**SPOILER WARNING** This feature may spoil certain mechanics and outcomes in Pokémon Pokopia.
No Pokémon impresses me like Trubbish. An underappreciated gem, Trubbish turns trash into treasure with ease and grace, though to be fair, it is all treasure to them — goals!
As a PhD student studying videogame preservation and digital rhetoric, I relate to Trubbish in this way, especially since I spend most of my days combing through dusty theory, crumbling games ephemera, and crusty tweets for things to write about. I gobble up objects many folks consider garbage — or at least mostly irrelevant to their lives — with the same voracity as Trubbish, although admittedly I am not as good at translating garbage into generally useful stuff as Trubbish is. Wow, I love Trubbish. ♥
I know, I’m gushing. And this isn’t a sermon in the church of Trubbish, though maybe it should be. This is a story about how Pokémon Pokopia, by way of Trubbish and other thematic vehicles, has reshaped my view of trash in all its beautiful forms.
Our story starts on a typical Sunday night: I am at the library working on my dissertation proposal. I work in 45-minute chunks, where I analyze an article or theory book, gather quotes and notes from it, and write a microgenre or two — which are basically 5-paragraph essays on whatever topic I am researching — then I take a break for 15 minutes. Think Trubbish processing newspaper into paper in Pokopia, then taking breaks to eat or nap, except I’m recycling theory into, uh, more theory! And instead of newspaper, tonight’s resource is digital rhetoric, or more specifically André Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA). Yeah, even I am snoozing at that title; I am ready to hang up my PhD student hat for the night and go play Pokopia rather than scratching my head over Brock into the wee hours.
Come to think of it, I am literally scratching my head because my actual hat itches like heck, yo! I was so embroiled in Brock, I’d hardly noticed. Only after I am freed from the oppression of my tomato timer do I reenter my physical body and realize I’m itchin’ something fierce. I take my hat off to vigorously scritch my itchy nog, and after some relief, I ponder aimlessly into the center of my hat’s black nothingness. (It’s a black hat, yo). When there, inside its void, I notice the felt liner the hat came with when I purchased it. I pull the liner out, examine the way it is just sturdy enough to make a new hat look totally swag on a shelf, then I lament the way it is too floopy and scritchy to be used for any other purpose.
I guess I should throw it away, then.
And yet, what else could this hat liner be used for? If I were playing Pokopia, it might be a spooky dish for berries and food. If I had Trubbish recycle it, the liner might give me an absurd number of seemingly infinitely long threads of string, seeing how just two of them makes ten cubic frickin’ meters of carpet in the game. Then again, maybe I’d just make it into another itchy hat for future library head-scratching sessions.
Either way, I decide to keep it.
But why was my first instinct to treat it as trash? Perhaps it is my internal bias that equates ‘hat liner’ to garbage; it is advertising ephemera, after all, so it is utterly unimportant to me. Tacky, even. Perhaps my instinct is cultural, as American fast fashion produces some of the highest polluting, most unsustainable products on the planet, and I am an American who used to work in the fashion industry (whoops!), so why not continue to conform to its cycles? Though, to trouble my own point, I am also a product of the Midwest junk-drawer sensibility, so perhaps it is a rejection of my cultural background that inspires me to throw something inert and impractical — in other words ideal for a junk drawer — into the trash. At any rate, by perceiving this floopy hat liner as trash, I have forsaken the Pokétrash trinity, i.e. the Garbodor, the Trubbish, and the Metagross (my three current recycle Pokémon) of it all, praise be.
I ask a stranger in the library what he thinks the hat liner looks like, and he immediately clocks it: “the thing that goes in the front of a hat?” he insists. Disappointed by his accuracy, I text my partner, who supposes it could be one half of a felt glove or maybe a really thin shoe liner. Wow, so smart and practical. Trubbish would be proud! Later, I consult my cousin who designs underwear packaging, and he says he knows what it is, but he thinks it could be a mineral in Stardew Valley, or at least the outline of one in the menu screen (the Stardew equivalent of “Who’s that Pokémon!?“).
