here 10+ yrs (cuz my friend insisted).

Context is required to ensure that the strategy posed here is applied correctly; the rules applied to warfare and the rules applied to a game of cards should be different, though the nature of those differences demands justification. In the lowest stakes environments, usually games, conflict is a form of play, taken on willingly by all participants, and the benefits of the game are typically beneficial to gain in the future as well as the present. Therefore, one meta-objective beyond the win conditions of the conflict in question is to play again with the opponent(s) present. In contrast, the highest-stakes conflicts such as war, politics, and some enterprises disallow certain concessions, while increasing the necessity of other goals in the present game. For this essay, we will delineate between the conflict at hand (“The Current Battle,” or “The Battle”) and the future outcomes one expects or hopes for themself and their opponent (“The War”). 

“Granting the Out” is the technique of winning while arranging for ones’ opponent to lose in THEIR most favorable way possible, such that one's own primary objectives are reached. Granting the Out should be seen as a secondary or tertiary objective in The Battle, as it necessarily can only be granted by the winner of a conflict. (Winning in this case, meaning the accomplishment of one’s own primary and/or necessary objectives.) The pursual and success of Granting the Out should only come at the cost of one’s own present objectives if the protracted War requires tact to ensure future victories, or the objectives being sacrificed are truly worth less than the esteem and preservation of one’s opponent. Granting the Out is an act of deception; granting one’s opponent victory at the cost of one’s own objectives is an ethical discussion, and worthwhile topic, but beyond the scope of this essay.

In the short term, Granting the Out provides a primary benefit to the present Battle: by controlling the conditions by which your opponent CAN lose, it can lead them to choose the option of your victory sooner and at lesser cost to you. When compared to taking all primary objectives by force from an opponent committed to the bitter end, a tactician may observe significant losses in resources and expenses. However, by planning for and granting your opponent’s secondary and even primary objectives tactfully in the moment, the opponent’s decisions can be predicted and eventually led into a checkmate where losing as you’ve planned is their best course of action. Worth Highlighting is that when the stakes are highest, the resources and ethical considerations required for absolute, crushing victory often render victory pyrrhic at best, and historically catastrophic at worst. How one wins is often more important than IF one wins, because all conflicts resolve to a future after. Granting an opponent the best way to lose ensures that their most desperate and costly gambits go unplayed, and one remains unable to snatch defeat from the jaws of a smoldering victory.

Conflicts are rarely so simple and courteous as to end with themselves, and as such most large scale conflicts are composed of lesser conflicts which eventually lead to the result of the larger (“Battles” and “The War” in this essay’s parlance). As such, Controlling or allowing the resources an opponent has can be important intelligence going into the next Battle; a great resource known is easier to address than a moderate resource in the fog of war. Since the vast majority of conflicts do not and can not end in annihilation, how a tactician will live with their neighbors (and of course, themself) is a silent yet powerful objective to be considered. Especially since, as stated above, it is always there. In lower stakes, such as a job interview or card game, the larger goal of the conflict itself may be the prosperity and harmony with neighbors, and as such burning bridges will negate any benefits of conflicting to begin with. In grander conflicts, the possibility of one’s opponents surviving to play or fight again with similar objectives is not only high, but preferable given the resources required to crush them outright. Delaying or preventing a future conflict allows, to say nothing of obvious ethical and humanitarian benefits, time to prepare for the next.

worldbuilding and formatting of the games to tell a more character driven story of the Kanto region and Red, the diagetically crowned Best Fighter in the series. As I read and appreciate the eighth region of the Pokemon special Manga, and find myself charmed by the flaws and goals of Henry and Casey, I applaud the methods by which Hidenori Kusaka has managed to adapt 10+ stories with the same archetype of protagonist, and find niches in the cracks of Gamefreak’s worldbuilding to prepare for the near-eternal task ahead of him.

First, it is necessary to outline the challenge a manga adaptation of Pokemon has to confront. Pokemon games are, in their primary source, a video game about a young, silent protagonist gathering a team of pokemon and defeating all challenges to prove themselves the best in the region. Protagonists are never given more character than the target demographic for the games would need to project on to, lest the games hamstring the universal appeal that’s bought them so much greatness and so many expectations. The games have diverted from their 8-gym-leaders-and-an-elite-four format more often in the recent generations, to varying degrees of severity and success, but the necessity of the player gathering a personalized team of monsters and writing progression narratives for THEIR team as they challenge the bosses and trainers has remained a consistent foundation for the series’ identity.

From this format, a manga adaptation presents challenging requirements: Firstly, the protagonist of a given region must have their own distinct character. A blank slate protagonist wouldn’t be able to respond to the region-specific challenges and pokemon of each story, so the medium of manga has to use its dialogue and action panels to convey both what is happening as well as tell stories with stakes and tension. While the themes, tone, and plot of a shounen battle manga map nicely onto the primary sources that are the games (the games took initial inspiration from games, anime, and manga of the 90s after all), the genre requirement of a young, plucky hero whose power highlights the interesting factors of the world’s interesting NPCs has a limited shelf life. Which leads to the second challenge: When the pokemon games are practically a dozen versions of the same story, how can differences in a protagonist highlight the differences to keep the story from getting repetitive? Handily the previous writing requirement gives creative license to add character elements which switch up the Point of View character, allowing the same tropes and story beats to adopt different emotional valences ad contexts from the previous and subsequent regions.

Hidenori handily uses one problem to solve the other; by writing each protagonist past red and gold with a specific goal besides the inevitable championship at the end of each game, he can recontextualize the pokemon, gym leaders, and legendary crises of each through the fresh lens of a new protagonist. In the case of Casey and Henry, Hidenori uses both a change in Henry’s character motivation and a change in Casey’s starting conditions to differentiate them from the archetypal champion journey of Red and the deuteragonist status of predecessors Sun and Moon. In Casey’s case, the fact that she had a full team of 6 pokemon motivates her to recover them using context clues found in previous protagonists. After seeing the challenges and journeys other protagonists used to obtain full teams in previous regions, it is easy for the audience to infer what a fully-fledged research assistant may have had to go through to obtain six pokemon with themed nick-names, meaning the audience’s genre savviness and context does the author’s job of explaining who these pokemon are and why they should matter to the character and reader. Casey’s connections with the professor offer a similar jump-off point to Red, Ruby, and other protagonists whose journeys start through homage to a previous character the audience recognizes, though with the added comedic quirk of her loud speech, easy to convey in the medium of comics but less abrasive than it might be in an audible TV show. 

Henry’s specialization and fixation with pokemon items allows for the exploration of a game mechanic often underexplored by the manga and non-game media in the franchise. Pokemon have been able to “hold” items since the second generation, but the application of equipment, where it is held, what items best suit a pokemon’s battle style, and contribute to their identity present interesting questions that Hidenori can use to tell different stories. The typical quest structure of “a pokemon or trainer is causing trouble, defeat it to progress” as seen in earlier arcs and the video games can only have so many solutions, but highlighting the emotional value of certain items and their retrieval, destruction, or application keeps things fresh. The theme also allows Henry to participate in the battles necessary of any pokemon adaptation, and to appear cool and competent as needed by the manga’s genre, but using Henry’s pokemon tools as the crux of each battle and victory to prevent the same strategies exhausted in previous regions and their protagonists.