you guys! vote for this design! it is great and designed by ray b!
Some months ago I read on Bulbapedia about speculations/interpretations explaining that Generation I theme was genetical engineering - That is argued through using pokemon as examples of that genetic mutations, such as ditto, mewtwo, the starter pokemon, fossils and some others. (You can find…
I am so not in the mood to write a response to this but I think it might be necessary, so that the response is still timely. Also, I want to procrastinate from my actual paper that I should be writing. There are huge flaws in both of these arguments which I would like to point out very quickly.
The “Atomic Bomb” theory is guilty of participating in post-colonial thought which assigns any narrative from “other” culture characteristics of that culture: we want to think of Pokemon as a story of the history of Japan, because it comes from Japan (thus ascribing it a correlation to the atom bomb) and not as a self-operating narrative. We want to see Pokemon adhere and represent a “cultural” character, a fetishized, over-simplified cultural character.
The “Dream Theory” of Pokemon is a little less problematic, but is sort of too easy. Any work of fiction can be thought of as a dream of the main character, especially any that include surrealistic and fantasy elements. The idea that different Pokemon or characters represent the Jungian Shadow (the writer of the article didn’t identify the idea as such, I’m adding the proper critical term retro-actively) of Ash (his homosexuality, for example) is fair; although a dream-work (even a fictional one) would be a lot more obfuscated and concatenated. James is gay and evil because Ash is secretly gay. He needs to, unconsciously, associate James with evil because he does not want to accept his own homosexuality: he has to “other” his homosexuality. Fine. But again, too easy. The symbolism within a dream is never that simple, dream symbols are overdetermined, the relationship of sign to signifier is never 1 to 1.
Let’s be real, Pokemon doesn’t make any sense. There is no continuity, no logical system. The symbolism or meaning of different art designs or characteristics of the fictional Poke-world are only allocated after the creation of these tropes. Pokemon is a series created by Nintendo to sell toys and games: not a project that we can expect to adhere to conventions of rationality, not one that we can expect to hold up to certain forms of literary criticism. Because of the nonsense of the Pokemon, we only assign a coherent narrative or logical system after the fact: in the same way that when we retell a dream we give it a narrative that the dream itself never actually had.
While I certainly sympathize with any attempts to understand pop-culture phenomenon as more complex than their surface level, we should be careful of how we go about such analysis so as not to conform or fall back on over-simplification of the text and the theory we apply to the text.
-eric
Well, I made this with a friend in mine who is leaving to go on tour forever. His name is Yellowbird and this custom painted Gameboy is in honor of him and pursuing your dreams and forgoing society to do what you love.
More custom gameboys to come. Please let us know what you think and if you would like to own one.
~Sam
