We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one…
Jorge Luis Borges, introduction to The Book of Imaginary Beings
In The Bear: History of a Fallen King, Michel Pastoureau traces the long and complex relationship between bears and human beings through the millennia, from a ritualistic mixed bear/Neanderthal burial 80,000 years ago to the modern teddy bear. For Pastoureau, the end of the story rhymes with the beginning; the special role played by Paddington, Winnie the Pooh and their relatives in children’s imaginations represents a return to prehistory, to the bear as an anthropomorphic, totemic, archetypal figure. “We find its oldest traces in Paleolithic caves,” he writes, “and its most recent manifestations in children’s beds.”1
This newsletter tells a similar story about the unstoppable, undying toy fad of my childhood, Pokémon, which offers not a single archetypal beast but an entire bestiary of imagined and embellished creatures. In 1999, just four years into Pokémania, Nintendo of America executive Peter Main called Pokémon “so far beyond anybody’s original projections that there has to be more to it than a quirky niche concept.”2 25 years later, Pokémon has expanded far beyond that. As I write this newsletter, there are currently 1,025 Pokémon, 127 more than when Pokémon celebrated its 25th anniversary (and when I started the previous version of this series) in 2021. The other relevant numbers truly boggle the mind:
Globally, Pokémon video games have sold more than 480 million copies.3
The Pokémon anime has lasted for more than 28 years and more than 1,300 episodes; it has aired in 192 countries and regions.
23 Pokémon films have grossed a total of well over $1 billion at the global box office.4
More than 64.8 billion Pokémon cards have been printed; Pokémon cards are sold in 93 different countries and regions.
Yes, there has to be something more than just a quirky niche concept and that something more is the raison d'être of Necessary Monsters. Furby, Pogs, Beanie Babies, Tamagotchi and other contemporaries had a normal faddish life cycle and died natural deaths in the popular imagination; Pokémon has not. Why? Because it offers something universally appealing, not specific to Japan or to the 1990s. Because it helps satisfy the insatiable human appetite for mythical creatures, which we will take from mythopoeic fantasy in the absence of a true, living mythology.
I will move in the exact opposite direction as Pastoureau: from the commercialized, child-friendly inhabitants of video game worlds, toy shelves, manga volumes and children’s television back to their (sometimes distant) ancestors in myth and legend.
Of all the books I’ve read to research the series, the most important is probably Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai, a book whose insights into Japanese yokai or mythical creatures are broadly applicable to world mythology. For Foster, pandemonium5 and parade represent the two extremes of how human beings imagine mythical creatures: uncanny, potentially malevolent entities to be feared and respected and figures of fun in safe, lighthearted entertainment.
This series, then, will be a journey from the Pokémon phenomenon of the past 28 years, which represents the extreme parade end of the spectrum (in a word, the Disneyfied end of the spectrum), back to pandemonium: to the yokai-haunted world of Japanese mythology, where kappa drown unwary swimmers and household objects take on ghostly life, and to the equally pandemonic world of the medieval European bestiary, where wolves prowl, crocodiles shed false tears to deceive their prey, dragons hunt elephants and basilisks kill with one glance.
These worlds are of course wondrous as well as terrifying. “The Bestiary is a compassionate book,” in the words of bestiary translator (and Arthurian fantasy writer) T.H. White.6 “Above all, it has a reverence for the wonders of life and praises the Creator of them;” unicorns and phoenixes, as well as dragons, inhabit this world, which is at times as panangelical7 as it is pandemonic.
Necessary Monsters will use Pokémon, familiar and on parade, as a gateway into that world. Charizard, for instance, will take us back through RPG bosses, Tolkien’s Smaug and Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock to the medieval European dragon, demonic symbol and nemesis of saints. Clefairy and Clefable, pink and kawaii, have roots in folklore about fairies much stranger and more numinous than Tinker Bell. Bulbasaur, the subject of the very next post, is a hybrid creature drawing on both the strange combinations of plant and animal imagined throughout history and the voluminous folklore centering on the common toad.
Attributing Pokémon’s success to the enduring appeal of mythical creatures (even now, even long after all the blank spaces labeled hic sunt leones or even hic sunt dracones have been filled in on the map) naturally leads to another question about why these imaginary creatures have such a hold on the human imagination. What makes them, as Borges suggests, a necessary part of our imaginative lives?
