Take a journey down the road of infrastructural fridge horror
Does anybody else remember ‘Lavender Town Syndrome’?
It was an urban legend centred around the original Red and Green 1996 Pokémon games. Supposedly there were a bunch of ultra-high frequency notes in the Lavender Town theme that were only distinguishable to children and young teenagers. The frequencies allegedly induced severe headaches, illness, and even suicidal episodes in listeners. According to the urban legend, over 200 children suffered from Lavender Town Syndrome and GameFreak altered the music in subsequent versions.
Obviously, it’s bollocks. It was dreamt up on forums somewhere around 2010, it was accompanied by a flood of budding YouTubers who reversed the track because of that other bollocks rumour about backmasking during the Satanic Panic in the 80s, resulting in a lunatic Christian fundamentalist DJ accusing Led Zeplin, of all bands, of hiding satanic promotional messages in Stairway to Heaven. Amusingly, Venom would appear roughly a year after these initial accusations, but Black Metal is a whole other kettle of fish… Anyway, long story short, the cultural legacy of the Satanic Panic means that every time someone discovers a song written with minor harmonics, someone reverses it. Such scary. Much fright. Yada yada yada.
Among the other legends associated with Pokemon Red and Blue (and Green)’s spooky scary skeleton settlement, are:
A zombie known as ‘buried alive’ was supposedly going to reside at the top of Lavender Town’s graveyard… towerblock (presumably they cremate all the Pokemon?) They follow the thoroughly by-the-numbers guide to horror cliches of breaking the aesthetic, sending the player weird messages, and then infect the game file like a virus.
For a start, ‘buried alive’? Guys, it’s at the top of a glorified office block, where is this person supposed to be buried, exactly; under the fucking floor boards? Secondly, why would GameFreak shove a zombie into the game apropos of nothing? And then the game would apparently write over the save file and then brick itself on a permanent screen of a zombie eating a child. This isn’t even a haunting. It’s just some random bit of code that GameFreak never finished. For some reason. Because traumatising the child audience, and then robbing customers of their product is a fantastic business move.
Then there’s ‘the white hand’, which seems to be a follow-on/mutation of the buried alive story? Basically the buried alive model throws out a ‘pokemon’ that looks like a decomposed hand that spins. Somehow this is supposed to cause headaches, nausea, and in some cases brain and lung haemorrhaging.
So we’ve established that a game developer deliberately inserting game-breaking features at random into the middle of their game, would be counterproductive to the business. Right then, for a start, how does a spinning sprite trigger nausea and headaches? Let alone violent death. Again, this is a bit of code, no supernatural hauntings by which to produce these completely outlandish effects. But the author clearly couldn’t decide on whether they wanted to write a malicious code story or a haunted cartridge story, tried to slam both together, and it doesn’t work because it falls apart at the slightest questioning.
This is a problem because it breaks verisimilitude. You can get away with a lot in fiction, but it has to make sense to the audience and follow the established rules of your setting. If you don’t establish how spinning 8-bit sprites can cause serious internal trauma, your audience will apply the basic rules of reality that they understand: those being the rules of the real world. As this is, effectively, based in a real-world analogue, including the fact that there is, apparently, no supernatural element here, it’s just a spinning 8-bit sprite created by an edgelord developer. So the audience has literally no reason to believe that it can have any of those effects.
Seriously, I’d love to be in the business meeting where they’re workshopping with ideas, and Steve comes out with “How about we make the children playing the game haemorrhage and die?” And Terrance is all “brilliant contribution, Steve, you’re going to go far here – send me a powerpoint and we’ll discuss ways in which we can create code and art that causes extreme negative physical affects in very specific body parts, with the power of an 8-bit screen, 8 KB of RAM, and a 512 KB cartridge.”
Finally, there’s Pokemon 731. It’s a hackneyed reference to the atrocities conducted by the Japanese at a prison camp known as Unit 731 during the latter days of WWII. If you’ve never heard of Unit 731 and you’re squeamish, that’s all you need to know. If you’ve never heard of Unit 731 and you’re not squeamish, by all means, go and do a bit of digging. Forewarning: It’s rough stuff.
Anyway, the creepypasta itself is a frankly hallucinatory mash of implausible elements, and references to other elements of Japan with a negative reputations, such as Aokigahara Forest. There’s a bizarre through line about the guy in charge of the music trying to use binaural beats to brainwash children into becoming super soldiers for a resurgent Japanese empire. Yes, you really did just read that sentence. Despite straining to be unsettling and horrifying, creepypastas lived at the extremes of goofiness and Pokemon-themed pastas were no exception.
