Writing Blog series about Pokémon and real-world mythology

[King Koop]

Hello Pokébeach,

I'm a long-time Pokémon fan (since Gen 1!) who's currently writing a Substack series about Pokémon's connections to real-world mythology. The central idea is that both the in-universe Pokédex and the Pokémon series as a whole represent a modern take on the bestiary. An excerpt from the introduction:

Pokémon Red and Blue begin with Professor Oak, who is now too old for any further adventures of his own, presenting his grandson and his neighbor, the player character, with his latest invention: a handheld electronic encyclopedia called a Pokédex. He sends the boys out on a quest to complete the Pokédex by encountering and gathering data on every species of Pokémon in the world.

While Oak frames this project as a scientific endeavor, “a great undertaking in Pokémon history,” the Pokedex entries themselves read more like legends or embellished travelers’ tales than natural histories. Fearow’s “huge and magnificent wings,” for example, let it “keep aloft without ever having to land for rest,” while Ponyta has hooves “ten times harder than diamonds” and is “capable of jumping over the Eiffel Tower in a single giant leap.” Many entries seem to reflect in-universe folklore and earlier accounts of doubtful veracity: Victreebell is “said to live in huge colonies deep in jungles, although no one has ever returned from there;” Haunter is “said to be from another dimension;” Chansey is “said to bring happiness to those who catch it;” Articuno is “said to appear to doomed people who are lost in icy mountains;” Arcanine is “a legendary Pokémon in China.”

A 12th century English bestiary — translated from the original Latin by T.H. White of The Sword in the Stone fame — informs us that the antelope “is an animal of incomparable celerity, so much so that no hunter can ever get near it” and that Indian bulls “can repel every weapon by the thickness of their hides.” Dragons “are bred in Ethiopia and India, in places where there is perpetual heat.” A hungry dragon, “lying in wait near the paths where elephants usually saunter, lassoes their legs in a knot with its tale and destroys them by suffocation.” Ostriches refuse to lay their eggs until the Pleiades are visible in the night sky. As in the Pokédex or a deck of Pokémon cards, each bestiary entry contains an illustration of the creature in question alongside a brief, extravagantly imaginative description.

Here are a few of the posts, if you're interested. Obviously I can't cover every Pokémon, or even all of the original 151, but I will try to cover the creatures with clear analogues in real-world mythologies.

Introduction

The wolf in the woods loses its menace in its increasingly industrial and increasingly urbanized society, Little Red Riding Hood descends from the world of legend into that of bedtime stories and cartoon comedies, pandemonium becomes parade. In a similar fashion, the bestiary has gone from the most popular secular book in medieval Europe to an archaic genre that I must spend some time explaining. But, just as Disneyfied fairy tales have had a long and profitable afterlife in pop culture, bestiaries have survived in a somewhat new form, as fantasy rather than folklore: the Pokédex, Pokémon itself, the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Alien Species. If fairy tales have been relegated to the nursery (alongside the bear, as we’ve seen), then the bestiary has for the most part been relegated to the game room, the teenager’s bedroom, the fantasy and science fiction reader’s library, or the Game Boy.

Leaving Pallet Town

Bulbasaur

Bulbasaur’s plant side allows it to follow a long mythological tradition of plant-animal hybrids. Some medieval and early modern Europeans, for instance, apparently believed that cotton came from the wool of ‘vegetable lambs’ that grew on trees. The 11th century Persian scholar and proto-Renaissance man al-Biruni wrote of a tree whose leaves become bees, while the well-traveled 14th century Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone described lambs growing inside melon-like fruits on trees.

Charmander

From a broader perspective, Charmander represents a kind of endpoint for the legendary salamander, a stage at which it has lost almost everything: its incredible venom; its “treacherous, ever hateful” character; its intense coldness that extinguishes fire; the appearance of and any link to real-life salamanders. Only the elemental essence of the creature has survived, only the lizard-like creature with a connection to fire.

Charizard

Charizard is just one of many, many roles played by the dragon of many faces, who emerged several thousand years ago (at the latest) and has never left the spotlight.

Pikachu

How and why did Pikachu become the most popular Pokémon, the face of the entire multimedia franchise? Of the 905 Pokémon that exist at the time of this writing, Pikachu remains by far the most well-known. Pikachu has appeared on no fewer than 192 Pokémon cards, as a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon (every year from 2001 to the present), on the cover of Time and The New Yorker and on the island of Niue’s $1 coin. It has appeared in every single Pokémon movie and anime episode. It became the first internationally known Pokémon after a notorious incident involving the hospitalizations of hundreds of children. The retinas you’re currently using to read this post function, in part, due to a photoreceptor protein called Pikachurin, which was discovered by Japanese scientists and named after the Pokémon. Pikachu is inescapable.

Clefairy and Clefable

Like the game of chess, which originated in India and then passed through — and was transformed by — Persian, Arabic, Spanish, French, English, American and Russian hands, Clefairy and Clefable combine influences from many different times and places. They reflect

• the moon rabbit of ancient (and modern) Chinese mythology;
• Japanese interpretations of this mythical figure;
• the Japanese kawaii aesthetic;
• The magical, soporific power of music in myth, such as Greek myth;
• medieval European fairy folklore;
• the once-numinous and dreaded fairy’s devolution into Tinker Bell;
• and 20th century UFO sightings and the science fiction they influenced and were influenced by.

Please check the blog out, if any of this sounds interesting to you. I'd appreciate any feedback, especially suggestions as to which creatures to cover next. I'm going roughly in Pokedex order and currently in the early stages of posts on Vulpix, Ninetales, Jigglypuff and Wigglytuff.