As the previous posts in this section reveal, I believe Pokémon’s success should be taken as seriously as, say, a historian analysing the Yalta summit. Though Pokémon, even at its most influential, obviously lacks the ramifications of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin’s European map-drawing, it has that effect on a significant number of people. I’ve encountered fellow Pokémon fans who know little of outside their window, but they can sing the franchise’s theme song by heart and name the release date of every game. For a lot of people, Pokémon is the medium by which they interact with the world. It creates their relationships, generates their interest in related topics like other video games and Japanese anime, and even informs their career choices. It’s part of their identity and DNA.
As such, I believe a serious effort should be made to understand how, where, and why Pokémon works and, by extension, synthesising Pokémon’s effect on people with big ideas like history, natural biology, and philosophy. Pokémon is the language of the large portion of the under-35 crowd such as myself and so I intend to use it to express important ideas. Two such ideas can help explain Pokémon’s success: the Hero’s Journey and the psychology of collecting.
The Long Reach of Joseph Campbell.
In 1949, Joseph Campbell, a literature professor specialising in comparative mythology, published The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The book explores the structural similarities of heroic myths in many cultures. The Bible, The Odyssey, The Iliad and god knows how many other’s I’m too lazy to list all share some degree of similarity. Campbell sought to distill down the common elements of the “mono-myth”, to use his term. The term we more commonly use is “The Hero’s Journey”.
The most famous passage, plastered not once but twice on the book’s Wikipedia page, goes as follows: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Following this introduction, Campbell then lays out the stages of the hero’s journey in exquisite detail to expand on that master summary.
Now, I have a confession to make: I’ve never been able to finish The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The book is riddled with the kind of impossible to understand psychoanalytic BS that makes my blood boil. Campbell was influenced by Freudian and Jungian concepts that I’ve never been able to grasp and I’m willing to bet a lot of people won’t either.
Psychoanalytic nonsense aside, Joseph Campbell’s idea deserves a spot on the list of “best ideas ever”. By seeking to find the constituent parts of the most compelling mythologies dating back to time immemorial, Campbell speculated on the elements common to all cultures, and gave novelists, screenwriters and playwrights a guide on what storytelling features truly grasp people’s imagination.
The most famous work influenced by Campbell’s ideas is Star Wars. George Lucas has never kept that a secret. Other famous works that had Hero With A Thousand Faces explicitly in mind include Disney’s home-run classics Beauty and Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King.
But another work of storytelling that shares Campbell’s ideas, however unconsciously, is Pokémon. Campbell’s executive summary quoted above hits that sweet spot between vague and detailed that it could very easily apply to Pokémon’s otherwise sparse single-player story. Case in point, allow me to fill in the blanks of Campbell’s executive summary with Pokémon specific details.
A hero (Red/The Player) ventures forth from the world of common day (Pallet Town) into a region (Kanto) of supernatural wonder (filled with Pokémon): fabulous forces are there encountered (Team Rocket, Gym Leaders and all manner of Pokémon trainers) and a decisive victory (against Team Rocket and at the Pokémon League) is won: the hero comes back (to Pallet Town) from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons (aka a completed Pokédex) on his fellow man (aka Professor Oak).
By that description, Pokémon’s single player campaign has distinct elements of the mono-myth that people found so compelling in Star Wars and Disney movies. Crucially, the bare-bones adventure story conceived by Pokémon’s creators has rarely, if ever, deviated from the foundations laid by the first Pokémon games.
But pointing out Pokémon’s similarities to Joseph Campbell’s ideas does not make a complete picture. In the world of argumentative reasoning, the idea that Pokémon and Star Wars are basically Joseph Campbell’s book with a fresh coat of paint is guilty of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. For those unfamiliar, the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy refers to a false conclusion drawn from overemphasising similarities in a dataset and minimising differences. In other words, for all of Pokémon’s similarities to Campbell’s archetypal hero, so many crucial differences exist that negate the so-called “perfect” connection: Pokémon is a video game, Campbell was thinking of mythology; Pokémon’s hero is a silent ten year old with no dialogue or expressed desires, Campbell’s hero is weighed down wants and desires nail-gunned to Jungian kookiness; and the list goes on.
Pokémon did not resonate simply because of the similarities, however shallow, to Joseph Campbell’s book. Something else is needed to explain its power. For that, we need to return to the game’s slogan.
(The Psychology Of) Gotta Catch ‘em All.
The central objective of Pokémon, catching one of every creature, taps into another joy millions of people derive from life, collecting. The psychology of collecting is…a weird animal, so I’ll put it aside for now. But long before Pokémon existed, hobbyists of all ages took great pride in building their collections of…just about everything. Stamps, rare books, vinyl albums, sports cars, Hot Wheels, and postcards are but a few items people love amassing large collections of. The ultimate example of collecting would be libraries and museums. After all, art galleries refer to the works hanging on their walls as their “collection”. Pokémon’s link with the deep-seated joy of collecting is obvious: lead creator Satoshi Tajiri drew inspiration from his obsessive bug-catching as a child.
In newer Pokémon games, some emphasis on “catching them all” has been lost. Seeing as how more than 1000 Pokémon now exist, collecting them all would be an epic undertaking indeed. But early in the franchise’s history, when catching them all was the most plausible objective, Pokémon could easily attract anybody who enjoyed collecting things for a living and didn’t mind playing on a Game Boy…or trading cards with their classmates.
Putting The Two Together
Pokémon successfully combining two of the most powerful pulls on the human imagination, the psychology of collecting and the similarities to archetypal hero myths, help contextualise the franchise’s continued success. Much like how Star Wars or The Bible will always be compelling because their narrative structures resonate in powerful ways, Pokémon’s various media will always be compelling because they rest on the deep-seated human need for collecting, the most exciting forms of storytelling, or both.
The combination is irresistible.