Palworld has brought back a Pandora’s Box that Pokemon let open in Black/White: Does Team Plasma have a point? Is the player in Pokemon/Palworld an evil entity just for playing?
Some preliminary context for those unaware. Pokemon Black/White’s version of an evil team was Team Plasma, which argued that Pokemon trainers were evil for capturing Pokemon and forcing them to fight alongside them. While the game gave us the character of N, who is honest and sincere in his ideas and intentions, Team Plasma is presented as an hypocritical boogeyman that wants to force all other trainers to free their Pokemon, but secretly this is only a ploy to make sure no one can oppose them when they attempt to grab power for themselves.
Palworld has its own take on the idea: out of the different hostile factions, we find early on the Free Pal Alliance, which similarly argues that capturing pals and forcing them to do your bidding is evil, and we find again that their leader really commits to the idea, but her underlings are constantly attacking pals in the wild and sometimes even putting them in cages.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Pokemon fanbase was very defensive of this idea, often repeating the arguments provided by the games that captured Pokemon like the companionship anyway, dismissing the fact that wild Pokemon violently resist being captured unless you force them into submission to accept the Pokeball. The fact that you forcibly push them into a situation where their previous freedom to choose not to associate with you gets overwritten by a newfound willingness to obey means that they’re being effectively brainwashed - if we were to apply our real life standards to this situation we would say without a doubt that the situation is exploitative and we’re wiping our ass with the idea of consent. Palworld is even more “in your face” about this, given that the brainwashing mechanic of Pokeballs/spheres does not only work on the mons, but on humans as well. The general reaction of the Palworld community seems to be acknowledging that it’s fucked up, but nonetheless jumping straight to the fact that the Free Pal Alliance are hypocrites as a whole or even calling them a parody of PETA.
My position here is: should these games even address the ethical dilemma? Once you put the ethics into the game’s narrative, the designers are basically forced into going to “Yes, but” territory, since acknowledging the ethical issue leads you to the conclusion that the game only allows you to play as a morally dubious character at best, but given that that would be unwise from a marketing pov (at least for Game Freak), the narrative ultimately has to twist the argument into some sort of fallacy (The Pokemon actually want to be captured/The Free Pal Alliance is full of hypocrites anyway), which in my opinion is actually the heinous design decision, since you’re pushing the player into twisting the moral dilemma in a way, thus training moral hypocrisy, rather than the much healthier position “Yes, capturing Pokemon/Pals is evil, but it’s a game so no actual sentient creature is being harmed”.
Both Pokemon Black/White and Palworld hint at the idea of human-Pokemon/Pal association out of free will through the character of N and the Free Pal Alliance, who do not capture their creatures, but rather they choose to cooperate with them out of real free will, but this option is mechanically impossible for the player (save, arguably, for rare exceptions where Pokemon freely join you through through scripted events). This ends up cementing the ludonarrative dissonance where the player has to justify themselves into thinking that what they’re doing is morally acceptable, despite being presented with actually ethical in-lore alternatives that they just do not have access to. It is understandable that, from a game design perspective, the Pokemon/Palworld developers do not want to spend significant effort into reworking the mechanics of Pokeballs/spheres, which are already effectively fun for their gameplay loops, but that leads them into the position where Team Plasma and the Free Pal Alliance have to become caricatures of their actual ideas, which on the other hand is a waste for their respective lores.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my rambling. My Chikipis have already laid all the eggs I need for baking cakes, so I’m off to butchering them for meat, bye.
Palworld even goes a step further by making it pretty undeniably clear that you are in fact mind controlling them, given you can capture humans and make them work for you just like Pals do. They can be violently opposing you one moment, and turning their guns on their friends to defend you the next.
It’s not like Pokemon is all perfume and roses, either, though. The game puts a nice veneer on it, and the player operates on the pretense that they’re cooperating with pokemon and forming bonds with them (through mechanics like Pokemon Amie and the camp scenes and whatnot), but then you’ve got things like the historical war where humans used pokemon to fight actual life-and-death battles, and the whole thing with Slowpoke tails being delicacies, and some suspicious foods in a world where all of the animals are pokemon…
Really, I appreciate Palworld’s approach a lot. If we’re going to be committing acts of animal cruelty and functional slavery, I’d at least rather the whole thing isn’t whitewashed, and at least the Pals in Palworld are fighting actual life-and-death fights, not the equivalent of a world-endorsed dog-fighting ring where we’re making animals near kill each other on the regular just for entertainment and sport.
