Actually, it took the support of a few friends for me to not care about what others had to say about me. I cared as a freshmen in high school, so I didn't say anything about liking pokemon. However, on one of the last days of school, I brought my newly bought Emerald version, and my friend said, "Oh, that's cool."
The next year, I saw one of my friends playing Blue version on the bus, and I was kinda hyper that day, so I said, "Hey, I challenge you to a pokemon battle!!!" I'm pretty sure it was that moment that purged all insecurities I had from then on.
Once I was a high school senior, I hardly had any classes where I did anything, so I would just play Emerald during classes, when nothing else was happening. It seemed contageous, as my friends then bought used copies of Ruby and Sapphire from Gamestop, and we all started playing them during school (but I had to help them with just about everything in the game). I also let a good friend borrow Silver, and I would battle him with Gold on the bus every week.
I even brought my old binder of trading cards one day as the end result of a "nostalgia" conversation I had with some other friends, but then a lot of my friends wanted to see my cards, and some were even saying things like, "Oh, I would SO be that pokemon!" And then another friend took a picture of my Dark Wigglytuff card, because he thought it was the most badass thing he ever saw in Pokemon (for those unaware, the card I'm talking about has a Wigglytuff posing as a mob leader, or something like that.
Anyway, to answer the main question, no.
