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hisvanity · 5 years

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POKÉMON TRAINING: THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIE

i’ve headcanoned a lot of things about social justice in the pokémon world and so far, i’ve made it a pretty bleak place. a place where poc coordinators are routinely discriminated against, where team aqua is actually an indigenous people’s only recourse for a dignified independence, and where one power-hungry royal family controls the entire global media. but there’s one thing i haven’t touched. one thing you probably thought was safe. one thing that makes the pokémon world what it is, without which none of my other social justice ramblings would even be possible.

after all these months (or years? i forgot when i had it) of holding this hc in…it is time.

buckle up, kids. i’m going to ruin all your childhoods.

So What’s Up With Training?

several things, actually.

one, given that all of the trainers are seen constantly traveling on the road and camping out, we can easily deduce that the vast majority of trainers are homeless.

two, since the only ingame source of income that a trainer has is winning matches against other trainers, we can assume that money is hard to come by.

and three, because we hardly see any trainers go to school, we can also assume that unless we see them in a trainer’s school geared specifically toward training, these kids aren’t in school.

there are some things that can be expanded upon with this.

one, if we look at the mere fact that most trainers are homeless, we can clearly see that they’re not coming from a lot of money. if training was a sport favored by the wealthy or even the middle class, we’d see much less journeying on foot and many more taxis going from place to place, much less camping out and much more staying overnight in hotels. there are obviously exceptions to this rule, as we’ve seen some really posh/elite trainer schools in canon (think the first few dozen episodes of the kanto series, or the dojo that ash went to in johto). but i think it’s canonical that the vast majority of trainers are just out on the street with no transportation and not even a temporary home.

two, if you start off training while poor, it can be very hard to work your way up the socioeconomic ladder. if your main source of income is winning battles, and you lose money every time you lose a battle, every day is literally a gamble in which you could either get the necessary cash for your next three meals or lose everything you have and go hungry. sure, there are headcanoned ways to earn other money, such as entering tournaments and winning prize cash, or performing unskilled labor at a poké mart or pokémon center (because what else can a kid really do?) but even with these headcanons, most methods of earning money are either 1) contingent upon you winning battles or 2) not very rewarding at all.

three, it can always be assumed that trainers are attempting to get a decent education on the road. there could be online classes, there could be free classes offered by training schools. however, if trainers are both homeless and strapped for cash, concentrating in class and while doing schoolwork can be exceedingly difficult--and work or battle is usually a better use of time than study, because it ensures that you’re going to eat the next day.

from these things we can conclude that training, from a realistic standpoint, is a low-income sport that is commonly pursued by low-income individuals during which obtaining a proper education is difficult if not impossible, and attempting upward mobility presents a similar challenge.

in the real world, you bet your ass people would try to take advantage of that.

Why Trainers Should Give Up on Their Dreams

let’s be honest. training is like sports is like having a career in the arts. it is devilishly hard to succeed in any of these fields--hard to the point that most artists have to work a second job just to stay afloat. only the top 0.001% of trainers will ever see six figures, with the rest forever plugging away at the grindstone, hoping that one day they’ll get that shiny carrot of success that’s been dangled in front of them from the moment they chose their profession.

this is the life of artists.

this is the life of sportspeople.

there is no reason to believe that it will not be the life of a trainer as well.

this fact about training will never be fixed, and that is because there’s a benefit to the upper class if this is the case. if poor people are distracted by training from doing anything truly productive…they stay focused on their pokémon instead of societal injustice. and they stay out of school, which means they’re less likely to threaten the incumbent upper class with potential upward mobility.

if you’re thinking three steps ahead, you’re absolutely right!

Modern training is a global capitalist conspiracy to keep poor people uneducated, and to keep them from questioning their rich oppressors.

let me tell you how this works.

training has always been a part of human civilization. but the modern version of training (challenging gym leaders, earning badges, then challenging leagues and national conferences) first started becoming popular in the 1950′s after WWII. ever since then, i think it’s safe to assume that in the pokémon world, training is the #1 worldwide hobby/occupation for people ages 10 - 18. this did NOT happen on accident. league champions in conjunction with governments and pokémon-centered merchandising companies such as poké mart, inc. billed it to parents as a fun and rewarding activity where you could learn how to be independent, intelligent and quick-thinking--not to mention earn some cash for yourself and your family on the side. they ran countless advertising campaigns depicting happy trainers with their pokémon, urging kids to start their journeys with tantalizing images of victory in grand arenas. governments in america and western europe even billed training as a patriotic symbol of independence from communist rule, because communist-ruled countries (except for china) did not establish proper leagues until after the soviet union fell. due to a cultural shift encouraged by the Powers That Be, pokémon training became the most prevalent sport worldwide.

it wasn’t until the early 1970′s that world corporations figured out that there could be something to be gained from all this. with rising prosperity across the globe, they needed a way to make sure that they could maintain a solid “underclass” to do all the dirty work that nobody else wanted to do--while also making sure that pokémon-related companies turned a profit. they realized that in training lay their answer. the system that resulted from their collaboration with world governments creates a vicious cycle that goes as follows.

