POP CULTURE AND POCKET MONSTERS
TYBA, 2020-2021
It is the year 2016. Killer clowns are on the loose. Kim
Kardashian has been bullied off Instagram. Hamilton has blown us all away. And
amidst it all, a wild Pikachu appears!
2016 was a big year for pop culture. But what none of us saw coming was the swarms of people that would take to the street in search of stray Pokémon. From mildly inconveniencing peaceful museum-goers to near-death experiences, the Pokémon Go phase was chaotic, to say the least. And though, like any good pop culture sensation, the Pokéfever fizzled out over time, what it did do was reiterate the cultural relevance of Pokémon two decades after its original release.
So, how did Pokémon stay relevant in
a world where trends die out almost as soon as they come into existence? How
did a video game, meant for children, turn into a global cultural phenomenon,
where it seemed no one was immune to this newfound ‘Pokémania’?
Pokémon saw its origin in Japan in
1996. It was the brain-baby of Satoshi Tajiri, a game junkie with a love for
collecting critters. It made its debut on western shores two years after and
the rest is history. Or so it seems.
Pokémon’s initial success rode the
wave of previously successful Japanese products including new technology like
the Gameboy, stories like the Power Rangers and iconic characters like Hello
Kitty, which influenced childhood consumption around the world around (Allison,
2004). The popularity of the video game eventually gave way to a card game,
board game, multiple films, a TV series and plushie toys all bearing the
Pokémon brand. Or, to take a page from critical theory, it gave way to the
“freedom to choose what is always the same.” With every medium it co-opted
since its release, Pokémon advertised itself with its own merchandise.
In the three years since its launch
Pokémon already had a massive culture industry in the making. It was crossing
geographical borders, cultural borders and was even venturing into non-gaming
spheres. And as Pokémon made its way into the western markets it deliberately
masked its ‘Japaneseness’ for the sake of global appeal - something Iwabuchi
(2004) called mukokuseki or
culturally odourless.
What this means is that Pokémon, as
we know it now, represents no overt customs or practices of Japanese culture.
Though the animé style is traditionally Japanese, everything else from the
character features and outfits to the entire fictional world is de-ethnicized
and made mukokuseki. As a marketing
strategy, it was genius. The more inherently mukokuseki the product; the more it suppressed Japan’s cultural
odour the easier it would be to repackage and sell across borders.
The nature of the content itself was
modified for the western audience. Satoshi was renamed Ash. Plot points that
explored a more morally ambiguous portrayal of good and evil in the original
Japanese version turned into clear-cut dichotomies of good and bad. The
aggressive localization sought to appease the American audience. And since the
global success of Pokémon was contingent on its partnerships with American
corporations, almost any link to its culture of origin was erased. The products
were licensed in over 160 languages and 30 countries and it was this
Americanized version of Pokémon that was eventually exported to the rest of the
world. The TV series, movies and even Pokémon names were translated across
languages to allow for a customizable experience of this global product. From
the way in which they consumed the content to their choice of starter Pokémon,
Pokéfans found their own, unique way of defining and exploring the world for
themselves. Most of these choices, however, were a mere illusion of agency.
The culture industry critiques the
standardization that is so prevalent in mass culture as it stagnates creativity
by churning out products that are exceedingly similar and by replicating
patterns that have worked in the past. Had Pokémon resisted the culture
industry, however, it may not have been the global phenomenon that it is today.
With technology on its side and ingenious marketing, Pokémon captured the
global market. To become the cultural phenomenon that we know and love today,
what remained was for it to capture the hearts of its audience as well.
Satoshi Tajiri, the man behind the
phenomenon, grew up in post-World War II Japan. With industrialization on the
rise, Japan was well on its way to being one of the largest economies in the
world. But as the industries grew and suburbs sprawled, natural resources began
to disappear. Unchecked urbanization ate into public spaces for play and with
nowhere else to go really, children increasingly chose to stay indoors.
Academic pressure to excel and long hours at ‘cram schools’ furthered the isolation
they faced forcing them to become what the Japanese called otaku.[1] As
a natural consequence, the youth spent more time in the virtual world than in
the real one.
So, when Tajiri created Pokémon in
the 90s, what he was really doing was simulating a version of his childhood.
Drawing from his own childhood, he fused his lived experience with his virtual
one to give us this much-loved video game. To add to the nostalgic value of the
Pokémon world was its iconic kawaisa[2] or
cuteness.
