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.
I mean, the fact that Pikachu, clearly not wanting to have Ash for trainer during the first episode, and yet still being expected to obey and tag along, is still very iffy, coming directly from the view that pets are property and must do as we say because we own them, rather than pets requiring human caretakers because we live in a world that doesn’t leave much room for them to live independently.
Your point about pokemon disobeying your orders is given more structure in the games, where if you don’t have the required gym badges, your higher-leveled pokemon don’t see you as a person worth obeying. Then when you get that badge, they fall in line. The point being… might makes right? You command authority only through fighting and defeating enough trainers and their pokemon? That’s a pretty problematic conclusion you could draw from that game mechanic.
I mean… there’s all sorts of problems in Pokemon lore. The fact that you can literally capture the creator of the oceans (Kyogre is practically a god), or the master of continents (Groudon), or the master of the Sky (Rayquaza) is when things started to get silly in Gen3.
Overall, Pokemon entities, like N, only make sense within their season (ie: Black and White). Its not like the creator of Pokemon foresaw how Pokemon’s lore or story would evolve 10+ years later, so trying to retcon N’s logic into things from Gen1 or Gen3 is… well… its going to be problematic.
Its the general problem with any long-running series. You either end up with amorphous meaningless blobs (see Mickey Mouse or Sonic, who have been in so many settings that they are practically meaningless today), or you end up with contradictions as your story writers took short-term / long-term risks with the lore and setting.
Generally agreed there. It takes a lot of commitment from a company to keep a franchise’s lore consistent through decades, and it’s rare for them to decide it’s worth it.
I’m curious how Pokemon Horizon, with Liko’s focus on adventure, will help the Pokemon series here on out.
Even from the start, Ash was not really “catch them all”, but was a generic adventure in this world. Very few Pokemon (relatively speaking), become Ashs’s friend, so its not really a mass-mind control thing. And only Team Rocket (or other “evil” entities) have the problem of actively trying to “steal” Pokemon or otherwise mistreat them. Even then, Jessie / James are among the most empathetic characters (which is why Wobbuffet and other such `mon hang out with them so much), so everyone’s pretty much morally fine.
The few times “Pokeball-mind control” was used was like… Mewtwo in that one movie, and other such obviously evil situations.
Liko is perhaps a better basis for a modern Pokemon hero moving forward, rather than Ash. I mean, when Pokemon got started, the focus was (as always) selling toys and figures and cards. Pokemon is now popular enough you don’t need the main character causing casual FOMO upon children to buy more toys, if you get my drift. :-)
Or Mario, who goes from battling the giant turtle that kidnapped his crush to going go-carting or playing sports and board games with him on a title to title basis.