“Are you a BOY or a GIRL?” or: Is there sexism in Pokémon?

                 I’ve never really thought of myself as being a feminist, just as I’ve never thought of myself as being whatever it is that you call someone who is against feminists. I’ve just been pottering about with my own life and enjoying the bounties that have come my way.

                One of the reasons that I do fusions from existing sprites is that I lack the talent to properly draw my own sprite from scratch. ANOTHER reason that I like to tell people (and is true) is that I find that fusion sprites look more authentic than scratch sprites in most cases because the fusion sprites have very similar properties to the originals.

                I’ve been lucky enough to stumble upon people who have done the hard work of collecting the pictures of every single trainer from the games of Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald all the way up to Black 2 and White 2. Because of this, I’ve had a wide variety of sprites from which to take pieces to make a fusion.

                And then I came upon some things that made me frustrated. You see, in my side project right now called “Pokémon: Manifest Destiny”, I wanted to have some things be different from the games that I played, which were Pokémon Red/Blue/Yellow, Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal, Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, and I only got a little into Pokémon Pearl. In each of those games, there weren’t any female professors or women in any real sort of power. There were female gym leaders, and even some women in the Elite Four for each region, but no Champions or Team Rocket/Magma/Aqua leaders who were women.

                I really hadn’t been bothered by this before, but when I went in and tried to find some parts for sprites to use to create my own professor, I had some difficulty.

                There were female sprites like this:

    Or this:

                And especially this:

                I didn't want to make a character who looked like they were either on the verge of peeing their pants, skipping through a field of flowers, or in some sort of ad for chocolate. I wanted to make a sprite of a woman who is serious and powerful. I didn't want a sprite of a woman who was showing off her beauty or sexuality, because there have been plenty of strong women in history who didn't rely on their looks. I wanted a sprite like these:

                Or these:

                Eventually I had to go in and adapt some parts from male characters and fuse them with female sprites to get what I wanted:

                It was actually a little bit concerning for me. As I went through making each of the characters, I noticed that there were some patterns. Either you wore a really short skirt, really short shorts, a bikini, or you were old or out of shape and wearing a full dress. Granted, there are some characters who don’t fall into these categories, but it seemed to me that the majority of the feminine characters do.

                Why is this? I thought it was kind of strange how I had never noticed this while growing up and playing the games. Could it be that I was just involved in the game? I’m thinking that it is more likely that I wasn’t old enough to notice these discrepancies. The Pokémon games are marketed to a rather young audience, and as such you don’t really see a lot of what would be considered ‘inappropriate’ for young kids. By far (unless you think Pokémon is all about cruelty to animals) Pokémon games are much safer for kids to play than a lot of other games or shows that are marketed to this same audience.

Just stare into the eyes....STARE INTO THE EYES...

I don’t think that children are in danger of being ‘indoctrinated’ by these characters, because they are there to play Pokémon. I don’t think there is any justification in saying that boys who play this game will then have their relations with the other sex affected. I would think that they would be much more likely to attempt to cram animals into small balls and then make them fight against each other.

                Besides, Nintendo has recently made some advancements in how they have portrayed characters. While I haven’t seen much of the new X and Y Pokémon games, they did have a female professor in the Black and White Pokémon games, as well as characters who were black. So maybe there is some hope that what has been a little unsettling for me is changing.   

Or not...sigh....