Parents Just Don't Understand

Recently I dusted off one of the most cherished and beloved vestiges of my childhood; something most people who were alive in the latter half of the 90's are likely to remember: Pokemon.

At first glance, Pokemon was a simple multimedia franchise, based around the idea that cute, fantastic monsters would be trained by their human masters to do battle with their equally adorable ilk. The idea becomes a lot more complicated upon glances 2 through 17, however. It was a conventional Japanese-style role playing game in the guise of something much simpler. It was a gateway drug, if you will, for more complex JRPG- style games such as Final Fantasy.

Although the history of Pokemon as a successful children's entertainment venture could fill several volumes, here I will only touch on but a chapter. My namesake, rapper Will Smith, once said the "parents just don't understand," a mantra of adolescents that persists to this day; equally persistent is the assertion that parents DO understand. Well, parents obviously know what goes on in a teenager's head as they have been there before. But what I think his majesty the Fresh Prince was talking about was Pokemon.

When I was but on the cusp of preadolescence, my own parents and the scores of parents of my friends possessed their own ignorant vocabulary for the creatures we held dear. The correct pronunciation of course is poke-ay-mon. If anyone over the age of 16 had their way, the number of pronunciations soars to countless numbers: pokey-man was post prominent, implying Pokeyman was perhaps a super hero. But I have also heard Pokeymon, Pikamon, Pokaman, Polkaymoan... some adults even went so far as to assume Pokemon was actually the same thing as Pac-Man. "I remember playing this in the arcades when I was your age," one parent said. "Sure has come a long way."

It didn't stop there of course. In all fairness, there were over 150 unique characters to keep track of, a fifteen-way rock-paper-scissors elemental system, evolutionary charts, plot events and subculture aspects to memorize, could we blame them?

Of course we could! We could remember all that stuff no problem. If we invested all of our Pokemon time into school in stead, we'd have a generation of geniuses on our hands. My proposed solution: teach Pokemon in elementary school.

Since I came into my own as a young adult, I stopped paying attention to that which wouldn't relinquish it before. As a quick Wikipedia survey manifests, there are currently 493 Pokemon. Purists such as myself will maintain that only the first 151 actually count, due mainly because the new ones look completely stupid. Fuck that shit. I'll keep my good ol' Pikachu and Charizard, thank you very much. You next generation Poketots can have you Chimchar Lucario inanity.