Pokémon, from RGB to Z and Beyond (A Personal Reflection 30 Years in the Making)
- Stefan Greenfield-Casas
- Feb 27
- 15 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Allow me to begin with three anecdotes:
It is 2000. I am in elementary school and am on a camping trip with my slightly older neighbor who lives across the street. Earlier in the day, we had gone fishing; in the evening, we ran around the campfire chasing fireflies. Now, at night, he lends me his Silver Version (he has his own Gold Version) so that we can play together for as long as his parents will allow us before it’s time for bed.
It is 2015. I am about to graduate from my undergraduate institution. I have just started collecting Pokémon cards again after my friend brought her own overflowing binder of cards to one of our gatherings. I make a dedicated Instagram account for my Pokémon cards and start posting photos of my collection. I meet like-minded Pokémaniacs and buy from them, trade with them, and find virtual community with these “trainers” from all over the world.
It is 2022. I am in my last year of my doctoral degree. I am taking a break from writing my dissertation to refresh a webpage over and over again, waiting for the new listings to “drop.” Finally, the new set of prints appears, and I rush to place my order for a 1/1 “misprint” collaborative art print by the Chicago-based artist David Heo and POP!NK Editions. The print itself is based on Heo’s interpretations of the trading card game’s Base Set Venusaur and Blastoise cards (originally illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita and Ken Sugimori, respectively). This is just one of dozens of new “high art” pieces I have seen in recent years based around Pokémon.
It is now 2026 and Pokémon’s 30th anniversary. Given this anniversary celebration (it’s also LoZ’s 40th, as well as an anniversary year for a number of other franchises), I would like to use this essay to reflect on what Pokémon has meant for me over the years. I’ll approach this somewhere between fandom and cultural criticism—The Pokémon Company International is a, well, company, after all, and Pokémon is the highest grossing media franchise in the world, one that has developed its own brand of what cultural anthropologist Anne Allison has called “pokécapitalism.” Part of what makes Pokémon so successful on this front is the way that it has made itself a part of our everyday life: from apps like PoGo and Pokémon Sleep, to household goods like their collaboration with Le Creuset. They are now even appearing in museums and galleries. I have an academic project in the works that explores these many facets in much greater critical detail. For now, however, I’ll use this space as a more personal reflection on how Pokémon has affected me over the years. So this essay is about Pokémon, yes, but also a glimpse into my inner world.
On the Cards
I think the main way I have engaged with Pokémon across the years has been through collecting its trading cards. I remember waking up early on Sunday mornings back in the 90s (the 1900s!) to go to the local flea market to purchase cards with my birthday and Christmas money. There was a Thai vendor there who thought I was adorable (and a repeat customer) and so she would give me discounts. I also remember having my cards taken away from me during elementary school (they were banned because of the pokémania fervor) and getting some cards back at the end of the school year (to this day, I’m uncertain if they were my cards… my friend said he recognized the rubber band and so the principal gave them to me??).
Eventually I stopped actively collecting the cards, though I’m glad I decided to keep all of my Pokémon cards (my Yu-Gi-Oh! cards were not so fortunate). As I mentioned in one of my opening vignettes, I started actively collecting again towards the end of my undergraduate days. This was c. 2014, so right before the 20th anniversary boom in 2016 and, because of that, I was able to purchase some cards that are, frankly, out of my budget these days.
In particular, I made a bunch of friends in the Pokémon card fan community on Instagram. The first card I purchased was a First Edition Crystal Lugia from a guy who went by the name of Alakahzam. He sold it to me for a steal (he needed quick cash) and I was suddenly very back in. After graduating, I would use most of (all of?) my graduation gift money to buy what for many is considered the holy grail of Pokémon cards. But, as these things often go for me, my interests started to turn to the obscure and the abstract. In particular, I became fascinated with vintage bootleg cards. I started collecting them to the degree that even some of the big name collectors (i.e., those with six figure collections, even back then) started sending people and listings my way when they came across these bizarre cards. Among these, my favorites were the Beckett Bootlegs (based off of unofficial concept art from early “leaks” of the second generation Pokémon) and the Chinese Crystal Knockoffs.
