Personhood Theory

At Viridian City's pokemon center, Red phones home — reassuring his mother, who's relieved he isn't travelling with only Blue, and who teases him about Daisy, Blue's sister, the crush he regrets ever confessing. While their pokemon are treated, Red opens his notebook on a question that unsettles him: he's startlingly attached to his charmander and even his rattata after a single day, and wonders whether that attachment will quietly bias his judgment of them.

Walking the city, they point Leaf toward the Earth Gym of the famously philanthropic Giovanni — Champion at nineteen, holder of his Gym for decades, author of a blog on thinking clearly — though he's away travelling. Over dinner at an outdoor cafe, a rapidash cantering past and a woman feeding scraps to her growlithe, the three turn Red's unease into the chapter's long argument. He runs an impromptu survey, asking Blue and Leaf to rate their bond with each pokemon one to ten; the numbers cluster oddly high for creatures they've known for hours. Why, he asks, are they so attached to pokemon they just met when they wouldn't be to a person? Blue calls it the natural human-pokemon bond; Leaf points to the effort of the capture. Red presses: none of them spares much thought for the wild rattata or the pidgey that escaped, even ones their captures may have orphaned, and he admits he feels only abstract guilt over possibly taking a mother rattata from her young.

This becomes his case that no pokemon's life weighs as much as a person's — even his own charmander against a stranger. His reasoning is about ripples: a pokemon's death severs essentially one relationship and, painful as it is, tends to be grieved for months and is in a sense recoverable — Leaf's mother replaced a dead purrloin within months — whereas a person's death cracks open many linked relationships and never fully heals. He'd accept his charmander being used in research if it genuinely had to be, rather than a wild animal, to save people or even other pokemon, and insists he tries to stay self-aware enough not to hold hypocritical beliefs. Leaf counters from Unova politics: an activist movement there — led by a red-eyed man named Ghetsis — pushes stricter licensing, better treatment of wild pokemon, an end to pokemon testing, restrictions on pokeballs, and a ban on battling. She agrees pokemon are living, feeling creatures and finds casual battling cruel, though she still uses balls, judging their stasis more benefit than harm. Blue thinks them both mad and would never trade his own pokemon for anyone's medicine.

Underneath, Red knows his sense of human primacy is rooted in fear: humanity domesticated pokemon to survive creatures that are otherwise forces of nature, like a tyranitar or a migrating beedrill swarm, and his own father, a Ranger, was killed by scyther defending a farm. The romance of the partnership, he reflects, obscures that many pokemon are ultimately used as living weapons and shields. Yet he isn't certain he's right to feel intrinsically superior to them, and marks the question for future reflection rather than settling it — the same honesty with which he allows that years of bonding might change his conclusion. Lighter talk follows — Kanto's superstitions, like the "shadow check" of splashing milk to flush out Dark pokemon hiding there, and Leaf's ambition to write a book on regional pokemon mythology — before they retire to the Trainer House.

Sleep won't come. Red keeps circling the moment he couldn't order ember with bulbasaur in the way and had to fall back on charmander's claws; the luck of it bothers him, because he still can't picture what he should have done instead. Deciding he and his pokemon need more versatility, he slips out near midnight to find the training rooms.