Consulting folks online, there are Reddit posts lamenting disposable hat liners and reviews of my specific hat, ranging from “Catherine’s Captivating Cap at the Bay,” which very convincingly praises the thing, to others criticizing how easily it gets sweaty (satin doesn’t breathe well) and how stiff it is — hmm, I wonder if those folks didn’t notice the insert either. This altogether gives us two communal angles: one of technological determinism posing the hat liner as a known entity and a crucial technology for fast fashion futures; then another angle with lamentations and alternative practical uses for the hat liner, which sometimes reproduce its disposability but also offer alternative re-use cases. Together, these opinions form a community project of meaning-making that constructs and then reconstructs the hat liner’s identity.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Noah, that’s a whole lotta big words and highfalutin sentiments. And I hear ya, so let’s consult a clearer and direct source on the liner: the horse’s mouth itself, Lululemon. Checking Lululemon’s website for more information on its “classic satin-lined ball cap,” which this hat is, I scroll to “product details,” where there is no mention of the included liner. I find ad copy on how “100% of the polyester and nylon in this product is recycled.” And under “materials” I see the following information: “lining (i.e., the inner band of the hat itself): 91% Polyester (recycled), 9% Elastane; body: 100% Nylon (recycled).” The recycled material is nice to see for the hat itself, but there is nothing about the insert, packaging, tag, or any other extraneous materials. Perhaps those are recycled as well, but there is no information about this that is accessible to the public. Crucially, under “care,” it specifically asks buyers not to wash the hat, meaning the buck stops here, y’all. These recycled materials are usable until sweaty and then their recyclability is complete! I guess this is just food for Trubbish now! Oh well.
Evaluating the hat liner in the context of Lululemon’s e-commerce advertising strategy, as the hat liner is an item that helps Lululemon sell hats by making those hats look nice on their website and in stores, I can actually position it as a piece of rhetoric (ad rhetoric, that is). And this means the almighty Brock can come back. No, not the rock-type Pokémon gym leader Brock. André Brock — you know, from that dense, snoozy theory I was reading earlier. My evaluation of the hat and its liner as an advertisement whose context is changed by community and the challenging of its underlying technology mirrors critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), wherein a researcher critically evaluates a rhetorical object (a tweet, a text, a post, etc.), then evaluates the community’s discourse around it as well as the technology which produced or enabled the object. Obviously, this is a hat liner, not an article, Tweet, blog, or other digital text, but if we frame this object as part of Lululemon’s e-commerce ad strategy, I think we can look at it as such.
When we look at the hat and its liner as a rhetorical device, we can restructure its use cases through both communal and technological skepticism. Comments and reviews are helpful to identify the liner as something that doesn’t go into a hat; they also help buyers with tips for reuse, like washing the hat in the dishwasher. Furthermore, questioning the technology used to make and market the hat allows us to better use and reuse it, as well. Without some level of pause, the hat and its liner might be misconstrued later as garbage and not something recyclable or reusable. Without pause, I might have thrown the liner away, or I might have tossed the hat as soon as it became sweaty. Considering satin’s low breathability, that could be soon!
And I was 100% inspired to pause and do this evaluative work because I played Pokémon Pokopia. Trubbish being a helpful cutie who recycles stuff is inspiring on its own, but Pokopia consistently engages in the same critical trinity as CTDA — instead of evaluating and reframing rhetoric through lenses of community and technology, it does so for trash.
