Urban Legends, Pokemon Style
I recently received a link to an urban legend about a mysterious Pokemon Black edition. Go on, click on it - it's not like Ring.
After Jigoku Shoujo I developed a new appreciation for urban legends - modern folktales of horror, morality, and the paranoia of an age.
Reading about Pokemon Black, you'll find details aimed at demonstrating Pokemon-cred (old man from Viridian City, a certain bush you have to cut to backtrack), as well as those to set the scene (bootleg Pokemon games/translations), the slow foreboding crescendo as you Curse opponents into tombstones, and the denouement where the player, wandering powerless through a barren world, heads inexorably to back to where it all started to meet his karmic fate.
Amazingly, it's a creepy story despite all the consequences being completely in-game; there are no long-haired Jynx climbing out of the Gameboy (that you have to trade away), there's no epilogue where the player meets with a spooky ambiguous encounter, there's no element of the supernatural at all. It's just a story that draws the reader in to identify with the game character until the character's moral doom is felt from the other side of the screen.
Now if I were an English teacher, I'd make my class write urban legends!
After Jigoku Shoujo I developed a new appreciation for urban legends - modern folktales of horror, morality, and the paranoia of an age.
Reading about Pokemon Black, you'll find details aimed at demonstrating Pokemon-cred (old man from Viridian City, a certain bush you have to cut to backtrack), as well as those to set the scene (bootleg Pokemon games/translations), the slow foreboding crescendo as you Curse opponents into tombstones, and the denouement where the player, wandering powerless through a barren world, heads inexorably to back to where it all started to meet his karmic fate.
Amazingly, it's a creepy story despite all the consequences being completely in-game; there are no long-haired Jynx climbing out of the Gameboy (that you have to trade away), there's no epilogue where the player meets with a spooky ambiguous encounter, there's no element of the supernatural at all. It's just a story that draws the reader in to identify with the game character until the character's moral doom is felt from the other side of the screen.
Now if I were an English teacher, I'd make my class write urban legends!