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.
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.
Yeah, I think that's definitely a part of it. We get older and our love for a franchise continues to grow with nostalgic vitality, only to have it remind us that we have aged out of its core demographic. A loss of innocence. A reminder that we are no longer who we were, that these cherished experiences are decades behind us.
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.
Yeah, I think that's definitely a part of it. We get older and our love for a franchise continues to grow with nostalgic vitality, only to have it remind us that we have aged out of its core demographic. A loss of innocence. A reminder that we are no longer who we were, that these cherished experiences are decades behind us.
Some struggle to let that go.
You make a very good point. You can't go home again.