I think Pokemon Special Manga had roughly the right level of edginess / darklord energy to me. Palworld seems unnecessarily grimdark, to the point of pointlessness.
Pokemon Special still has the death matches:
As the famous scene of Charmeleon vs Arbok. And its far less rosy about Red’s (aka: Ash) chances of becoming top 1% through the Pokemon League. Its not all roses but its not all dumb grimdark energy either, its a good balance. Lethal force against a giant snake trying to lethally poison you and your friends is fair, and Blue (aka: Gary) is right to use lethal force, and Red is naive about holding back in that fight. Having the rivalry also helps compared to Ash vs Gary (the Anime counterparts to Red and Blue in Pokemon Special)… setting Blue up to be the more pragmatic (albeit lethal) rival, with Red being the more classic protagonist.
Mind-control and enchantments being used for… ill-purposes… is explored in a lot of fantasy settings. I don’t think Pokemon (or Pal-world for that matter) are very good settings for that.
Maybe the sweet spot would be somewhere in between. I think Palworld is a step in the direction I’d prefer, at least, but based on some of the internet discourse around this topic it’s clear that that doesn’t apply to everyone. I think if they actually spent some time giving us a bit more exposition about the whole situation it’d be a little more palatable. If they ever implement PvP (which is on their roadmap), it’d be neat to be able to align with or perhaps join the NPC factions, or apply their ethos to player-made guilds, and be able to play as the equivalent of the Free Pal Alliance or the Syndicate. Or, alternately, some alternative to Pal Spheres… imagine for instance if there was a real alternative to capturing Pals, and if someone wanted to take the moral high ground they could actually avoid the things they find objectionable, while still playing the game.
It’d be the Pokemon equivalent of being able to play a character who was opposed to the Pokemon League as a whole and aimed to dismantle the whole system, rather than participate in it, which I’d find compelling.
You mean… Sonic SatAM ? :-)
There’s other settings where people are literally getting mind-controlled to work for an evil overlord, with a scrappy young group of freedom fighters running disruption campaigns against them. But the setting needs to be reworked entirely from the ground up.
I think such a setting could occur in Pokemon, but it just hasn’t been written yet. More importantly though, Pokemon is aimed at a younger demographic who wouldn’t appreciate such a story. And indeed: Sonic SatAM’s problem was the lack of toy sales. A lot of these cartoons are toy-commercials after all, as that’s where the real source of funding is. If the comic/anime/cartoon fails to sell toys, the whole system falls apart.
These slightly darker and more complex stories about freedom fighters (Sonic SatAM), or conspiracies (Young Justice) tend to lead to superior shows… but inferior toy sales. So everyone reverts to a happier storyline a few years later and My Little Pony suddenly shoots up to #1 (no offense to the Bronies out there, but yall spent money on those toys and it supported that universe…)
EDIT: I should probably note that Team Rocket in the Pokemon Special manga is a secret organization controlling large swaths of the world. In fact, the above fight is Koga vs Blue. Yes, Gym Leader Koga was trying to kill two kids, because Gym Leader Koga (future Elite 4 member) is an elite agent of Team Rocket.
That’s not “capture” or any soft words here. Its literally kill. Koga even resurrected a zombie Psyduck as part of this arc.
In the Pokemon Special Manga, Team Rocket is a serious world threat with deadly consequences. I mean, imagine what a criminal ring could do with legendary creatures, especially when said criminal ring has already infiltrated multiple members of upper-class society (Ie: Gym Leaders and Elite 4).
I loved Sonic SatAM. Totally had a crush on Sally Acorn when I was a kid, and almost nobody even remembers who she was, now. It had some surprisingly heavy themes for a kids’ show.
I think the juxtaposition of the kids’ show (or game) aesthetic against the more adult themes is fun; I wish more games would do that. Undertale did a great job with it, for example.
If you want it for specifically Pokemon, I do highly suggest the Pokemon Special comics. (EDIT: Named “Pokemon Adventure” in the English speaking world. Though “Pokemon Special” is the Japanese name, so you’ll likely be able to find it in any case…)
Its the world the original creator of Pokemon wanted anyway, before Nintendo watered it down for a more kid-friendly environment.
EDIT: Anime in general took kid-like aesthetics and bring mature themes into them. Madoka Magika, Promised Neverland, Full Metal Alchemist, and the like. Young Justice did a good job for American media.
That’s neat, I’ll give it a look! Haven’t read any printed Pokemon media.