Tag Archives: history

I just need to get out of my system how weird Pokémon Conquest is

You all know Pokémon, right?  That game about cute animals battling each other that’s so popular with kids and young adults.  I’ve been a fan all my life and recently got into the DS game Pokémon Conquest because it was described to me as Pokémon meets Fire Emblem.  So far so good.  The game is set during an alt-history warring states period in which all the warriors of Japan use Pokémon to fight each other.  The “Kingdoms” of Pokémon Conquest are all elementally-aligned and so take the place of the traditional Pokémon gyms.  There’s the fire kingdom, the water kingdom, the grass kingdom, and our heroes have to defeat them all to reunite Japan.  

The moderate amounts of insanity begin early on, however when we find out that Nobunaga is also a Pokémon trainer and is trying to conquer Japan himself.  In Japanese culture Nobunaga was once described to me as “George Washington Hitler” due to the complex and often contradictory role he is seen in.  On the one hand he was the Great Unifier who’s successes in uniting Japan lead to the direct predecessor of the modern Japanese state and the end of the Sengoku period.  This characterization can lead to positive portrayals.  On the other hand he is often viewed as needlessly, even gleefully cruel and portrayed in some media as a diabolical schemer taking pleasure in the pain of others.  So when I saw him in a Pokémon game I did not know what to expect.

Insanity ramps up when the game reveals that your assistant, an unconfident girl with a Jigglypuff named Oichi, is also the secret sister of Nobunaga.  Nobunaga reveals that his signature Pokémon is the Gen V legendary Zekrom, so I guess that’s how he conquered Japan, by using a legendary Pokémon.  But I couldn’t get over my laughter at how the game decided that the shy assistant girl would be the sister of the main antagonist, like sure that’s storytelling plot twist #1: have a secret relationship.  But it seemed so out of the blue and didn’t really add much to how I saw either character.  It didn’t add dimensions to Nobunaga because we barely see him, and it didn’t add dimensions to Oichi because she barely has character and neither she nor anyone else acts differently because of this revelation.  It felt like a twist for twist’s sake.

The highlight of this game’s weird and wacky insanity was when your main character evolves.  Yes that’s right, in this game Pokémon aren’t the only ones who evolve.  After a bunch of events happen the main character evolves into a cooler version of themselves, with all the evolution sound effects and music that you’d expect from a Pokémon evolution, and they aren’t the only ones that can do that.  Oichi herself can evolve too, as can some of the other main characters if certain conditions are met.  I wonder if this power will ever carry over to the main games?  I should ask my friends if anyone ever evolved in Pokémon Legends, Arceus.

The finally hilarity for me was the finale where you reveal that the continent you’re on bears more relation to Arceus (the Poké-God) then to historical Japan, and Arceus itself comes down and basically says that your main character should be the one to defeat/catch it.  OK sure, whatever, catch ‘em all.  But God himself coming down and saying “catch me bro” just put the final pin in the corkboard for me, I think this game is a comedy and I wish it had gone all out on it.  Maybe it’s because I’m not 10 anymore, maybe this would feel like a stirring epic if I’d played it as a kid, but I couldn’t keep a straight face through any of it.  There are some things that are just instantly hilarious to me, and mixing Pokémon with history is one of them.  I still giggle at how Lt. Surge apparently fought in wars with his Raichu, and now we can add him to the long list of war-fighting trainers from this game.

Pokémon Conquest: how Eevee and Jigglypuff reunited Japan.

Post 7

I’d like to start with a chat about stories.

Say I told you a story and it started out like this: “there once was a great man called America.  He had 13 sons and together they fought against tyranny.”  Obviously this is an anthropomorphic mythology of the American Revolution, right?  The nation of America and its 13 colonies/states become actual people in a dramatic tale.  Now here’s a different story: “there was a great man called America, and with his 50 children he settled the length and breadth of this land.”  Well this is an anthropomorphic mythology of a more *modern* America.  There’s 50 states instead of 13, and they don’t need to fight the British anymore.  But how about this one: “America and his 24 children quarreled frequently among themselves.”  What is “24” in relation to?  Well in 1821 Missouri became the 24th state, and it wasn’t until 1836 that Arkansas became the 25th.  Us modern folk don’t really think about America as having 24 states, but for 15 years in the 19th century that was the case.