I have long been interested in replicas, fakes, and multiples—it is part of the reason I research musical arrangements. This was just one facet of that materializing in my collecting habits (and there’s a whole other essay to be written about how Pokémon and its slogan turned me and a whole generation into collectors). To be clear—in this setting at least, I am not interested in counterfeit cards, those which try to pass themselves off as real. I am, however, extremely interested in how we value these obscure and pleasantly bizarre items that, in many ways, should hold little to no (monetary) value. At the end of the day, it’s all made up. Anyway, I made my own community there as well, with other bootleg and knockoff collectors. Post 2020 and LP’s, unfortunately, very public engagement with Pokémon as a speculative asset, I stopped regularly engaging with the Pokémon Instagram community. Many of my online friends from that era have also stopped using their Pokémon accounts. But still, every now and then I check back to see what people are talking about, what cool vintage things people are finding, and what the latest drama is.
On the Games
Certainly, next up for me would be the games. I have so far played at least one game from each of the 9 generations of mainline games in Pokémon. We’ll see if this continues in the future (the Switch 2 does not particularly interest me as a console at the moment). But growing up playing Pokémon introduced me to the RPG genre before I even knew what genres were. These are now the games I tend most to prefer, though I have little stake in the classical turn-based or more contemporary real-time battle stylizations that seem to rile up so many gamers.
Of all the Pokémon games, SoulSilver has remained my favorite since I first played it. I was in high school at the time, and while I had largely skipped over the first wave of Gen 4 games (to this day, I think Diamond and Pearl are the weakest mainline games overall [I have not played Platinum, which many consider the best mainline game], even though Cynthia is undoubtedly the best Champion), something brought me back in. What this something was, I couldn’t tell you. At that point, it may have been nostalgia—Silver Version was the first Pokémon game I beat all the way through, and so I had (and have) fond memories of playing it. I think my opening vignette can attest to this. I was also quite the nostalgic person back then, young though I was. While I have since become extremely critical of nostalgia after studying it in graduate school (check out Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia), the youth I associated with Silver Version was a nostalgic ideal at that point. A bit more about this below. But SoulSilver as a game offered a number of quality of life adjustments, as well as the double map that the original game also offered. Here, I’ll disentangle an uncritical Silver nostalgia for a more general positive memory of SoulSilver.
More recent games have certainly had their moments. Black and White’s plot gave a compelling take on the ethics of Pokémon and human interactions; Sun and Moon gave me my favorite side character and made me nickname a Pokémon for the first time ever; and Scarlet and Violet finally offered a fully open world (truly condemning explorer-type gamer Stefan to freedom). But later games are too easy. There is no challenge to them, at least in their main storyline. I caught Eternatus at full health with a regular ‘ole pokéball when playing Sword and Shield. I also still haven’t played any of the Legends games. But it is hard to keep up with everything these days.
On the Music
Oh, the music. I’d like to say that much ink has been spilled on the music of Pokémon, but this really isn’t true, at least, not of academic scholarship (one notable exception comes in the form of Elizabeth Hunt’s brilliant work). Instead, much criticism and analysis comes by way of YouTube. I have written a post elsewhere on one of my favorite pieces in recent memory. But here are a few more from across the years.
In 2015, I took a daytrip with my friend to go see Pokémon: Symphonic Evolutions in Houston. This was before I had decided I was going to research and study video game music concerts, so I’m especially glad I decided to attend. Basically the sole decoration I had in my office at UR was a giant Conductor Pikachu poster from that concert, and a source of small enjoyment was seeing how different students would react when coming in for office hours.
Frankly, I’m surprised Pokémon has not done more with their music in concert form. For the 25th Anniversary in 2021, they released a video with Post Malone. …No comment. They have also started collaborating with Hatsune Miku and Vocaloid producers for Project Voltage (comments forthcoming elsewhere on that one). Most recently, however, a Pokémon medley was performed to open the 2026 Pokémon Europe International Championships:
As I said in a Discord message to some friends when they asked for my opinion of the concert [edited for clarity]: “The arrangement is kind of boring, but it's effective for what it is. I really wish they had included at least some of the Pokémon cries/sfx. Fans are doing that these days! Look mum no computer was easily the best part of it, but also kinda seemed underutilized. The accompanying video was... eh. I'm trying to think what Distant Worlds does for the older games to make the visuals more engaging. I generally prefer "music only" video game music concerts, but whatever. I actually think including the cries and sfx would've made the visual more interesting here. I'm also, I think, pleasantly surprised the entire medley is dedicated to Red, Green, and Blue Versions rather than the entire 30 years of Pokémon.”
Indeed, fans are doing more interesting things with Pokémon’s music and sounds than Pokémon itself is doing these days, I think. I’m a huge fan of Matsuzawa Aoi Tina’s melodica videos, for instance. And DJ Vega has done some really cool scratch remixes of iconic Pokémon battles. (In researching this, I found out that he was actually apparently invited to perform at Pokémon Worlds in 2025!)
