What’s Wrong with Pallet Town?

Why Pokemon Red and Blue’s idyllic hamlet is actually a horrifying study of human misery.

If anybody was a child in the 90s (I promise this isn’t some set up for a shit joke about other generations, because fuck the Internet’s obsessive idealisation of that one decade…) there’s a good chance they played the Red and Blue Pokemon games. This was back when you could bludgeon your parents to death with a Gameboy the size of a brick and they couldn’t even render colour; we had quaint ideas about what constituted ‘portable’ in those days. maybe that explains the JNCO jeans… When an image of Pallet Town appeared during a crawl through the tubes, I was reminded of spending far too much time playing it… and then how hardcore fucked up that setting is below the surface. Looking at that picture of Pallet Town, I found I had questions about what it implied. None of the answers were comforting.

Red and Blue started off in ‘Pallet Town’. A bare ‘pallet’ before you get your subsequent colours – hence the following colour-themed settlements you visit through the rest of the game. It’s a cozy little hamlet that seems to exist in some sort of idyllic bubble, the parents behave like the Stepford wives, everybody is perpetually and unnervingly cheery, and everything is just fine.

I always wondered at Pallet Town. Why does it contain a grand total of three buildings? You’d think a laboratory with that kind of hardware would require better infrastructure. The population is, apparently, a grand total of seven people. Each house seems to contain a single room. Both of those houses belong to the protagonist, the rival, and their respective mothers. Not a father in sight. What happened to them anyway? Aside from the guy waddling around on the communal lawn, there’s not much else going on besides the professor for those two. They could be homosexual, but given that they’ve both got kids, the game was released in mid-90s Japan, and the adoption of children by homosexual couples is still generally illegal, we assume that they’re sticking to the conservative ‘nuclear family’ template. Alternatively, the protagonist, the rival, and the professor are all very much related…

Ok, so with the parents seemingly absent, another question: where the hell does Oak or Lemons or whoever it is, sleep? I can’t remember a bed in the lab. Does he just work in a cocaine fuelled haze until he passes out? Perhaps, but there’s limited evidence for such a lifestyle. I guess Lemons is a scientist, but he seems to be some sort of zoologist, as opposed to a chemist, so, presumably, he cannot produce his own supply. Given the lack of alternatives, we presume he either sleeps on the hard floor of the lab, which seems unlikely at his age. Alternatively, it’s not far-fetched to conclude that Lemons just yo-yos between the beds of the protagonist and the rival’s mothers. What a lad.

Next question: Who are those two random people outside? A random wandering woman and an overweight guy with a receding hairline. Where the hell do they live? They surely can’t live in the town as there, quite literally, isn’t enough housing. Why are they there? What do they even do? There isn’t even a local shop. On that note, what economy is even keeping Pallet Town running? Are they all just living off of whatever Professor Lemons siphons from Government grants? Is this why they are sending pre-teens off into the wilderness to dog-fight random bits of the local fauna? That might make sense. If Lemons isn’t sugar daddying the mothers, then hunting or road kill seems to be a reasonable conclusion, given the lack of agriculture present.

Maybe Pallet Town is actually just a really backwards place, essentially run by Oak. The two women serve as concubines for the Professor, and he sends their underage kids out into the world to scam the government for research grants, so he can bribe the four other adults in the immediate area by controlling the resources that cover their basic necessities, while threatening them with Pokemon-dispensed violence. The two people outside are just perpetually homeless and depend on handouts from Oak to survive. Meanwhile, Oak spends his days abusing the local women and grinding up Rhyhorns and Ponytas into powder that he’s convinced is an effective aphrodisiac.

The two child protagonists of the story are actually just traumatised and unhinged from having grown up in this backwater town that everyone else has forgotten about. Then they’re just abandoned in the wilderness to survive like animals by wandering at random and shaking down everyone they meet in vicious animal fights. It explains Blue’s narcissistic overcompensatory drive to be ‘the best’ and his inability to accept defeat, having been ejected from his home by an equally psychopathic father figure. That also explains why Red sods off to lurk about in a mountain cave for the rest of his life and becomes a mute. Everybody else thinks they’re battling some master cockfighter, but he’s basically regressed to a feral state and all he sees is food. If you lose a fight with Red, you’re on the menu.

Is there some sort of politically conservative message underlying this entire game? A response to the abandonment of the traditional family model? Pokemon becomes a mortifying propaganda piece about what happens when single-parent families become too prevalent, and the only strong males left are tech-controlling Silicon Valley-esque lunatics with the power to draw everyone in their immediate vicinity into a nightmarish sex cult. Perhaps this is why the professor sends the protagonist and the rival out into the wilds in the first place. To the Professor’s mind, the protagonist and the rival are two young virile males who might one day challenge his carefully constructed power structure and usurp his stranglehold on access to women. Pallet Town spirals into a horrifying inbred abuse story, the inhabitants start to resemble the Habsburgs, and the whole place starts resembling a folk-horror tale.