A PERSONAL HISTORY WITH POKÉMON
I’m getting to an age where all it takes is a reminder of when 2009 was, a realisation that a celebrity is younger than me, or a brief changing of the winds to send me into solipsism. This is problematic for two reasons: one, I’m not that old and two, it’s the kind of indulgent thinking that leads to the mind rot of nostalgia. Last week, however, I was struck by this temporal nausea by simply being asked what my favourite Pokémon were.
For the record, I love Pokémon. Yellow was the first videogame I ever played. I got upset because it wasn’t clear to me that the dark rectangles at the bottom of the main character’s house was the door. My trainer’s name was 'AAAAAA', his Pikachu was called 'AAAAAB'. Chalk that up to a six year old's inability to direct the cursor accurately. Even with such remedial control of the game, I managed to get to the Elite Four with a team of mismatched ‘mon. Pokémon is important to me because it’s the only game series that I would consider the sediment to every aspect of my taste. It’s foundational to my relationship with my younger sibling and is becoming foundational to my nephews as they’ve started to show an interest in it.
That being said, why does it matter what my favourite Pokémon is? If you’ve even glanced at the surface of fandom studies (or been in a fandom), you’ll know one of core tenets is self-subjectification - simply put, the transformation of your identity relative to the fandom or social group. Being a 'Pokémon fan' is meaningless, being a fan of Trubbish makes a statement about yourself and your position to a franchise that means something different to everyone. The common refrain being that every Pokémon is everyone’s favourite Pokémon; something I didn’t believe in until I visited the Pokémon Centre Store in Tokyo and found plushies available for even the most detestable, bargain bin monsters.
Our personal histories to games are a popular and important way to explore game history as a subject. Out of Université de Montréal, Dany Guay-Balenger is doing great work on documenting the history of ‘middling games’ - games you’d think no one cares about - through application of oral histories. Documenting why these games matter to individuals undercuts the 'canonisation' of games history that reinforces the same 50 games as the most historically important. This kind of bottom-up historical work helps us better understand why games resonate and why fandoms form around them.
With Dany's work front of mind, I put my method where my mouth is and I did what I do whenever I feel uncertain in this world: I opened a Google Sheet. I booted up every Pokémon game I have in my flat, wandered down the annals of the last two decades of my personal play history, and documented the Pokémon that featured in my Hall of Fame teams - the ‘Mons that were with me at the point of beating the Pokémon League. My earliest teams (Yellow, Silver, Sapphire) are lost to time so I worked with what I did have which covered the DS, 3DS, Switch and Switch 2 eras respectively. Here is the document in its glory.
This documentation was a helpful exercise to see where my Poke-biases lie. Obviously the first Generations of 'Mons are the most popular. They’re the ones I have the most familiarity with. There were only a few Pokémon that I used multiple times: Raichu is one, Umbreon is another, Drampa the - frankly, bad - dragon-type that resembles the dragons of Chinese mythology. Charizard was another recurring team member which the contrarian in me hates but its high attack stat and advantages typing makes it a shoe-in for any balanced team. Based on a cursory view of this deranged sheet, my favourite Pokémon, it seems, are the ones that helped me win battles.... by god, I’m not a romantic, I’m a min-maxer.
By looking at 20 years of Pokémon team composition splayed out like this, something has occurred to me. My methodology is poor. This is a list of Pokémon that were used at different times untethered from the contexts in which they were picked. I know that my playthrough of Pokémon Moon was far more in-depth and considered because I played it every day for six months as I commuted two hours each way into the city for a job I hated. I know my playthrough of Pokémon White was rushed because my 3DS battery could only hold a few hours of charge at a time. These details are more important to charting my Pokémon history than what my favourite Pokémon are. I had a crisis about not knowing what my favourite Pokémon is because that’s actually the wrong question to ask to investigate my relationship to this series. A better question might be, after nearly 30 years of play, why do I still care about Pokémon? And the answer is, like all good personal histories, still evolving.
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