To jump backwards now—as I mentioned above, I have actively turned my back on nostalgia at this point in my life. Too many people use it as an escape (especially in this day and age), and I wonder how much of it is based on actual enjoyment rather than a simulacrum of joy (says the person who is interested in fakes). Anyway, my one exception that I have allowed myself is the “National Park Theme” from Silver Version (and its HGSS arrangement as well). I spent quite a bit of time in the National Park in the game, as the bug catching contest was one of my favorite weekly events. Why the “National Park Theme” rather than the “Bug Catching Theme”? Again, I couldn’t really say. Regardless, this is the one territory, both musical and virtual, that I consciously allow myself as a nostalgic respite. I also think it’s somewhat apropos that it’s a theme from a park that hosts a bug catching contest. Part of Pokémon creator Tajiri Satoshi’s inspiration for creating the games was growing up in rural Japan catching bugs, after all.
On the Anime
In the interest of meta transparency (metamodernist that I am), this is the last section I am writing. I think this is because less is immediately coming to mind about my relationship with the anime specifically. It was the first element of Pokémon I stopped engaging with as a child (though I watched it religiously after school every day until then), and I did not really pick it back up like most of the other franchise elements.
I think there are two elements as to why this is the case. First, the show is (or was) based around Ash, a character who never grew up, and who had little development of a character over the years. This makes him a vessel for nostalgia. And yet, my usual critique here is tempered by the fact that part of the reason for this is because Pokémon used him across generational cycles such that newer generations of children (or fans more broadly) could engage with the character without needing to know decades worth of his lore. Sure, there were the occasional callbacks to events or characters from previous seasons, but the anime made it easy for fans to start the anime pretty much whenever.
Some seasons do seem to be better critically respected than others—I was reading up on this at some point last year when I was thinking about going back and watching select seasons. And this seems to be true of the movies as well. The movies especially seem to exist in a doubly mythic cycle; that is, beyond the general generational cycles per region, the movies exist in their own time such that their events do not obviously overlap with the television show. One might say they’re “not canon.” Maybe.
Beyond this, however, you have certain movies which are definitely in different timelines or worlds. The most obvious example of this is Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You!, which is a retelling of Ash and Pikachu’s origin story, updated to account for all the Pokémon which had been revealed in the 20 years since the anime first started airing. I remember going to see it in theaters, just a few months into my PhD. Indeed, it inspired me to think a bit more critically about Pokémon and its mythic cycles (a bit more on that below). If nothing else, it gave us talking Pikachu. Reactions were… mixed. Okay, not really. But I’m truly rambling at this point. Onwards.
On the Art
Around 2020, I started to notice an interesting phenomenon—Pokémon was starting to appear in galleries. At this point, these were fan works created by millennial artists drawing from their childhood experiences and inspirations. This first piece I can recall is the artist three’s “558.2G” as exhibited at Corey Helford’s “Art Collector Starter Kit VII” show. This was hardly the first Pokémon fanart I had seen. Pokémon was one of the main IPs you would come across in Artist Alleys at anime conventions, and artists like itsbirdy and reidf had huge followings on social media due to their unique artistic takes on Pokémon. But the spaces in which these new works were being exhibited was drastically changing. As any cultural critic or curator should be able to tell you, presentation is everything. Just by nature of these works being exhibited in established galleries gave them a cultural cache that an anime convention does not really afford. As an extreme example, there are some parallels here with Takashi Murakami’s exhibition at Versailles back in 2010 (a favorite example of mine for anyone who’s read my dissertation).
Anyway, by this point in life, I had largely moved from focusing on collecting Pokémon cards, to collecting art. Following my interest in multiples, I was especially drawn to prints. Indeed, I started collecting James Jean prints because itsbirdy posted about purchasing a print of James Jean’s “Seasons” way back when. So when, in 2020, I saw that an artist named David Heo was going to be releasing a print based on his interpretation of the legendary First Edition Base Set Charizard card, I knew I had to pick it up. David in particular has become one of my favorite artists since then, and he has created a number of Pokémon works and prints in his idiosyncratic collage style. My third vignette above is in reference to probably my favorite piece of his I have, a metamodernist piece that is decidedly me.
