Here's a fan theory.
The first generation of Pokemon games
begins after the conclusion of a massive war.
OK.
So you've played Pokemon.
And even if you haven't, you've probably
managed to absorb most of the premise
through the process of cultural diffusion.
And for the record, we're dealing mostly with the game
here.
But I would be curious to know if what
we're going to talk about transfers at all
to the TV show.
But just as a quick refresher, in the original games,
you play Red.
You catch and train Pokemon.
You battle them with other people who do the same.
There are gyms, championships, good guys, bad guys, and so on.
Professor Oak gives both you and your rival,
Blue, a starter Pokemon, and you begin your Poke-journey.
But soon, you may begin to notice something weird.
Your pop isn't around.
Blue is an orphan.
Most of the people you meet are either young, like you,
or seemingly pretty old.
There are very few people who are middle-aged
and most of them work at gyms.
There is a conspicuous lack of adults.
A fan theory known as the Kanto War Theory, or Pokemon War
Theory, hypothesizes that this is the case because immediately
preceding the events depicted in Pokemon Red and Blue,
there was, in fact, a war in which many,
if not most of the adults in Kanto were killed.
A conversation with Lieutenant Surge, the Vermilion City gym
leader seems to solidify the whole theory.
And as the Pokemon War Theory Creepypasta entry puts it,
quote, "You realize you are among the first generation
of people to live in peace at post-war time."
The basic premise, beyond the dearth of adults,
is that the war would explain the world's focus
on combat and training.
It would explain why, until later games,
there isn't much by way of infrastructure or anything
beyond homes, gyms, and hospitals.
A war would explain the lack of communication between regions,
and the players' seemingly special, though in no way
completely unique status as a traveler or adventurer.
It would also explain why Professor Oak gives out
a pokedex to new trainers.
Quote, "To either collect or verify
information lost during the war and to determine
which species of Pokemon survived the conflict."
But who, you may ask, fought in this war?
I've seen posts saying that the war was between Kanto,
representing Japan, and Unova, representing
America, source here.
In an exhaustive posed by Insightful Panda,
it's argued that the war must have
been between Kanto and the neighboring region of Johto.
Panda claims that the former attempted to annex the latter.
Insightful Panda argues that Johto
is a likely candidate for war with Kanto,
because there is evidence that their government, culture,
history, and Pokemon population intertwined.
The Pokemon League unites, or perhaps just simply
intertwines, the two lands.
It's possible to read into their architecture
to see the Kanto influence in certain parts of Johto
as a result of or apology for attempted annexation.
Panda draws on the hubris of the fighting type gym in Saffron
City and even the existence of Missingno,
which they attribute to the movement of Pokemon originally
in Kanto over to Johto to justify
a potential tense relationship between the two regions.
Already though, there's some difficulty at the beginning.
First and foremost, no one really talks about the war.
After a war's conclusion, you may wish it never happened,
but to bury it completely is kind of unheard of.
If the impact were great enough to affect infrastructure
and overall population, wouldn't it
be at least a passing topic of conversation?
Unless the war happened a really long time ago,
but that's not really the premise of this theory.
Also, in a country or region where nearly all adults would
go into service, a few other things
would have to be the case.
First, if there were a draft and not
a massive standing military force, which maybe there was,
there would be conscientious objectors, resistors,
and evaders.
In short, the war would be a massive political item,
which much like the Vietnam War in America,
would have created a visible and a vocal class of people.
Two, if there was no draft and Kanto citizens were just,
like, totally into going to war, either actually
or as a construction of the state,
I'd expect more nationalistic messaging throughout the game.
Kanto, in short, would resemble, say, North Korea.
And third, media is an inextricable facet of any war.
The Pokemon universe has televisions, movie studios,
theaters, and newspapers.
A recent war would have a presence on most, if not all,
of these.
Even if the war was long enough ago that battlefields
have regrown their grass, it's unlikely
that all cultural signifiers of the effort
would be erased or avoided.
There are, of course, counterarguments
to these counterarguments.
Red is a child, for one.
And so, it's arguable that the whole game
is from a child's perspective.
Everything is much simpler, less political, significantly
less complicated than it is actually.
Arguably, this is also an explanation
for the characteristics of the game, which
give rise to the war theory in the first place.
When you're a kid, everyone who's
older than you is basically the same age
and probably the only infrastructure
you're interested in is sports or entertainment.
I guess until you get hurt that is.
Really, by framing the start of Pokemon as the epilogue
to a major conflict, I think we turned Red
into a kind of uniter of worlds almost.
Insightful Panda touches on this when they say it's
not until the second generation of games
that communication between the two theoretically warring
regions is fully repaired.
Playing as Gold against Red, your former self,
signifies true peace between the Kanto and Johto regions.
Except, well, I don't think there's
much solid evidence of not peace from the start.
Just a whole lot of circumstances,
which is great and fine.
That is the fun of fan theories, turning circumstance
into substance, defending unannounced connections
in the search for unexpected meaning.
So we're maybe led to ask what is it
about the Pokemon world that would
make this theory, in light of all of its shortcomings,
desirable?
Well, maybe it's that Pokemon as the world is just too tidy.
It's all very nice and innocent.
Such a quaint state arising in response to a great catastrophe
lends depth.
Pokemon training becomes not unlike chess
during the Cold War.
Ultimately, harmless in and of itself,
but representing so much more.
One way to navigate this theory's shortcomings
in the name of that added depth is
to consider Red as a child forging out
into the world in the wake of some imagined societal
catastrophe.
Meaning, if we hold this fan theory by extension of the fact
that we think of Red is holding it about himself
in his own world, we can explain why
so many of those important war-related details
are missing.
Red perceives some tension in the world,
of which there is little or no physical evidence and tasks
himself with addressing it under the auspices of uniting
previously warring nations.
Because, you know, he's a kid, and kids are imaginative.
I think we can also see how this contextualizes
the actions of the player.
The training and collecting of Pokemon
is no longer just an exercise in growth, discovery,
completionism, or even a simple hero's journey.
It's nothing less than the reuniting or perhaps,
uniting of regions, of eventual allies, if not a republic.
In the way Pokemon, like the animals themselves,
become the most meaningful in a collection, perhaps
there's some obscure argument buried deep
within the Pokemon story that the same is true for states
or regions as federations.
Maybe this is what Red imagines himself to be doing,
uniting people and lands.
And across the many generations of the game itself,
what we should imagine ourselves to be doing.
Got to catch them all, United Republic Edition.
What do you guys think?
Was there a massive war before the events of the first Pokemon
game?
And even if there wasn't, why might people want
that to be the case?
Scenery change.
Let us know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding
being literally yourselves except via images
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