Pokémon created a sort of simulacrum
for a form of childhood that had once existed. Players embark on adventures,
compete for badges and as no single cartridge contains all existing Pokémon, if
children are to complete their collection of critters, they would have to
communicate and trade with other players. Social interaction was built into the
very fabric of the game.
Pokémon gave an entire generation
that was slowly seeing the end of social interaction as it once existed, a way
to build a new community in the new reality of the technologically driven
world. Children had a space to talk Pokémon stats, share cards, and build
expertise in a world that only they were privy to.
As Pokémon’s popularity surged
through the global market, this imagined world started becoming more and more
real. The characters, though they did not exist in a physical, tangible space,
existed in a very real emotional space where children formed attachments to
their Pokémon. The arrival of Pokémon-themed merch gave expression to this
attachment. Over time this virtual world became a reality in the real world
creating what Baudrillard (1994) called the ‘hyperreal.’
“A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of difference.” (Baudrillard, 1994)
With the bombardment of Pokémon- in
the media, at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, in references made by other
popular shows like the Simpsons, the line between what the original referent[3] to
the game was and what it had become, became increasingly blurred. What
resulted was this captivating, hyperreal world that had entrenched itself in
the lived experiences of its consumers.
All of these themes culminated into
what can only be called the frenzy of Pokémon GO in 2016. The augmented reality
app, like every one of Pokémon’s other offshoots, took the same standardized
theme and converted it into something spectacularly new and exciting.
 |
| A user playing the game Pokémon Go |
The technology alone, however,
cannot explain the explosive popularity of the app. Ingress, the predecessor to
Pokémon Go, used the same AR-based game design and was not nearly as popular
simply because Pokémon had what Ingress didn’t- a generation of loyal fans that
had grown up with Pokémon.
The
nostalgia of having spent hours collecting critters and building friendships
brought back a little bit of the Pokémania that had so intensely taken over in
the early 2000s. In giving their fans a way to live out the virtual reality
that had consumed so much of their childhood, Pokémon Go was the final step in
solidifying the Pokémon simulacra. It seamlessly merged the real with the
fictional and did what even Disneyland could not do, by bringing into existence
the imaginary world to your very real doorstep.
“It is the map that precedes the territory” (Baudrillard, 1994).
And Pokémon
GO ended up reframing an entire system of symbols. Mundane structures in our every day
realities became Pokéstops or hotspots for rare Pokémon. The game that
simulated the outdoors indoors, was taken back out again. Players could live out
the life of the trainers that they had grown up watching; find Pokémon in
spaces that existed in their own reality - a wild Squirtle at Churchgate
Station; a stray Geodude somewhere on Charni Road.
The phenomenon that was Pokémon Go was the climax to a sequence of events that date back to the late 80s. Mass-produced Pokémon content through the culture industry laid the framework for this hyperreal reflection of reality. It serves to remind us that when it comes to pop culture, sequels rule. However, while it is important to be aware and critical of the mass-produced culture, as an ardent fan of Pokémon, I don’t suppose I can criticize too much.
In a world as anxiety-inducing as
the one we live in, a little bit of mindless fun is more than welcome. And who
wouldn’t choose to gallivant across town hunting for pocket monsters when the
alternative is to face reality in all its drab horror? But when it comes down
to it, I do believe that people have agency and can exert that agency through
popular culture. In 2019, Pokémon Go
aided and abetted the protests in Hong Kong as the police couldn’t very well
arrest activists for playing a game in a public space. As recently as July of
2020, Niantic Labs announced that it would donate $10m in profits from its
summer Pokémon Go Fest to causes supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
Pop culture, in its own way, gives
the masses a platform to shift power dynamics and make people in power
accountable for their actions. Art imitates life and life, art. So, at some
point, the hyperreal does become our lived reality. It becomes a space within
which we can explore new realities, express and exert change and within which
we begin to exist.
- Otaku - Roughly translated to a fan with an almost obsessive addiction to the fandom to the extent that it overpowers almost everything else in their life.
- Kawaisa - Involves emotional attachments to imaginary creations/creatures with resonances to childhood and also Japanese traditional culture (Allison, 2004).
- For the Pokémon world, the original referent was Tajiri’s childhood based on which the games were created. It simulated social play that used to happen outdoors and that was replaced by video games and virtual worlds.
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