Look, I get that the people who wrote these were probably quite young – and I’m glad to know that kids were writing back then. Some of these stories get pretty lengthy, and that implies dedication and discipline that I can only respect. On the other hand, the tendency for creepypastas to aim for horror and land in comedy, is a stark illustration of why you need to interrogate your own fiction.
Is that a long, tedious, and often frustrating process? Yes. Very much so. But it is a fundamental necessity. If you’re a young writer, get into the habit of asking ‘but why would it work like that?’ or variations thereof. I promise you, it will benefit your writing.
Well, anyway, the purpose of this post isn’t to rag on creepypastas and go on yet another rant about narrative consistency and verisimilitude. And you’re probably wondering, why I’m even digging up the corpse of a 15-year-old horror meme? It’s a bit weird, admittedly.
I was reminded of all of this after something about the Palworld-Nintendo law war was suggested by YouTube, and I was subsequently seized by an urge to re-listen to the Red/Blue OST. Apparently, I too am a terrible bitch for the odd nostalgia trip. I played the hell out of Red as a kid, back before the Gameboy Colour existed. Ok, I know some of you have no idea what a Gameboy is so… well, a Gameboy is… was, a big grey block that pretended to be portable but was only portable in the sense that you needed a backpack to lug it around. Unless you were wearing JNKO jeans, you weren’t getting that thing into a pocket anytime soon.
What were JNKO jeans? Ok, well, JNKO was a….
Forget it.
The point is that Pokemon has never needed a string of half-arsed creepypastas and internet ghost stories to be an unexpectedly dark setting. It is a series crammed full of fridge horror. There’s the series of surprisingly dark Pokedex entries that everybody knows about. Then there’s the simple fact that the setting revolves around a group of zoologists, ecologists and other animal and evolutionary biology-adjacent researchers, sending literal children out into the wilderness alone, to catch and dog fight a bunch of wild animals with supernatural abilities that militaries around the world would literally kill for.
My main memory of Pokemon is the first part of the game – the journey from Pallet Town to Cerulean City on the other side of Mt. Moon. I don’t know why, but it really lodged in my head. But while I was remembering this, it occurred to me how weird that journey is. As stated prior, it doesn’t take much for Pokemon’s bizarre fridge logic to get really dystopian. To cut to the chase: Kanto is a straight-up mess. But you probably haven’t realised how much of a mess.
And it’s probably not for the reasons you might think.
The implications of a lack of roads.
Pallet Town in the first indicator that something is dreadfully wrong with Kanto.
We know it’s dangerous because Prof. Oak stops you the first time you try to go out of Pallet Town through the long grass – because you’re immediately attacked by a rat. Rats don’t usually attack things multiple times their size. Neither do pigeons. So presumably there is a significant population of rabid animals in the area.
Pallet Town is a tiny little hamlet with a couple of houses and a lab. In fact, there’s no way out of Pallet town. You’re hemmed in by an ocean on one side, and the world’s least kept roads on the other. Presumably you’ve never actually travelled beyond the boundaries prior to that point?
The implication is that the abundance of roads that have been totally reclaimed by wilderness and wild animals, indicates severe problems with infrastructure spending. The governments in the Kanto region don’t have the money to maintain arguably the most basic unit of infrastructure.
This might explain the presence of the world’s most unambitious cartel – Team Rocket – seeming to hold a hell of a lot of sway in the region… despite not really having much to do. They just have more money than anybody else, I guess. Which makes sense because the biggest building in the entire region is a vast casino. The second largest is a mega store.
Pity Pewter City
Pewter City itself is incredibly isolated for a relatively significant settlement. It is ostensibly connected to Viridian City by wading through the undergrowth of a forest because there isn’t a road through; at best it’s a walking trail, and in several places completely wild. The implication you can take from that is that delivery vans or electrical maintenance, or anything that requires the use of a vehicle, just isn’t getting through. If you want to deliver anything between Viridian and Pewter, you have to rely on random people cutting their way through a forest full of apparently hostile fauna, and most of the locals don’t seem to be up to the task of defending themselves.
Then there’s the fact that Pewter City is almost completely cut off. If your character is implied to be more capable of self-defence than 90% of the people milling around, that implies they would need a safe route between settlements. The lack thereof implies that travel in and out of Pewter City is effectively a survivalist trial. Unless you can deal with the forest wildlife, or the cave wildlife, you are quite literally stuck in Pewter City.
You either risk injury or death just trying to the next town over, or you never leave. Or perhaps they would only ever travel in groups? Do the locals operate under the logic of ‘you just have to outrun the slowest person’? Or maybe the travel under armed guard? Presumably there are ways to counteract the fact that you get swarmed by a million vampire bats in Mt. Moon. I guess there’s the repel, but you’d need industrial amounts of it in order to create a functional link from settlement to settlement. Which, again, implies trade between settlements, but if you can’t get anything in large quantities to Pewter City it implies that, for the average person, circumstances are pretty confined.
