Friends, you might not know it by scrolling through my author page here at Kotaku, but there were a few years where I was really disillusioned with Pokémon. For a few generations, I played the games, but I wasn’t living and breathing Game Freak’s monster-catching RPGs like I am now and did as a kid. This wasn’t because the games weren’t resonating with me, but because I’d been kind of annoyed by the types of competitive-focused fans I suddenly found myself surrounded by in my high school years. All these years later, Pokémon Legends: Z-A has you encountering a group of similarly snobby, pretentious, gatekeeping Pokémon battlers, and putting the smack down on them was one of the most karmically satisfying moments in the game for me.
As the kids around me grew up in my small Georgia hometown, it seemed like their relationship to Pokémon changed. They stopped caring about who their favorite little guys were and started crunching numbers and making spreadsheets, suddenly becoming very concerned about the competitive viability of these monsters above all else. I tell a guy Beautifly is one of my favorite Pokémon and he starts preaching to me about how she’s a weak point in my team because she’s a frail bug. Bro, I don’t give a fuck, look how pretty she is. Eventually, the constant competitive-focused conversational detours those people insisted upon became so obnoxious, they pushed me out of the space. Pokémon was always a social outlet for me, so to feel like I couldn’t really connect with other people through our mutual love of the world and its mysterious creatures soured me on it almost entirely.
Eventually, I found my way back. The Detective Pikachu game was the first step back in the door, as its mystery adventure mechanics and hopeful view of the Pokémon universe struck a chord with me in 2018. Then the movie came out, the Let’s Go games and Sword and Shield had me tethered to my Switch, and I could not have been more back. I watch competitive play at arm’s length, but I’m still hankering to go to the World Championships some day. By and large, though, I play these games for the worldbuilding, the story, and to hang out with Raichu. Don’t tell me how to make my Pokémon better for a hypothetical tournament I’ll never compete in. I do not wish to know.
I’m not the only one who feels this way, either, as evidenced by a group of kids in Pokémon Legends: Z-A who call in Lumiose City’s mob equivalent to, with your help, get some competitive snobs to leave them alone. Lumiose City has a group called the Society of Battle Connoisseurs, which is led by the fairy-type trainer Jacinthe, a rich socialite who has a large amount of influence in the Paris-inspired metropolis. She is also, as you will come to find out, someone who insists upon herself, shows up uninvited, and puts literal barriers up to trap people into doing what she wants, and she seems to be involved in some kind of odd, fetishistic relationship in which she makes Lebanne dress up as a maid as some kind of humiliation ritual. That insistence seems to trickle down to the rest of the SBC members, as our first encounter with them is during a quest in which the player is running errands for the Rust Syndicate. A pair of these elites has started hounding a group of children, probably aged between five and eight, about how to make their Pokémon the Very Best Like No One Ever Was. Are you feeding your Pokémon the right supplements to ensure they’re competitively viable? If not, the SBC will come find you and pester you in broad daylight.
So these poor kids call in for backup, and because I am indebted to the Rust Syndicate, that backup is me. The kids run up to me with distressed looks on their faces, and say they were just having battles on their own before the two people dressed way too well to be hanging out on a battle court started “lecturing” them about the importance of competitive viability. “I bet they’re just trying to show off to us because nobody their own age will put up with them,” one says. And despite all their insistence upon their own competitive superiority, my team wipes them out, and they go running off to their homebase with their Slowpoke tails between their legs. It was cathartic.
Pokémon is such an expansive franchise that it can mean different things to different people. Some fans only engage with the games, others with the anime or card game, and some may just like having plushes on their desk. A series this big and broad is never just one thing to everybody, and trying to insist that it should be is the kind of toxicity that pushes people out. There will always be bad apples in the community that want everyone to conform to their vision of things, but at least I got to send my own personal Pokémon snobs packing.