If you lived in 1830 and were going to write an anthropomorphic mythology of the United States, it might make sense for you to give America 24 children.  You would probably characterize America and the states in an 1830s way.  New York and Pennsylvania, the richest and by far the largest states, might be America’s two eldest sons, with large and wealthy families.  An unpopulated state like Illinois would be one of America’s youngest children, who lives far away on the very edges of the frontier.  This kind of arrangement seems strange to a modern, but makes perfect sense when you consider that that was the reality of the 1830 world.

Now this story is kind of pointless but it illustrates how many stories in the bible appear to work.  Too often I see a simplistic dichotomy of how people see the bible: either it is literal truth (though some may acquiesce to saying it is embellished) or it is a book full of lies with zero academic or historical value.  I don’t think the bible is literally true, and I do know that many of its narratives are historically false, but in saying that there is a lot that can be learned historically by the stories written in the bible *even the stories that are false*.  

The story of Jacob and his son Joseph is the best example of this.  The story itself is impossible and archeologically unfounded, however it gives us important historical clues not towards any “real” Jacob and Joseph, but into the worldview of the story’s writers.  To refresh your memory, Jacob (aka Israel) is a shepherd with 12 sons: Judah, Levi, Benjamin, Joseph, etc.  Joseph is his favorite/best son who can do all manner of awesome things to save himself and his family.  An observant reader can page ahead to later parts of the Old Testament and see that the names of Jacob’s children are the names of the 12 tribes of Israel.  So “Levi” is the ancestor of the tribe of Levites, “Judah” is the ancestor of the tribe of Judah and so on.

You can see the connections with the America story from above.  A father (America/Israel) and his sons (13 states, 12 tribes) can be used as mythological antecedents for the political realities of the day.  And it seems that the Jacob story was in fact used to “explain” some of the historical realities of the day.  On Jacob’s deathbed, he praises Judah over all the other brothers, hinting at how the tribe of Judah would gain supremacy during the monarchic period.  It seems clear that the author(s) of the Jacob/Joseph story seemed to be using it to explain or justify the author’s “modern” time period.  The 12 tribes of Israel should all be united because they were originally the 12 sons of Jacob.  And the wisdom of Joseph and Judah are used to justify the ruling families of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, who claimed descendence from these two.

Now I use this example mostly because I think it’s neat but also because it’s something I look out for when reading works set in an author’s past.  How the author thinks of the past is usually colored by their own present in ways that may not be obvious.  I’d love to hear if anyone else has examples of this.

Post 6

So all the previous posts were written during a single long plane ride. What am I going to write about now?

I’m always somewhat interested in how many elements of ancient languages can be seen retained by modern ones. The ancient Near East god Mot was the god of Death, and his name is strikingly similar to the modern Arabic word موت (mowt) meaning death. The words Jesus said on the cross (eli eli lama sabachthani) are conjugated much in the way that modern Arabic is as well. If “el” means god then “eli” means my god, and any modern Arabic speaker would understand if even if they would use a different noun for god. I learned to say lematha for “why” but lama seems recognizable as لما which would also mean why, and sabachthani is conjugated just as a modern word would be, except with a “tha” instead of a “ta”.

It’s somewhat striking to be able to find little bits and pieces of old languages that are still legible in this way, and it shows us just how much languages stay the same even if they change. Perhaps it’s also interesting to me because as a native English speaker I feel like we’re used to thinking about our language as being very very “new.” The “English” of Beowulf seems almost unrecognizable to a modern and bored schoolchildren still struggle with Shakespeare. Yet occasionally some ancient bits of Latin, German or French can be seen to contain a word or two which is recognizable due to its English descendant.

It’s an idea I’ve toyed with but don’t have any data for: is it measurable how fast languages changed in the past and are changing today? Has English changed particularly quickly in the last millennium, or are we English speakers just filled with exceptionalism? And if it did change faster than other languages, has that change slowed due to global English? Or has it sped up? I would hazard a guess that all languages have slowed their rate of change since the invention of movable type and later the radio. Moveable type fossilized many spellings and letter shapes that had before been more fluid. And radio itself probably smoothed out the differences between accents as everyone heard many of the same songs, the same broadcasts, the same speeches no matter where they lived. Likewise the ability to record our speech gives us a link to the past that other generations don’t have, and those influences probably slow the changing of our language even more.

I’d like to know how the rate of change of languages is calculated, and how that rate has changed, and what changes it. When the Greeks conquered the Near East they brought with them a lingua franca that would later be known as “Koine.” Did an influx of Near Eastern speakers cause this language to change faster than if it had stayed in Greece? Or did its status as a language for everyone cause it to change more slowly, since everyone had to understand each other?

If anyone knows where I can learn more about this, hit me up.