“Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.” – Arnold H. Glasgow

This quotation resurfaced in my mind today. I thought I’d tell you about fireworks.

Fireworks are an explosive that’s laboriously produced. They’re pretty dangerous things to make. Then you prime them and fire into the air. And in one furious outburst they’re gone. Is it worth it? In Tarō Okamoto’s words, ‘Art is Explosion’. If you have a passion that you’re working on, or a project, it isn’t enough to keep it under wraps and never reveal it. Eventually you should show it to the world in one great explosion and maybe it’ll live on. If it fails, at least you know you did something spectacular. There are no pockets in shrouds, and nobody will admire you for something you never did.

Like many great things, fireworks were invented by the Chinese. And like many other things, it was created as a consequence of something invented for war-making. Gunpowder, one of China’s ‘four great inventions’, is integral to the firework. This tells us a lot about humanity as a whole. War is one of our greatest sources of innovation. That’s a mite depressing. But fireworks are used as a symbol of celebration, to celebrate victory and peace. Fireworks, in a way, can be seen as a frivolity that’s possible because we don’t need that gunpowder for war. Having enough resources to squander on something as trivial as a firework is something to celebrate in itself.

Bonfire night is a British tradition. I doubt  other countries celebrate it. It’s the ritualistic burning of a man caught trying to destroy our Houses of Parliament. Savage, but patriotic. But if you’re ever at a bonfire display, try something at the main event. As a lovely huge firework starts to explode in the sky, turn around and look at the crowd around you. You’ll see a sea of faces all staring upwards in unison. Their eyes are all reflecting vivid oranges and greens as they’re fixed upon a shared vision. It’s times like that when you can really get a sense of human unity. And it’s a firework like that you should want to show the world.

Throughout your life you’re smouldering gently with a fire that will eventually consume you. Some fear it as mortality, others embrace it as passion. You have no way of knowing how much fuel you have. Some people burn like a bonfire and die peacefully aged ninety-four. Some people burn like a candle and die before they’re thirty. When it comes to life, there’s no justice or logic when it comes to length. There’s only the ability to make the most of it.

We treat them mainly as things, right? Some of them are moderately intelligent, but not so much so that we attach any kind of legal obligations upon them. Instead, obligations are imposed on their owners, or the owners of the land they inhabit. This seems pretty reasonable, because serving an injunction to a cow isn’t going to be of much use.

At least, that’s modern legal thinking for you.

The Bible states that an ox that has killed a man ought to be killed. (Exodus 21:28) Not too different from current procedure with dangerous dogs.

Yet in medieval times, people clearly thought differently. Here is a link to several animal trials, which were treated seriously (and many of the cases were lost because the defendant failed to appear in court).

Even more worryingly, Ancient Rome had a court that allowed trials of inanimate objects, such as stones and spears, when they caused death. Hopefully it was restricted to accidental deaths – you can’t blame a spear for being used for its purpose!

I suppose at least they’re showing the animals and objects some respect and acknowledging that they can control their own actions and responsibilities for when they don’t.

Instead of, you know, treating them like objects...

Pessimist: The glass is half empty!

Irritating optimist:

For a person of my age, Pokémon was an understandable craze. It was released into England when we were young and quickly grabbed hold of children with its games, trading cards and animated TV shows. With my development I lost most of my interest in the franchise, but playing the games still brings back an enjoyable wave of nostalgia. I feel safe in saying that when I first discovered the games, the villains were clear and the goal simple. The first games, Pokémon Red and Blue, introduced Team Rocket with their goal of world domination. The subsequent game titles were released in pairs, usually with opposing colours as titles. It is surprising that it has taken them until Pokémon Black and White to introduce an enemy that lives in the moral grey area.

Team Rocket’s original goal was beautifully simple. 1) Find Pokémon 2) Steal Pokémon 3) ???? 4) Profit. As a business plan it was simple enough for their dumbest of minions to understand and it gave us a clear enemy to vilify. Yet with Black and White’s introduction of Team Plasma, the respective colour titles ceased hold steady. N, the mysterious leader of Team Plasma, claims that he only wants to steal Pokémon so that he can free them from their abusive owners. For anyone with the slightest knowledge of their world, this argument can only grow in justification.

In their world, Pokémon are much akin to wild animals. If you walk in tall grass or swim in the sea you may encounter them and they may attack you. The solution? Beat them half to death with your own Pokémon and trap them inside a minuscule red-and-white ball. And when they’ve finally recovered, you train them up so they can attack other people’s precious Pokémon. This they call a ‘Pokémon battle’, which uses the unique characteristics of each creature to beat the other so hard that it passes out, or ‘faints’. A fainted Pokémon is oblivious to the world until you take it to a Poké Centre (hospital) or use any number of powerful drugs on it. The fact is only hinted at in the games, but these creatures can die if they’re left in this state for too long. So I’m going to change my word for the phenomenon known as ‘fainting’ now. It is not fainting, it is a coma.

To summarise, the goal of Pokémon Black and White is to raise Pokémon for the sole purpose of beating other Pokémon into comas, to defeat the Elite Four and become the Champion of beating Pokémon into comas. All the while singlehandedly defeating Team Plasma, the organisation that seeks to take your trained animals away from you so that you can’t beat any more Pokémon into comas. And we thought Team Rocket was bad?

Taken this way, the principal reasoning behind the Pokémon games is weird and twisted. Parenting associations try and ban shoot-’em-ups, claiming they promote child violence, when this sort of thing is going on – disguised because the Pokémon are majorly cute and fluffy.

The hero’s justification for this violence, and that of most of the civilised Pokémon world, is that humans and Pokémon have a bond of friendship that must not be severed. When working together, they can accomplish great things. Examples of civil engineering only possible by utilising Pokémon’s supernatural powers are pointed to. Elderly and young folk alike trust them as companions. Even your in-game parents have usually walked the path of a Pokémon ‘trainer’ themselves, showing that this pathological violence begins at home. I object to the argument that this ‘bond of friendship’ shouldn’t be severed. If I and my best friend forged an incredibly intimate friendship by running around and causing injury, so that people required hospital in-treatment or medication to get better, we’d be thrown into prison as soon as we were found. If I operated an underground cock-fighting or bear-baiting ring my animals would be taken away and myself prosecuted. The fact that Pokémon are ‘magical’ doesn’t make it any better, it just compounds the fact that these creatures should be protected.

Team Galactic, from the Diamond, Pearl and Platinum versions of the game, is constructed to use the power of Pokémon to reconstruct the galaxy in the boss’s image. Team Galactic came after Team Rocket and yet again we have an understandable, and immediately hateful, motive – power/world domination. The grunts of the organisation simply believe that the organisation’s intent is to steal lots of Pokémon and the grand scheme is hidden from them. So in the scheme of things, there is a gradual progression from motives that are instantly identifiable as villainous (Teams Rocket and Galactic) to those that take time to determine and perhaps have a case for each side (Team Plasma). One sad thing about the game (White/Black) is that you can only progress through it if you choose to oppose Team Plasma. What Game Freak (the developers) have done is inspiring – taking an old and arguably dying franchise and injecting into it something that can perplex even the adults that have been playing it from the start.