I’m writing Necessary Monsters because Pokémon represents these creatures’ survival far outside of their original contexts and thus speaks to their imaginative appeal in very different places and times — to their enduring symbolic power.
In a rare English-language interview,8 Pokémon’s reclusive co-creator Satoshi Tajiri touches on the applicability of Pokémon’s central idea, the capture and taming of monsters: “the monsters are controllable by the players. It could be the monster within yourself, [representing] fear or anger, for example.”9
The monsters of myth are not mere flights of fancy but represent important aspects of the human experience: the fear of the unknown, and its irresistible appeal; the awe-inspiring power of uncontrollable nature; the combined hope and fear of life after death; the simultaneous fascination and revulsion with things that do not fit into our worldview’s categories; the destructiveness of our own anger; the sheer variety of animal and plant life. Indeed, the 19th and 20th centuries filled a new bestiary with creatures — Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Jekyll, Martian invaders, Gollum, Godzilla, cinematic zombies,10 HAL 900, the Terminator, the Borg, the Brundlefly, Pennywise the Dancing Clown — that embody contemporary fears of technology, of disease, of total war, of our inner darkness and of life on other planets.
(And, of course, a friendlier bestiary of droids, Wookiees, scarecrows, tinmen, cartoon animals, puppets dreaming of becoming real boys, Marsh-wiggles, childlike extraterrestrials, conscientious crickets, soot sprites and other creatures that demonstrate our empathy for nonhuman life and even for machines.)
“Animals are good to think with,” in the famous words of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; mythical animals might be even better.
Throughout history, writers, artists and their colleagues have engaged with their culture’s fantastical creatures by categorizing, by compiling, by taxonomizing, by operating in what Foster calls the encyclopedic mode. From Han China to the medieval European scriptorium to early modern Japan to the Borges book that gives this newsletter its title, human beings have expressed their enduring fascination with these imaginary beings by creating bestiaries, illustrated books of beasts describing their powers, behaviors and habitats.
Pokémon Red and Blue (1996), the original Game Boy games, begin with a quest, with a call to adventure. Professor Oak, now too old for adventure of his own, presents his grandson and the player character with his latest invention: a handheld electronic encyclopedia called a Pokédex. He sends the boys out on a quest to complete the Pokédex by encountering and gathering data on every species of Pokémon in the world. “I want you two to fulfill my dream for me,” he tells them. “This is a great undertaking in Pokémon history!”
While Oak frames this project as a scientific endeavor, the Pokédex entries themselves read more like legends or embellished travelers’ tales than natural histories:
Fearow’s “huge and magnificent wings” let it “keep aloft without ever having to land for rest.”
Ponyta has hooves “ten times harder than diamonds” and is “capable of jumping over the Eiffel Tower in a single giant leap.”
Ninetales is “very smart and very vengeful… grabbing one of its many tails could result in a 1000-year curse.”
Rhydon, “protected by an armor-like hide,” is “capable of living in molten lava of 3,600 degrees.”
Many entries seem to reflect in-universe folklore and earlier accounts of doubtful veracity:
Victreebell is “said to live in huge colonies deep in jungles, although no one has ever returned from there;”
Haunter is “said to be from another dimension;”
Chansey is “said to bring happiness to those who catch it;”
Articuno is “said to appear to doomed people who are lost in icy mountains;”
Arcanine is “a legendary Pokémon in China.”
These descriptions echo those of bestiaries and similar books from around the world. T.H. White’s translation of a 12th century English bestiary,11 for instance, informs us that the antelope “is an animal of incomparable celerity, so much so that no hunter can ever get near it” and that Indian bulls “can repel every weapon by the thickness of their hides.” That dragons “are bred in Ethiopia and India, in places where there is perpetual heat” and that a hungry dragon “lying in wait near the paths where elephants usually saunter, lassoes their legs in a knot with its tail and destroys them by suffocation.” That ostriches refuse to lay eggs until the Pleiades are visible in the night sky and that the phoenix builds its own funeral pyre, dies in the flames, and is reborn from its own ashes.