In the game’s introductory level, it asks you to build a Rain Dance site out of dolls and objects scattered around the landscape — things left behind by people which were preserved there for years due to its dry desolation. Squirtle teaches you Water Gun and gives you helpful tips to bring hydration back to Fuschia City, then Professor Tangrowth, Bulbasaur, Slowpoke, and others chime in with other tips, moves, and quests for doing a Rain Dance. These community members give you the tools to reshape the land. As you work on this quest, you also dig up artifacts, which Professor Tangrowth evaluates with feedback like: This is a thing humans no doubt used for something, but it’d make a sweet display for Pokémon who like this sort of thing! Held items, consumables, and fossils which would previously have been destroyed or used up for battles are now key features of habitats: Tyranitar likes nuggets, Meowth is soothed by a cooling nevermeltice, and Aerodactyl is drawn to a habitat in his own likeness.
There are also notebooks and newspapers strewn about the world as well, each with a tidbit about the technology that enabled this desert, brought you here, and is now helping you and the other Pokémon reconstruct the wasteland. But none of the Pokémon can read the words of these texts, though they do know they are important to documenting the world’s history — especially its demise and the status of humans in the place — so many of them like to collect and hold on to these old artifacts. When given the opportunity to theorize the use of an object or human artifact, Pokémon give funny or cute “wrong” answers, though these are thoughtful and helpful answers within the context of their lives. “Bring that to Scyther!” one Pokémon will say about an item Scyther can process into useful materials for building. “I bet a fire-type Pokémon would like this” another might say about something that is loved or lit up by fire-type Pokémon. You can make habitats out of all of these items, too, and Pokémon determine their use and provide theories on the technology that enables them.
Many of Pokopia’s items have unconventional uses, as well. Pikachu charges up using Team Rocket power stations that look suspiciously like the ones Electrodes sat on in HeartGold & SoulSilver to sap their electricity. The same screens (laptops, TVs, tablets, etc.) that folks used for leisure and labor before the world’s demise are now used for keeping and showing pictures you take along the journey; they now document and display the world’s repair instead of its destruction. In a later stage of the game, Tinkaton asks the player to help them rebuild the Silph Co. tower, though when asked to construct each floor, players can choose to subvert expectations and target play instead of labor, community instead of cubicles, and nourishment instead of production. There are plenty of little things, too, like Drifloon play-kidnapping using Pokédolls, Greedent (Chef Dente, pictured above) using several kitchen items as fashion, and Tangrowth using a CD as a hair tie.
There are almost too many recontextualizations of everyday things and behaviors to list here, and it is remarkable how Pokopia reframes technology’s use so consistently, showing unconventional ways Pokémon play with discarded and left-behind things, rather than contextualizing items around how we would perceive them. Though as players, we determine how they are ultimately used. But even if folks use Pokopia’s things and blocks to replicate human aesthetics and use cases, the game spins their conventionality in an interesting and compelling way.
As such, Pokopia gestures to players to reexamine and recontextualize all the stuff of their lives through community meaning-making. It helps players see the bigger picture, to see the things and behaviors of our lives as meaningful in their reuse. Pokopia reframes trash under a communal lens, looking to Pokémon desires, habitat needs, dialogue, and questlines instead of human consumption. It interrogates the technology that made it trash to begin with: the same stuff that laid waste to this world is shown as destructive, then it is repurposed to critically rebuild the world in a new way. It asks us to recycle not just the game’s objects but our imagination, to look introspectively at the behaviors that brought us here, and reframe our relationship with each other and our environment.
In this way, Pokopia also reframes what a Pokémon game can be: instead of focusing on amassing a huge horde of collectibles for battle, this is a game about finding, recycling, and sharing what is around us for the comfort and happiness of others. All told, there’s a criticality to Pokémon Pokopia, especially in its treatment of garbage. The game illustrates how easy and wonderful it is to recycle stuff, no matter how insignificant a thing might seem, to reclaim trash, and I think it’s pretty rad for that, yo.
I bet Brock would be proud of the critical recontextualization of trash Pokopia is doing. Maybe not André Brock. If he saw this feature, he’d probably stop reading it after I likened his most critical and influential work to soggy newspaper (whoops!). But probably Pokémon’s Brock — I think he’d see what we’ve done with the wastes and remark “the world is huge, yo.”
