Good Isn’t Good Enough: Pokemon, Representation, and Identity

I’m currently only about halfway through the main storyline of Pokemon Moon, despite picking it up the day it was released. Most of this is due to my end of semester schedule, which is a series of late nights and endless cups of coffee, but I still have plenty of thoughts on Nintendo’s latest installment of the Pokemon franchise, one of which is directly related to an issue very close to my heart: gender and identity.

Every Pokemon game begins with some variant of the same question: ‘what is your name?’ Every Professor from Oak to Kukui asks you to give yourself a name by which they and other characters in the game will identify you. Other identification questions appear depending on the game in question, and one that arose with the release of Pokemon Crystal, the question that gave players another choice, one Jynx has written about before: “are you a boy or a girl?”

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The thing about Pokemon Sun and Moon is that this question comes in a different form, one that, when I first read it on the screen of my 3DS, filled me with an almost violent level of hope. In Pokemon Sun and Moon, the player is greeted by Professor Kukui of the islands of Alola, and the game begins with him saying he needs to ask some questions so he can introduce you to everybody on the islands. The thing is, instead of asking that ubiquitous Pokemon professor question – are you a boy or a girl – a collection of eight images pop up on the screen and he asks “So which photo should I use for your trainer passport?”  

I wish I could explain the levels of excitement I suddenly had, which were only surpassed by the excitement levels of my partner, who lives 300 miles south of me and is agender. The two of us messaged back and forth in reckless excitement, blown away by how this choice appeared to give us the option to choose a character based on appearance instead of gender. As a trans guy I was excited, but it was nothing compared to how they felt, this game appearing to give them the option to actually choose a character who reflected their nonbinary identity.

I admit, I jumped the gun. I hopped on the NYMG Slack group to tell Sam, Alisha, Jynx, anyone who would listen, ‘this Pokemon game doesn’t make you choose a gender guys, holy shit!’ I was ready to throw a parade, sing Nintendo’s praises, call this a victory for the dismantling of the gender binary, until I played the first five minutes of the game and discovered, to my dismay, that despite the clear neutrality of Professor Kukui’s question, and the apparent androgyny of many of the passport images, as I played the game, the NPC residents of Alola referred to me as a boy. Despite the appearance and suggestion of a lack of binary decision about my gender, the game still went with one or the other depending on whether you’d picked a short-haired character from the top row of photos (the boy) or a long-haired character from the bottom (the girl).

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I looked at the screen and sighed and felt like I’d been played for a fool, not by Nintendo precisely, but by my own desperate hope that maybe this time, things would be different, and maybe this time I could play a game that didn’t force me, or anybody else who played, into a binary they didn’t adhere to or believe in.        

I have a long history with Pokemon. While it wasn’t the first game I ever played, it was the first I ever owned, as I received a copy of Pokemon Red for my tenth birthday. The nineteen years since then have seen me playing through every generation of Pokemon, with brief forays into collecting the trading cards, watching the movies, and even writing Pokemon related fanfiction during the Twitch Plays Pokemon craze in 2014. When it comes to Pokemon and gender, it took until Pokemon Alpha Sapphire came out that I was comfortable admitting to myself that I wanted to play a Pokemon game as a boy, and after I came out as trans, I was faced with the troubling issue of continuing my Pokemon games of the past.

Not every trans person has the feelings I do about playing characters in games that reflect their identity, and for me it’s always been heavily dependent on the game (for example, I will play as femshep in every Mass Effect game until the day I die without question because I find the story more compelling with a female protagonist, but that’s another story for another time). In the case of Pokemon, a game series that I credit with multiple levels of identity formation over the course of my young life, being able to play a character who represents and reflects me matters a great deal. So I restarted my game in Pokemon X, playing as a boy instead of a girl.

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Games tell stories, in terms of literal narrative and metaphorical identity journey, and stories matter, especially when the standard representation seen in fiction doesn’t match up with what we see in the mirror. I’ve talked about the importance of representation before, and my stance on this idea has only solidified in the wake of the Political situation in the United States.

Unsurprisingly it always comes back to LGBT representation for me, and Pokemon Sun and Moon is no different. The excitement I felt when I read Kukui’s words instantly evaporated when the other citizens of Alola referred to me as a boy. Not because I’m not a boy, but because I thought for a moment that maybe my gender would not be acknowledged in any form during the course of the game. Because my partner was so excited at the chance to play a character who actually represented them. Because as much as having an introduction that doesn’t ask if you’re a boy or a girl sounds like progress and representation, it isn’t enough, it’s a middle ground.    

Pokemon Sun and Moon does many things well for representation and diversity. The integration of a different culture into Alola’s portrayal brings us leaps and bounds forward into a game played by everyone from nostalgic millennials to parents to young children. It’s progress, it’s positive but it’s still not enough. It’s playing it safe, giving those of us desperate for representation a spark of hope for a franchise close to our hearts. The representation situation I’ve spoken about before is something Nintendo has as much as Blizzard does: suspending it in a state of neither present nor absent, leaving us here with our uncertainty.

In a world where explicit representation is sorely needed, I’m asking Nintendo for the same thing I’ve asked of Blizzard, of Bioware, of every game company large and small. Don’t half-ass your representation, especially not when its presence is sorely needed. The things you’ve done are good, and I appreciate them, but at this particular juncture, good is not good enough.