The world of Pokémon and its creature are equally rooted in the bestiary analogues of its creators’ native Japan, the illustrated encyclopedias of yokai rooted in Japanese folklore and Chinese literature12 that became a popular genre in the late 18th century. This period of Japanese history, which saw a general explosion of print culture, also saw a proliferation of yokai into popular culture that foreshadowed Pokémania: yokai books and woodblock prints, yokai clothing, yokai magic lantern shows, yokai shooting galleries, yokai board games and even a yokai card game. In Pandemonium and Parade, Foster describes these cards using terms that bring the Pokémon Trading Card Game to mind:
Information about each yokai was compressed into a single, discrete unit; the phrase describing the creature was associated with a visual representation. The yokai became a tiny capsule of knowledge, as tight and self-contained as an encyclopedia entry.13
Foster’s next book, The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore, takes this bestiary form, as does Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings, as does this very newsletter — Pokemon as bestiary is its central theme. With a few potential exceptions, each post will catalogue one Pokémon or Pokémon family in relation to its mythical ancestors, featuring illustrations from bestiaries, woodblock prints and netsuke of yokai, painted Greek pottery and other sources.
Just as a classic bestiary identifies each creature’s natural habitat (whether real or imagined), Necessary Monsters will trace Charizard, Vulpix, Oddish and company back to their ancestral cultural habitats: to the medieval bestiary, the Greek myths, the legends of rural Japan, the rich animal imagery of Shakespeare’s plays, the German folktales compiled by the Brothers Grimm.
Of course, the Pokédex was not and is not the only bestiary in pop culture. I’m sure many of my readers are familiar with the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, or, as I did, spent youthful hours poring over illustrated lists of enemies in video game manuals. J.R.R. Tolkien famously describes the survival of fairy tales as children’s media as an accident of history after they became unfashionable for adults. In the same way, the bestiary — once the most popular secular book genre in Europe and, as we’ve seen, a cultural force in early modern Japan — has lost much of its former cultural territory but has survived and thrived in its new home, fantasy media. Like the totemic bear, it has found a new life in children’s media, with Pokémon leading the way.
Yes, a big part of Pokémon’s success and global, multigenerational staying power is down to effective, synergistic marketing, rampant fanboyism and millennials’ refusal to give up childish things. But I think there is something more: Pokémon as a kind of plastic, electronic Noah’s ark, holding such necessary monsters as fairies, dragons, firebirds, kappa, kitsune and baku.
If you followed the previous version of this series, I welcome you back for another dive into these deep waters. If this is all new to you, I hope you find something intriguing in this attempt to locate the mythic within this inescapable pop culture phenomenon.
Either way, I welcome you join me on this adventure.
Pastoureau, Michel. The Bear: History of a Fallen King. Translated by George Holoch. Harvard University Press, 2011.
King, Sharon R. “Mania for ‘Pocket Monsters’ Yields Billions for Nintendo.” New York Times, 26th April, 1999.
https://corporate.pokemon.co.jp/en/aboutus/figures/
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchise/fr2907148037/
Foster’s use of this particular word intentionally evokes the motif of the Hyakki Yagyō or Night Parade of 100 Demons.
White, T.H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century. 1954. Dover, 2010.
A Joycean borrowing, from Chapter 3 of Finnegans Wake.
Larimer, Tim and Takashi Yokota. "The Ultimate Game Freak." Time, November 22, 1999.
Pokémon, a contemporary bestiary, also takes the narrative form of the monomythic or hero’s journey as famously described by Joseph Campbell. The central idea of taming monsters — IE taming one’s fear, one’s anger, one’s inner demons — acts as a literalized metaphor for the central monomythical story of challenge and self-actualization.
As opposed to the original creature from Haitian Creole folklore.
White, The Book of Beasts.
Mostly notably the Han Dynasty Chinese atlas/encyclopedia known in English as The Classic of Mountains and Seas. An illustrated English translation of this book’s passages on fantastical creatures has been published as A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas.
Foster, Pandemonium and Parade. Foster makes an explicit connection between Pokémon and earlier yokai media in his final chapter, writing that “the Pokémon world shares critical structural affinities with yokai culture — particularly the collusion of ludic and encyclopedic modes” (p.124). Pokémon is both a game and a fictional taxonomy “through which the denizens of an otherworld are named, located, defined, described, and made to come alive.”
fascinating read, I’m looking forward to the rest of the series!
if I may, might I suggest Dr Marc Steinberg’s book Anime Media Mix? its discussion of the anime industry and its configurations through an analysis of the mobility of animated characters between different media - the media mix - could be interesting to your project; it specifically talks about Pokémon as well, offering a political economy and media studies perspective
I am sorry if you already know all this!
Color me intrigued. This was a thought-provoking read about a topic that, as much as I love it, doesn't usually inspire very deep thoughts for me. I'm definitely excited to read more Necessary Monsters posts.