Hello, my name is Josie. I'm 21 years old and I have never played Pokémon.
I had an awesome childhood. Really, I did. My parents gave us all kinds of great toys and my brothers and I spent many hours indulging in some Spongebob or Rugrats after playing with Star Wars action figures for the better part of the day. I ate cereal every morning for breakfast. Forts were a week-long endeavor. It was glorious.
But it did not include Pokémon.
I was raised in a "conservative house." That didn’t mean I spent weekends watching Adventures from the Book of Virtues or running around in long khaki skirts, but it did mean that every now and then something within the culture--whether at school or otherwise--would pop up that my mom or dad felt we shouldn’t engage in. The first of these was the fact that after I turned five, we stopped celebrating Halloween, and the second was Harry Potter. Yes, my parents fell victim—however briefly—to the idea of those books being about witchcraft and sorcery and black magic and whatever else conservative groups thought they were about without ever cracking a single one open. It’s not fair to place the entire blame for that one on my mom, who revoked her decision and changed her opinion entirely on the issue by the time I was like, eleven. I could have read them if I wanted to. I chose not to read those books because they were big and big books freaked me out for some reason as a child, and I never bothered to go back and read them later on.
And the third...was, well, Pokémon. It was one of those things that have more impact in hindsight, as I didn’t recognize at the time just how influential this series of games was not just on that genre of entertainment, but on my generation as a whole. Everyone played this game. Everyone's heard of it, everyone can tell you what the silly little catch phrase is, and everyone can give you the name of at least one Pokémon. It’s become so ubiquitous that you don’t have to know anything about the game to understand its basic premise; kind of like Monopoly or Mario Kart.
The game has inspired fan art, fan fiction, started the writing and drawing careers of many people, and basically been a catalyst for about 80% of the current creative population between the ages of twenty and thirty.
And you’d think that given the fact that my parents let me play Neopets for hours on end every day for about five straight years, they wouldn’t have had an issue with Pokémon. It’s just a game that features a bunch of made-up animals and people trying to capture and train them to fight each other, except it’s legal and not nearly as horrible as what happens in real life. I mean hell—I grew up playing games like Killer Instinct and Mortal Kombat alongside my dad and brothers. But no, the problem wasn’t with the fighting or even the game itself. My parents’ main beef was the television show and with the fact that the animals evolved.
Yeah. As far as I can remember, that’s the only issue they had with it. It's another one of those things where the people making the complaints have never taken the time to explore the material, lest they see that the thing they're so afraid of isn't actually that destructive.
And to be fair, this ban on Pokémon was so lax that I can remember on one occasion I put the show on because there was nothing else to watch and my dad came downstairs, saw me watching it, and this is how our conversation went:
Dad: You know you’re not supposed to be watching this, right?
Me: Yeah. I was just flipping channels. It’s the only thing on.
Dad: Oh.
Then he proceeded to watch it with me for the duration of the episode.
I developed little interest in the show or the game because I knew my parents "didn’t want me to be" involved with it, but I could have pushed those boundaries if I wanted to, and it wouldn't have taken much for them to break. I think if I asked them now why they didn’t want us to play that game or watch the show, they probably couldn’t even tell me and then feel stupid when I explained to them why I thought that ban existed. But after spending so many years training myself to avoid the game or the show, I never felt the desire to catch myself up.
So long story short, back in April, Google did their whole April Fool's Day prank involving their mobile Google Maps app and sticking Pokémon all across the "globe." A friend of mine mentioned the gimmick and, because I'm a sucker for mindless entertainment, I jumped on the bandwagon. I didn't catch 'em all, but I did get into a discussion with my friend about how I had never played a single Pokémon game, even after parental bans stopped having any effect on me. Come Christmas time, I received a gift from this friend that contained my own Nintendo DS and three different Pokémon games: Leaf Green, Soul Silver, and Platinum. He set me up to begin my Pokémon adventure, even down to which one I needed to play first.
After I put my little Leaf Green Gameboy Advance game into the slot and spent a solid minute trying to find the power button on the DS, I booted up the game and began delving into the world of this cultural phenomenon that took me far too long to explore.
Over the next...however many days it takes me to complete this game, I will be blogging my progress here. I'm going to clarify once again that I have no idea what the heck I am doing. That's the thing about getting into something late in the game: You're lightyears behind everyone else and there's a lot of slack to pick up. But the good part is that there are plenty of resources to help me out. I'll be consulting with my friend as well as bulbapedia for help when I inevitably get stuck, but for the most part, this is going to be me screwing up and failing and probably yelling a lot.
Here's to hoping I can make it through the game with my sanity in tact.
(Side note: I'm still planning on continuing my other on-going project, so hopefully I can do them well simultaneously.)
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