Pokemon’s Dark Political Theory

loving-not-heyting:

So to be clear this post isn’t about the political message of the Pokemon games for us.  I think, for the most part, that’s pretty simple: be nice to animals (but not too nice), love conquers all, etc.  This is instead about the inner political logic of the Pokemon world itself, what its politics are from the inside.  And they are, I suspect, pretty darn weird.

So the jumping off point is that anyone you defeat in a Pokemon battle gives up pretty much whatever you want from them: money, status, entry to some guarded location, etc.  The one exception is their own Pokemon, who would remain loyal to them anyway.  And what’s weird is that this is true even of remorseless criminals.  Organised crime syndicates will just, like, give in to whatever demands you have once you win a battle against their leader, groups that are okay robbing and torturing and perpetrating terrorism.  Why?

The answer is that defeating an opponent in a Pokemon battle is a thinly veiled physical threat.  Even a fairly low-level Pokemon can inflict pretty serious damage on even an armed human being (think of the susceptibility of Steel-types to various attacks) while defending themselves pretty well, and the main means humans have of protecting themselves is carrying their own Pokemon.  Once your Pokemon have been defeated, you are at your opponents’ mercy, and it’s wiser to relent than to keep fighting yourself against their monstrous minions.

This also explains your inability to refuse fights.  The instruction manuals accompanying the games sometimes suggest that this is because doing so would be rude, but this is true only in the trivial sense that there is a deeply engrained custom of not doing so.  The reason for this custom is that refusing a fight is profoundly irrational: it means refusing to protect yourself from a threat of violent coercion in the only useful way available to you.  You could run, of course, but most Pokemon are faster than you.

This arrangement, of course, means that high-level Pokemon users wield an extraordinary amount of power.  This is why, when (for example) Team Rocket starts shit in Mahogany Town, it’s not the Pokemon equivalent of a SWAT team sent in, but the reigning Pokemon Champion of the region, and why it should have come as no surprise that Kanto’s dominant mob boss was also the most powerful Gym Leader in the area.

This also explains the relative (peaceful) anarchy that prevails in the Pokemon world.  Pokemon, the most powerful weapons available to people in this universe, are not really viable as an instrument of organised state authority.  They work best when each used exclusively by one individual: they are exceptionally loyal, take a lot of investment to raise well, and can’t be exchanged without serious cost.  A traded Pokemon will increase their stats less with each level up, and level up more quickly than their non-traded counterparts.  

That latter trait, levelling up faster, might sound like an advantage, but it really isn’t.  It takes more and more Gym badges (that is, signs of comparative accomplishment and ability) to control a higher-level Pokemon, so traded Pokemon become less reliable more quickly.  This creates a more general problem: the most powerful Pokemon will only obey the best Pokemon trainers, meaning that powerful Pokemon are an inherently scarce resource.  That Pokemon use Gym badges (which by design sift the wheat from the chaff of weak trainers preparing for the Elite Four) as a proxy for assessing comparative ability is much more plausible than that they intrinsically respect little pieces of metal, so “Just give everyone all the badges!” is not a solution.

There’s a popular fan theory that the Pokemon games are set a generation or so after a devastating Pokemon War, and this is true, but not in the way many think.  There was a Pokemon War, and it was devastating because of the instruments involved (trained Pokemon), but less because of their great power than the above concerns.  Pokemon are loyal to an individual and not a state or party, making wide-scale alliances and factions unstable, and the most powerful among them are precisely those hardest to tame or widely distribute.  

The War thus soon devolved into a bellum omnium contra omnes, one of all against all, with the greatest power vested in a relatively small number of hostile individuals.  It might be thought or hoped that they could amass armies to themselves, but this, too, was unfeasible: the way for a trainer to gain more power is by fighting, meaning that in putting his footsoldiers in the line of combat such a general would be sowing the seeds of his own undoing.  It was the War to end all wars, not merely because its new instruments of warfare were so potent, but because finally we had reached weapons that produced discord rather than centralisation, anarchy rather than nationalism.  We had returned to a Hobbesian state of nature, but this time individually equipped with weapons of mass destruction.

The Pokemon world is a utopia: one without borders (the “National” Pokedex is precisely the worldwide one), without warfare, where an ethos of love prevails, in which health care is free and almost everywhere easily available.  There are still criminal syndicates, but most of them see their demise very quickly and easily.  It is a paradise, but like the New Jerusalem of the book of Revelation, one available only after and through an epidemic of apocalyptic violence.