Perhaps the darkest part of Detective Pikachu is that, despite generally depicting a relatively utopian society, the Pokemon world apparently still has unpaid interns.
You hear that, Ryme City? This is the dark side of your “corporate utopia”! Down with capitalism; hang the parasites!
uh
I mean
I don’t think Lucy ever says she doesn’t get paid, and I don’t know what the norm is in the media sector in the real world. She says she writes listicles, so maybe she gets paid for each piece she publishes, but doesn’t have a traditional salary (still a pretty precarious position)? In any case, though, I think it’s an intended facet of Detective Pikachu’s tone that Ryme City is not the utopian society it presents itself as. The ideals it was founded on are not enforced, and the man who defined those ideals… well, he turns out to be not such a good dude. Pokémon normally likes its cities to be bright, shiny and cheerful, which is what Ryme City looks like in the game. The movie has a noir aesthetic that makes its version of Ryme City… well, not outright pessimistic, it’s still a Pokémon story, but it’s certainly grimier than anything we’d see in Alola. The fact that a city founded by a billionaire CEO, and apparently built from the ground up by his company in the space of ten years, might turn out to have skimped on social programs and/or be somewhat exploitative of its low-level workers is… well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a glaring inconsistency in the worldbuilding, put it that way.
Pokémaniacal 