilogy shows their disdain for fans of the series. They knew each one would generate billions so they didn’t even bother to make a coherent plan to link three movies people had been waiting forty years to see.

The Pokemon Company has become a media juggernaut in the same way. They built a multimedia project where every branch fed into the other. The show got you interested in the games which got you interested in the cards which got you interested in the plushies and on and on. Each new entry in the anime or games revealed a broadening world that would further sell plushies and cards and assorted trinkets.

Grieved Pokemon fans are probably correct when they assert that Game Freak and the Pokemon Company don’t care about quality because they know fans will eat it all up. They’re probably correct when they assert that the games hit a pinnacle and have been declining. I wouldn’t know. I can’t say. I was an apostate, only recently rechristened to the great god Pikachu.

All I can tell you is that Pokemon meant more than the world to me when I was a child. Today, as I look at Sword and Shield, at Legend: Arceus, I feel only hope. The hope the child that I was dreamt so often of. The better world I dreamt into existence, that shaped so many of my unsleeping, unhappy nights.

Maybe it’s because I wandered away from Pokemon for so long that I no longer feel any ownership to it, but I do find it strange to see so many adults just furious that the games meant for the children they once were continue to be made primarily for children.

Yes, I’d probably love a Pokemon game with a more complex story. I’d fall deeply for a Pokemon game made with the depth of God of War or Final Fantasy VII Remake. As awesome as that would be, it’s worth remembering why it will never be.

Pokemon is made for children. It always has been. It always will be.

And that’s good.

I feel it even more powerfully when I look at my son, who has come to love Pokemon the way I once did. I felt it achingly pure when he watched the episode Pikachu’s Goodbye, where dozens of Pikachu come on screen. My son screamed and just ran. He ran out of the room, down the hall, then back down the hall again to the room where Pokemon played on TV. He screamed again seeing all those Pikachus.

I remembered, in that moment, the purity of joy a child can find in Pokemon. The kind of joy I’m now so seemingly numb to. But I’ll tell you: seeing my son’s immense joy that couldn’t fit inside his body so he had to run and scream it out filled me with a joy so light and bright that, for a moment, I was that child I once was, discovering Pikachu for the first time.