[Nonfiction] Necessary Monsters: Pokémon and the Bestiary

[King Koop]

Hello all,

On and off over the past year I've been writing a Substack series about Pokemon's connections to real-world mythology, especially to the medieval European literary genre known as the bestiary and its various analogues in other cultures.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction if that sounds interesting.

Pokémon Red and Blue begin with Professor Oak, who is now too old for any further adventures of his own, presenting his grandson and his neighbor, the player character, with his latest invention: a handheld electronic encyclopedia called a Pokédex. He sends the boys out on a quest to complete the Pokédex by encountering and gathering data on every species of Pokémon in the world.

While Oak frames this project as a scientific endeavor, "a great undertaking in Pokémon history," the Pokedex entries themselves read more like legends or embellished travelers' tales than natural histories. Fearow's "huge and magnificent wings," for example, let it "keep aloft without ever having to land for rest," while Ponyta has hooves "ten times harder than diamonds" and is "capable of jumping over the Eiffel Tower in a single giant leap." Many entries seem to reflect in-universe folklore and earlier accounts of doubtful veracity: Victreebell is "said to live in huge colonies deep in jungles, although no one has ever returned from there;" Haunter is "said to be from another dimension;" Chansey is "said to bring happiness to those who catch it;" Articuno is "said to appear to doomed people who are lost in icy mountains;" Arcanine is "a legendary Pokémon in China."

A 12th century English bestiary — translated from the original Latin by T.H. White of The Sword in the Stone fame — informs us that the antelope "is an animal of incomparable celerity, so much so that no hunter can ever get near it" and that Indian bulls "can repel every weapon by the thickness of their hides." Dragons "are bred in Ethiopia and India, in places where there is perpetual heat." A hungry dragon, "lying in wait near the paths where elephants usually saunter, lassoes their legs in a knot with its tale and destroys them by suffocation." Ostriches refuse to lay their eggs until the Pleiades are visible in the night sky. As in the Pokédex or a deck of Pokémon cards, each bestiary entry contains an illustration of the creature in question alongside a brief, extravagantly imaginative description.
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We even unknowingly reference the bestiaries in our modern, everyday English. The phrase "to lick someone into shape," for instance, originates with bestiary descriptions of mother bears giving birth to formless lumps and then licking them into the shapes of cubs. "Swan song" comes from the common folk belief — recorded in bestiaries — that swans sing most sweetly just before their deaths. "Crocodile tears" originates in the doubtlessly insincere tears crocodiles were said to shed over their recently consumed human prey.

In his essay "On-Fairy Stories," J.R.R. Tolkien calls our perception of fairy tales as mere children's entertainment "an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the 'nursery' as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused."

The wolf in the woods loses its menace in its increasingly industrial and increasingly urbanized society, Little Red Riding Hood descends from the world of legend into that of bedtime stories and cartoon comedies, pandemonium becomes parade. In a similar fashion, the bestiary has gone from the most popular secular book in medieval Europe to an archaic genre that I must spend some time explaining. But, just as Disneyfied fairy tales have had a long and profitable afterlife in pop culture, bestiaries have survived in a somewhat new form, as fantasy rather than folklore: the Pokédex, Pokémon itself, the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Alien Species. If fairy tales have been relegated to the nursery (alongside the bear, as we've seen), then the bestiary has for the most part been relegated to the game room, the teenager's bedroom, the fantasy and science fiction reader's library, or the Game Boy.