But other artists, galleries, and museums have created or shown Pokémon as well. In 2023, the Pokémon x Kogei exhibition debuted at the National Crafts Museum in Japan. This landmark exhibition featured both up-and-coming and master craftsmens’ takes on Pokémon in whatever craft they practiced. Examples included pottery, embroidery, carvings, and the like. My favorite piece in that collection is probably Hayama Yuki’s porcelain “Vase with Pokémon of the Universe.” While the exhibition traveled to LA for a bit, I was unfortunately unable to make it then (but s/o to my friend for picking up the exhibition catalog for me!). Overseas, in NYC’s venerable Perrotin Gallery, Daniel Arsham held his Time Dilation exhibition, which featured some of his (officially sanctioned) Pokémon works; a year later and back to Japan, Nanzuka Underground held his A Ripple in Time exhibition, which was completely dedicated to his Pokémon collaboration (see also Arsham’s “Cubone” at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024). The House of Pikachu: Art, Anime, and Pop Culture exhibition is going on in Houston for a few more weeks; and Spoke Art’s recent LEVEL UP features some Pokémon pieces as well. Ghanaian artist Magasco has even offered his… interesting take on the series which is currently on view at Harman Projects. And just a few weeks ago, MOMA, the Getty, and the Whitney each posted a PoGO photo following the looking back to 2016 trend that was taking place across social media.
We have come a long way from the (possibly bootleg?) bamboo wall scrolls I used to see at the mall growing up.
In Academia
In the second semester of my master’s, I took a seminar called “Opera and Cinema” with the indelible musicologist Hannah Lewis. For my final paper/presentation for that course, I wrote a paper theorizing a “neo-Gesamtkunstwerk” drawing on composer Richard Wagner’s hypothetical Gesamtkunstwerk, but reinterpreting it in the 21st century by way of video games (and, more particularly, Pokémon). I would present this paper at the North American Conference on Video Game Music the following year, along with two other papers dedicated to Pokémon: one by the video game composer Mark Benis, and the other by musicologist Rose Bridges—a rare cohort of pokéludomusicologists. A few years later, I presented a significantly revised version of this paper at a conference hosted by Yale where the theme was “trans-” (broadly construed). Here, I reframed my concept to that of the Transmediagesamtkuntwerk. The transmedia prefix, I argued, better accounts for Pokémon’s sprawling reach across media. A year after that paper, I took a seminar offered by the media theorist Jim Hodge entitled “Ordinary Media.” In this class I started delving into the media theoretical elements of Pokémon, arguing in that term paper that Pokémon’s success is in part predicated on making it easily a part of your everyday life—quotidian, from the games to show to the merch and beyond.
What’s incredible to me is just how on the nose I was in my analyses across these years. I have since read an excessive amount of Japanese media (and some marketing) theories, and I was spot on with many of my intuitions, even if I didn’t have the specific language they used in these works. I’m happy to say that I have a book chapter in the works that explores this phenomenon in much, much greater detail. (And thank you to the multiple friends who suggested I submit an abstract for that project.) No advanced spoilers here! With that being said, this essay works as a less formal companion piece to that decidedly academic work. In fact, the anecdotes that open this essay initially opened that chapter—but the editors and I agreed they didn’t quite work there, so I have instead moved them here.
On A Few Decades’ EXP and Shifting Priorities
Thanks for sticking around this long and for humoring yet another anniversary reflection. As I hope I’ve made clear, Pokémon has had a long lasting impact on my life. But that impact has shifted over the years. I long ago gave up on “catching ‘em all” and trying to experience Pokémon in its entirety. Dare I say that I now think that is an impossible quest? But with this no-longer-10-year-old-Stefan wisdom, I have been able to reconsider my relationship with Pokémon. My relationship is no longer one based purely on consumptive obsession, but, rather, critical joy and engagement. That is, I still enjoy Pokémon, but I no longer feel the need to try and engage with every facet of it. I pick and choose. Rather than trying to complete a master set of the latest TCG set, I pick and choose a handful of cards; if a game doesn’t interest me (or, more likely, I feel like I don’t have the time to dedicate to it), I skip it until I’m ready. I didn’t even watch the conclusion to Ash’s journey in the anime until I was writing the initial draft of the aforementioned chapter I’m working on.
I’d like to think this mindset has bled over into my life outside of Pokémon as well. One can only do so much in life—we have limited time, limited energy, limited resources, and where one chooses to spend or invest them has consequences in other departments. As much as I love Pokémon, I have far too many other interests to dedicate my entire being to these kawaii monsters. Other people instead build their lives around (and some even careers off of) this franchise, in any number of ways. And all the power to them, assuming they’re critically thinking through that worldview. But even if I’m not dedicating the entirety of my life to Pokémon, it has influenced me and taught me so much across the years. Happy 30th, Pocket Monsters. May you continue to impart these life lessons in the years to come.
Comments