Poke Mon Questions

Poke Man, 1982

I’m as amused by Ryan Reynolds, middle-aged comedy/action hero, as any other unfrozen caveman would be, but this “Poke Mon Detective Pikachu” thing leaves me with many questions. The big ones are:

  • Why is it “Poke Mon” instead of “Poke Man”? Are they not men? Are they Devo? I seriously saw that second “o” as an “a” for decades, and the accent marker is clearly delimiting two words.
  • What’s a “Pikachu”? Is that a species or the individual? Where are the packs or herds of these things? Final Fantasy has moogles with families and lifecycles.
  • Why is it now a talking animal in a deerstalker cap instead of a dumb fighting cock?

Seriously. I know very little about this whole genre. So here I will enumerate what I know about the poke mons:

  • Infants in the ’90s had poke mons which were cock-fighting games and the yellow one is their… leader? I know it makes some sort of noise, and the trailer suggests it’s “pica pica”. The trailer also suggests it’s able to electrocute someone? That’s weird, right? Does it grab a frayed extension cord, or is it a fuzzy electric eel, or what?
  • It was a videogame first, a Dragon Quest ripoff; I never played it or saw more than a screenshot. Then a card game, a Magic the Gathering ripoff; I know these only from the booster pack wrappers left behind by prepubescent crack junkies, never seen a card. Then some badly-animated… I want to say Chinese or Vietnamese? cartoons, didn’t look like even the cheapest Japanese anime; I’ve seen maybe 2 minutes of this and it was incomprehensible squealing and Hanna-Barbera-quality slideshow “animation”. Then movies, a quick duck search shows there’s 20 of these movies!!! That’s fucking bizarre, I’ve never heard of them; admittedly, I haven’t watched broadcast/cable TV since 1999 and I block all advertising online, so how could I, but you’d think someone would have said to me, “Did you know there are twenty fucking poke mon movies?!”
  • I know about the trap balls from parody references and Poke Mon Go (which I tried for a couple weeks but I live many km from any dots on their map). It’s weird that a tiny ball holds a whole fighting cock in it. How does it breathe and eat (and other science facts) in there?
  • There’s an enemy team named Rocket, with a hot pink/redhead chick (who I’ve seen in some parody porn), which automatically to me means they should be the heroes, and the team with the kid who owns the yellow one should be the villains.
  • I’m totally skeeved out by people doing even pretend cock-fighting or dog-fighting for fun. Taking a dumb animal and making it hurt another dumb animal for entertainment is unacceptable. You can kill (humanely, which ironically means not how we treat other Humans) and eat or process an animal for leather or other parts, fine; or make intelligent beings fight each other in an arena; but anyone doing it to animals is wrong.