There is also no connection between Pewter City, the place where you fight the first gym, and Cerulean City, the place where you fight the second gym. Ok, there’s one: A dirt track up a mountain hiking trail leading to a cave entrance. Then you have to wander through three levels of an unlit cave network, nutters lurking in the dark waiting to ambush innocent traveller with animal fights, and an improbable number of ladders. On the other side there is a second mountain hiking trail. Other than that, there’s no connective infrastructure.
In theory these two settlements have to interact in ways that go beyond ‘random dragon-toting ten-year-olds meander from one town to the other’. Either:
- They both exist in separate isolated economies, of which Pewter City is entirely self-sustaining.
- Given the general lack of helicopters and airplanes, you can speculate that their entire economic network is facilitated by flying Pokemon lugging things back and forth. Which seems implausible, given the amount of stuff that a modern village, let alone a city, needs to sustain it. And when you do the math, it is actively impossible.
- Most implausible, their entire economy is based on people manually distributing all goods and services on foot. There is absolutely no way that all deliveries are made by hand-deliveries. For a start, to sustain two modern settlements, you’d need an army of delivery men lugging huge amounts of commodities between settlements, through the Mt. Moon cave system, every single day. Which is completely impractical, and I’d estimate that you’d end up going into debt trying to pay this army of delivery men wandering back and forth between just two small villages, which negates the point of delivering all of these goods in the first place. Not to mention the sheer cost of providing all of these delivery men with enough repel to keep them from being attacked by wild Pokemon while trying to do their jobs, and thus losing valuable commodities and labour.
And you might think, ‘maybe there’s just no cars in Kanto’. Only, there’s a completely random pickup truck, stranded on an isolated ledge, east of the S.S. Anne in Vermillion City. So someone is driving in Kanto. Where? Who knows. How? Who knows.
From the lack of roads we are presented with two conclusions, of which we can draw one:
- No roads were ever built.
- Roads were built at one time and have not been repaired in such a long that they were literally swallowed by nature again. Maybe Tyler Durden would like Kanto, but to the rest of us, this looks like a concerning lack of basic infrastructure.
But, then again, where is the government?
- You’ve got free vets, which implies government spending.
- You’ve got a police force, which implies a government. Only the police are conveniently incapable of preventing Team Rocket from pursuing various criminal activities, which suggests that they’re all actually on the payroll of Team Rocket.
- The crime syndicate team rocket seems to run rampant and unopposed.
- One giant gambling house, owned by team rocket, seems to be one of two major economic powers in the region.
- The other economic power in the region that isn’t Team Rocket is the independently owned Silph Co.
It’s possible that the majority of the region’s cargo and trade is done by sea, cargo ships dropping off goods at Vermillion City, and distributed from there. But there is no sign of any warehouse infrastructure, and if Vermillion were the main source of economic activity in the region, it would be the largest city by a mile. The fact that it is merely a cosy port village visited by a cruise ship every so often, suggests that despite the opportunities for naval trade, very little of it is happening. And that still wouldn’t fix the problem of how isolated Pewter City is.
There’s a very real chance that Kanto’s entire economy is propped up by Team Rocket or Silph Co. The police are either completely starved for resources to the point of total ineffectualness, wildly corrupt and paid off by Team Rocket, or a private security force directly owned by Team Rocket. This would explain their inability to fight criminal organisations that a 10-year-old can take down. Gambling on slot machines is the other major economic force in Kanto, and the casino is owned by Team Rocket…
Silph Co. are a private organisation with one major branch. Predictably, they don’t seem to care much about anything outside of their massive superstore. Giovanni, and by extension Team Rocket, actually seem to have some kind of broader vision beyond the acquisition of capital. If all they wanted to do was hoard wealth, their casino would have facilitated that end without problem.
Which implies that there is no opposition to Team Rocket. And if there is no opposition, then presumably the power vacuum in the absence of a government is filled by the next most powerful entity. That entity is Team Rocket.
So who is paying for the free healthcare? We can only conclude that the region’s government has totally collapsed, unable to manage the region’s failing economy illustrated by their chronic lack of basic infrastructure and an indifferent police force. As seemingly the only organised group in Kanto with access to a steady stream of funding from a gambling-addicted population, Team Rocket can afford to subsidise the Pokemon centres as a smokescreen for their role as the clandestine owners of Kanto.
And that’s how the first hour of Pokemon Red and Blue prepares you for the dystopian worldbuilding of the failed state of Kanto.
Ok, well, this post was as goofy as the creepypastas I started out lambasting, but enjoy your April Fools.
Words and Chaos 
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