kids from poor families are told to quit school and train at age ten. they are thrust into a life of constant fight and constant struggle, just to earn a few more scraps of cash to send home. anxious families are promised that their children can still continue their educations via trainer schools, and that they can still have a path to college if that’s what they so desire--the most commonly found and most expensive scholarships in the world are reserved exclusively for trainers. however, given the rigors of training, 90% of trainers are unable to maintain consistent schooling of ANY LEVEL while they pursue a training career. of the 10% that can maintain consistent schooling, a further 90% of trainer school-educated children are unprepared for college, and roughly that amount of trainer school-educated students drop out of college once they attempt it. without a college degree, they are locked out of higher-paying jobs and forced to continue in unskilled labor, perhaps continue as trainers in the hopes that one day they can afford school. instead of getting angry at the system, however, many people are so focused on the day-to-day concern of trying to better their lives (and of potentially trying to achieve their training dreams) than trying to take down what holds them in chains. and so the cycle of poverty perpetuates.

They Use Training For A Reason

and that reason is fairly simple.

nobody has childhood dreams about working one’s way up from fry cook to manager at mcdonald’s. nobody has childhood dreams of becoming the world’s fastest-cleaning janitor, or becoming employee of the month five times in a row as a cashier. everybody, however, has childhood dreams about “being the very best, like no one ever was.” pokémon training has an emotional appeal due to its glorious veneer, an appeal that can motivate even the most stubborn people to drop out of school even when there’s no pragmatic reason to drop out of school in the first place. you just don’t get that out of cleaning toilets. you never will.

now, one can argue that the people at the top could have just relied on the natural tendency of capitalism to keep the poor at the bottom while the rich get richer. but they didn’t trust that it could stay that way on its own, and so this system was born as a guarantor of their greed.

So What About Rich and Middle-Class Trainers?

the richer your family is, the more likely you are to “make it big” as a trainer, and obtain the dreams that are promised to impoverished children all over the world. rich families have the advantage of giving their children tutors to improve their battling craft, enrolling them in expensive elite trainer schools, getting them interviews with media outlets in order to increase their visibility. the children of rich and even some middle-class families don’t have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from, or even where their next pokémon is going to come from--many well-off trainers have never caught a pokémon in their lives, instead buying them from expensive breeders. society also tends to look at the rich trainers and use them as examples of people who “made it,” and shame poor trainers without those advantages for not being able to do the same.

hold on, one might say. won’t well-off children have the same difficulty as their lower-income peers in staying in school? won’t they drop out of school to train, just like said peers? well, the powers that be have already thought that through. in all private schools, there are training and coordinating teams that meet after school for 2-2.5 hours a day mondays through fridays, similar to teams of other sports. also like teams of other sports, they hold practice sessions and compete regionally + nationally--each individual student has a ranking in the competition, but all students’ individual performances contribute to the overall ranking of their school. such programs also exist in public schools in low-income neighborhoods, but their quality is far below the programs found in private schools; also, full-time training is usually a financially more realistic option for low-income students than joining a school team because most school tournaments don’t give money to winners. moreover, going to school with a full stomach and a guaranteed roof over your head is very different from going to school with economic anxieties on your shoulders. a key difference between the two is that in the former, one battles for pleasure, not for cash, and if one loses cash, one can easily replace it; in the latter, one’s win-loss ratio can make a big difference in one’s day-to-day life. in addition, those of the lower middle class usually find themselves facing the same pressures as poor people during training--which means that the system used to keep poor people poor is also used to widen the gap between the poor and the rich.

government bigwigs and corporate fat cats know these truths. in fact, they bank on them. they run cartoons where children are told to “be the very best, like no one ever was.” they constantly uplift the rare cases of the people who made it from rags to riches, dangling the everlasting promise that you, too, could be like them. they drop propaganda leaflets into suffering neighborhoods telling them that you can have a better life if only you take up your poké ball and take up the fight. they do this with the full knowledge that training is not a sustainable solution for these children, but that it would benefit them to keep these children in training. and then they turn around and victim-blame the poor trainers who inevitably fail to reach the goals they were promised--calling them “lazy” and “unmotivated” when really, they are victims of a system that was rigged against them from the beginning.

you will not be the very best.

you will only ever be a pawn in somebody else’s long game.

