One and a half years I’ve been writing this damn blog and I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to introduce myself. What has happened to my manners?
I’m Chris, and I write about Pokémon on the internet.
I’m not, and have never been, a particularly skilled battler, though I’m familiar with all the important concepts of competitive Pokémon. I stopped paying attention to the anime about halfway through the Johto series as I was growing up, and have only recently started to pick it up again. I’ve never read any Pokémon manga. On a good day, I can remember perhaps a dozen words of Japanese. I can’t draw to save myself. I certainly can’t rip apart a game’s coding within a week of its release to produce a comprehensive list of the egg moves and tutor moves every Pokémon can learn.
So why the hell are all of you reading this nonsense?
One imagines I must contribute something, besides my immense personal charisma, because as far as I can tell people do read this blog (I have an account set up on Google Analytics, and I don’t really know what any of the numbers mean, but my website designer friend tells me they’re pretty strong for a personal web page). I like to think that there are basically two things I bring to the table: good written English skills and an extremely unusual perspective. I see things in a very different way to most people, including most Pokémon fans, and I know how to express my ideas – and I actually think that both of these things come from the same place. I get both of them from my background as a classicist, studying the history, culture and languages of ancient Greece and Rome.
I get the impression that most people learn to write formal English in English classes, which makes sense (I think it’s also why a lot of people never do learn to write formal English very well – the people teaching the English classes would rather talk about Keats, Austen and Shakespeare than lecture their students on the finer points of English grammar, which would arguably be much more useful – but that’s by the by). I didn’t learn proper written English in an English class. I learned how to write English properly by studying Latin. Studying other languages opens your eyes to how language actually works and, in the process, your own will start making a lot more sense to you; I think Latin is particularly good for this simply because it’s extremely logical, with a number of core principles that run through every aspect of it. This also makes it relatively easy to learn. English, by contrast, is utterly demented. It’s what my Latin professor likes to call a ‘magpie language’ – it compulsively steals shiny things from other languages it comes into contact with. As a result, it is fiendishly difficult to learn, but also has just about the largest vocabulary of any language ever (there are, like, 50,000 Latin words, tops – estimates for English vary, but it could easily be ten times that), and is thus incredibly flexible and powerful once you know what you’re doing. The moral I want to bash clumsily into your heads today is that being raised with English as one’s native tongue is an incredible gift, something which people raised in other cultures have to earn with a great deal of effort, due to English’s status as the international trade language of the current era. Learning other languages will allow you to make the most of that gift. I honestly don’t care if you learn Latin, or Mandarin, or Spanish, or Old High German. It’s the act of learning that matters to me.
That had nothing to do with Pokémon, but it’s something that’s quite important to me, which I guess is sort of what this entry is about.
All that stuff about languages affects the style and tone of my writing. Where a lot of my stranger content and ideas come from is my worldview as a historian – not so much last year, when I was talking about individual Pokémon, but even then I’d occasionally slip into fits of euphoria when confronted with a Pokémon like Sigilyph or Cofagrigus. It’s actually the reason for a lot of the stuff I’m interested in, though, when I do my anime reviews, and talk about broader ideas like what legendary Pokémon are for. See, the thing a lot of people don’t seem to realise about studying history is that it’s mostly not about memorising facts and dates at all. Ask me when Julius Caesar was born and I’ll tell you “100 BC. Ish.” I don’t know the exact date, anyone who claims to know it is lying, and that goes double for Wikipedia (but that’s another rant entirely). Ask me to list all of Euripides’ surviving plays, and I might manage half of them on a good day. Knowing trivia is useful, don’t get me wrong, but you can always look it up; the wonderful thing about life is that no-one ever expects you to do anything under exam conditions. Studying history is actually about embracing a particular way of looking at the world.
Let me tell you a story.
A couple of weeks ago, I was roped into watching Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter with my dad and brothers (yes, I am going somewhere with this). Now, I don’t know that I’d say it was a good movie; actually I thought the dialogue was forced and the plot twists transparent. I thought that the fact it even existed was absolutely fascinating, though. Obviously no-one goes to see a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter expecting anything resembling historicity, but it takes itself really seriously; it’s actually a fairly standard take on the ‘myth’ (if I can call it that) of Abraham Lincoln – dripping with patriotism, lots of stirring rhetoric about freedom and slavery – except that it happens to have vampires in it for some reason. I spent most of the movie thinking about how interesting it is that we, as a culture, can now ‘do’ history by turning it into an action movie and putting vampires in it to make people pay attention. In short, I really enjoyed the movie, even though I thought it was objectively bad, because I was so mesmerised by the cultural context in which it was produced.
Yeah; ‘weird’ doesn’t begin to cover it.
When I watch an episode of Pokémon, I don’t think about things like “how do these actions translate into game mechanics?” or “when is Ash finally going to grow up?” or “I wonder what Pokémon the kids are going to catch next?” The questions that run through my mind are invariably things like “what kind of society would create an institution like the Pokémon League?” or “what would the general public think of using stones to evolve Pokémon?” or “what does this episode imply about how Pokémon and humans started working together in the first place?” I’ve spent nearly five years of my life picking apart Herodotus, Livy, and the rest of the crowd of classical authors, asking myself about the kind of things that they tell us without necessarily meaning to, what we can infer from what they don’t say, and what they seem to be taking for granted. It seems to have messed with my head a little and now that’s how I reflexively look at everything (including Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). Show me a world like the one we see in the Pokémon games and anime, and I’ll have a lot of fun playing with the cool creatures, but it also won’t be long before I try to pick apart what makes that setting different and figure out what that implies about its society, culture and philosophies. This is why I produce all these weird entries analysing the ethical implications of evolution, discussing how trainers and Pokémon relate to each other on a personal level, and trying to figure out what the Pokémon League actually does. It’s why I heap so much praise on Pokémon that suggest, imply or explain things about the past. It’s also where a lot of my more specific weird ideas come from, like my insistence that Pokémon can’t really ‘do’ epic and shouldn’t feel like it needs to anyway, but explaining that one would be another entry all to itself.
I sometimes get comments that I take all this stuff way too seriously and I’ve forgotten how to have fun. Well, not exactly. This, for me, is what constitutes ‘fun’ (or at least, one sort of fun – I’ve also been spending far too much time lately reading a Song of Ice and Fire, and I did once get drunk in Rome with my best friend, but that’s another story…). I’m well aware it’s odd, but I like to feel I cater to a niche audience. If you’ve read this blog and felt I’ve drained all the fun out of Pokémon… well, I think Puck said it best:
“If we shadows have offended/Think but this and all is mended/That you didst but slumber here/While these visions did appear/And this weak and idle theme/No more yielding but a dream.”
Pokémaniacal 