Leaving Pallet Town
Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle as Heralds of Adventure
Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
T.H. White’s Arthurian retelling The Once and Future King begins with young Wart — the future Arthur — chasing his escaped hawk Cully into a wild wood, “farther from the castle than he had ever been before.” Walking deeper and deeper into the forest, Wart’s fears shift from wolves and wild boar to outlaws lurking in the shadows. “There were magicians in the forest also in those legendary days,” White writes,
as well as strange animals not known to modern works of natural history. There were regular bands of Saxon outlaws – not like Wart – who lived together and wore green and shot with arrows which never missed. There were even a few dragons, though these were small ones, which lived under stones and could hiss like a kettle.
After several adventures in the forest, Wart meets the wizard Merlyn, who agrees to become his tutor. He follows Cully to his destiny, just as Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Both exemplify an archetype that Joseph Campbell calls the “herald or announcer of the adventure” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. This character, often an animal, introduces and embodies the unknown, fantastical word beyond the hero’s everyday reality. Other examples would include R2-D2 in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. The story of Theseus I knew as a child began with a talking seagull — a messenger from Poseidon — telling the young hero of his true, royal heritage, beginning a journey that would climax with the slaying of the minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth. (I can’t think of another myth that aligns with Campbell’s monomyth as much as that of Theseus.)
Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle play this role in Pokémon’s first generation. In the first episode of the anime, Ash stays up late with excitement about his upcoming Pokémon journey and, when he does fall asleep, dreams about the Bulbasaur, Charmander or Squirtle he will select as his starter Pokémon. (This of course causes him to oversleep and miss out on receiving one of this trio, forcing him to go with plan B, Pikachu.) In Red and Blue they serve as the player’s first encounter with an actual Pokémon and, as the combatants in the game’s very first Pokémon battle, introduce the core gameplay elements.
Red and Blue — and Yellow, for that matter — begin in a very prosaic, almost banal way, with the protagonist getting out of bed. After naming the protagonist and his rival, the player’s first few possible actions include playing a video game in the protagonist’s bedroom, turning on his computer, talking to his mother, watching television, chatting with neighbors or visiting the girl next door. (Speaking of the girl next door, Gary’s sister is strangely absent from the Pokémon anime. She appears as Daisy Oak in the later games and Pokémon Adventures manga and as May Oak in the Electric Tale of Pikachu Manga, where Ash’s crush on her motivates him to embark on his Pokémon journey.) The “Story” section of the Pokémon Red and Blue manual gives the protagonist’s less-than-exciting life history:
You are an 11 year-old boy living in Pallet Town with your mother. Your rival lives next door to you. You and your rival used to play nicely together when you were little, but lately he has become mean. He sees you as his rival because you are the same age and height. When you hear that Professor Oak is a Pokémon expert you get excited because you are a curious boy.
Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle bring a taste of the wider, stranger Pokémon world’s magic to quotidian Pallet Town, just as the White Rabbit brings a piece of Wonderland to the English countryside.
Campbell introduces the herald and the call to adventure through a reading of the Brothers Grimm fairytale “The Frog King” (“Der Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich”). This tale’s herald of adventure, as you may remember from your childhood, is a frog who emerges from a spring and offers to retrieve a princess’s dropped gold ball if she lets him become her pet and constant companion. The frog, Campbell writes, “is the nursery counterpart of the underworld serpent;” with the gold ball in its mouth it resembles “the great Chinese Dragon of the East, delivering the rising sun in its jaws, or the frog on whose head rides the handsome young immortal, Han Hsiang, carrying in a basket the peaches of immortality.”
Campbell reads the frog king as a symbolically shrunken dragon; Pokémon’s starting trio came from literally shrinking their monstrous evolutions. “I created the designs for Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle,” illustrator Atsuko Nishida told Pokemon.com in 2018, “by working backward from their final forms.” In the same interview, series co-creator Ken Sugimori cited pet animals such as lizards and turtles as another source of inspiration for the creatures, noting that “it would be difficult to make an emotional connection if the first partner Pokémon is a tough-looking character.” Instead, the player has a cute, child-size animal that is much more approachable.
Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle play another monomythical role in addition to heralding adventure. Professor Oak is of course an example of the same mentor-magus archetype as Merlyn, Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi. “The first encounter of the hero-journey,” Campbell writes, “is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.” Obi-Wan gives Luke his father’s lightsaber, “an elegant weapon from a more civilized age;” an unnamed old man gives Link a sword in The Legend of Zelda (1986), warning him that “it’s dangerous to go alone!” Professor Oak, in a possible homage to Zelda, gives the player-character a similar warning when he attempts to leave the safety of Pallet Town – “Hey! Wait! Don’t go out! It’s unsafe! Wild Pokémon live in tall grass! You need your own Pokémon for your protection.”
They are, in other words, themselves the equivalent of the enchanted sword or magical gem wielded by other heroes of myth and mythopoeia. The player character protects himself from a world of strange monsters with a little pet monster of his own.
Bibliography
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Campbell, Joseph. The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension. 1951. New World Library, 2018.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865. Dover, 1993.
Grant, Michael and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. 1973. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhem. Kinder- und Hausmärchen Band 1. Reclam, 1980.
White, T.H. The Once and Future King. Ace, 1961.
Zimmerman, J.E. Dictionary of Classical Mythology. 1964. Bantam Books, 1971.