Still More Prose and Stuff

Here's another hot one that held my attention. There's a really nice tie with toys and cultural studies analysis, and a strong argument calling attention to why Pokemon must be deconstructed. I also realized that most of my selections about writing have been introductions thus far so I'll try to diversify my entries.

Does Pocket Monsters (Pokemon), the never-ending video game, anime, card game, and retail kitsch franchise, deserve a racial analysis? There have been serious studies of the cultural effects of the franchise by social scientists such as Joseph Jay Tobin, yet there has been very little cultural studies-oriented scholarship on the subject. More in-depth analyses of the ideological constructions in the Pokemon canon are non-existent, perhaps due to its status as a children's icon. However, I feel that the fact that children are its principal consumers makes its ideological analysis even more important, if we are to understand the ways in which the media interpellates and socializes us into ideology. An additional point of departure is the fact that Tobin and his peers did not grow up inundated with Pokemon, as many people in my generation did. For us, it was more than a toy: it was and continues to be a consuming obsession. It is no wonder that its ideological work has been heretofore unexamined. To that end, I would put forward the argument that the Pokemon canon displaces racial Otherness onto Pokemon, and in doing so attempts to ameliorate the potent racial anxieties of its audience with its utopic vision of unquestioned racial domination. However, I will also point to moments within the text that work to deconstruct -- in the Derridean sense -- the seeming unity of that vision.