Dishonorable Mention: Unovamerica

because it’s not a true worldbuilding post from me without a little shitting on the country that we liberals love to hate.

the united states is known for its dislike of free healthcare, but there is one brand of free healthcare that it has mysteriously never disliked: that provided to trainers. human healthcare from pokémon centers is completely free, but only if you are a registered trainer--many children become trainers purely because they can’t afford healthcare any other way. this practice has been adopted in many other parts of the world, but america started it first. pokémon centers in the u.s. are particularly notorious for enforcing the “free healthcare for trainers only” rule: they have been known to turn away the seriously ill, seriously injured and even the dying because they couldn’t present a valid trainer ID. in addition, to ensure that registered trainers are actually training and not just “mooching off the system,” the u.s. and countries adopting its system have a “fight per month” rule: if you don’t get a new badge or participate in a new tournament at least once every month, your access to free healthcare in pokémon centers is revoked.

many american states and non-american countries offer free and comprehensive healthcare for the families of traveling trainers as well--training is the ONLY low-income job where you can get this sort of treatment. most notably, trainer healthcare disregards preexisting conditions, which prevents many people from receiving the care they need via insurance. the government does this on purpose to funnel people into training, which not only achieves their goal of keeping kids uneducated and complacent but also makes sure that poké mart, inc. can always turn a profit--poké mart, inc., an american company, is actually a main player in the global conspiracy because the more trainers there are, the more money it makes off its monopoly on trainer goods. and so far, it’s been working. up in washington, the poké mart lobbyists have really been doing their job, and the healthcare system of an entire nation is suffering because of it.

there is no challenge to this system anywhere in the united states. conservatives use trainer’s healthcare to pander to undecided voters and demonstrate that they do have a “good” healthcare plan that “works.” liberal politicians also support trainer’s healthcare unquestioningly, believing falsely that this mechanism to funnel people into a profession with a lack of education is an innocent step in the right direction to universal healthcare for all. for reasons of political pragmatism, both sides are complicit in the rotten healthcare system that pins a basic human right to your willingness to enter a certain field.

the vigilante justice involved in some trainer journeys also actively upholds america’s system of police brutality and mass incarceration. propaganda encouraging trainers to fight crime often depicts black and brown people as the criminals. trainers’ victims in the u.s. usually end up in jail, subject to the very system that most trainers claim to be working outside or against. many vigilante trainers also use the same techniques of police brutality against unarmed black & brown victims that police often do themselves. lastly, in the u.s., fighting a racist cop is one of the fastest ways to get yourself deplatformed as a trainer: no matter how justified you are, if you do so your career is done.

oh, and do you want to know which country’s elected leaders had the idea for this entire system to actually become a thing?

if you’re reading this post, you’re probably sitting in it.

I Haven’t Even Told You The Worst Part

nowadays trainers are told that they can make a difference by being trainers. that they can use their strength to do justice in the world. commercial after commercial shows young kids beating up on criminals, encouraging youth to become vigilantes in a similar vein--to get out there and start changing the world in front of them. what those kids don’t know is that this promise of being able to enforce justice is also, in some sense, a lie.

training can deal with certain types of crime. training beats up team grunts and kills pedophiles. hell, sometimes training even takes down entire evil teams. but training will never be able to fix ITSELF--no amount of battling can ever undo the insidious system that has made itself as much a part of a trainer’s existence as potions and poké balls. training will also never solve modern slavery, the climate crisis, income inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration. the people at the top know this. they know that with everybody’s eyes fixed on pokémon training, nobody will focus on the greater issues plaguing the world today, and that this is exactly how they want things to be.

essentially, trainers are told that they are the arbiters of justice as part of a mechanism to prevent them from solving some of the greatest injustices in the world.

vigilante justice, the thing most dear to many trainers, the very thing that makes modern training what it is--has been transformed into yet another tool for world governments and corporations to keep trainers under control.

So Where Do Leagues Fit In All This?

i pose this question because i hc them as the ultimate vigilantes. the people who are supposed to keep this sort of shit under control. people who, collectively, have the strength to take down an unjust government. theoretically, they should have been able to solve this problem with training a long time ago by unseating those in power and finding real solutions for the kids involved.

however.

you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know that it’s a problem in the first place.

that’s right. this entire system of keeping poor kids (and tbh kids in general) under government and corporate control is so insidious and well-hidden that the very people who are sworn not to let this kind of thing happen are sometimes the ones most responsible for holding it up. leagues are just as guilty as the governments they are supposed to oppose of encouraging kids to take up training, using the same rhetoric and techniques that the higher-ups also use. some leagues are even straight-up complicit with governments (see: the american, prussian and chinese leagues) in attempting to funnel kids into the training system. even wallace, social justice advocate that he is, was not aware of the system he unwittingly perpetuated until recently--and even then, he is not only exploitatively held up as one of the examples of somebody who “made it,” he thinks the training system is just a byproduct of capitalism rather than something that has been encouraged on purpose. granted, leagues around the world have also created programs to help struggling trainers with food, shelter, tutoring. but honestly, the people on top let it happen because these programs are ultimately just a band-aid on a gash that cuts down to the bone.

IN CONCLUSION

if you care about your education, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

if you wish to pursue a dream that you can actually fulfill, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

if you don’t want to sell your soul to capitalism, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

in the pokémon world, a world built on pokémon training, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

#don't give me that pain. || WORLDBUILDING #politics*#race*#|| ok to reblog

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