I'm going to resist all efforts to be negative with this because this is just a nice little story to prove that I am in fact a dinosaur in every sense of the term.

Pokemon came out in the USA when I was in high school. Normally that would mean I wouldn't have ever had anything to do with it, but as you may have gathered, normalcy is a rarity around here. It wasn't like I eagerly anticipated the game and I have never actually played it beyond naming the characters rude things… but anyway, a friend of mine had a pathological relationship with this rather strange girl. She was obsessesed with all things cute. She collected stuffed animals and everything in her room was pink… and he went along with it. How he came out of the relationship straight, I don't know because he too started to collect cute shit.

The buzz grew and he knew about it way before anyone else ever knew about it stateside. This was important to him because soon there was about to be a whole stable (quite literally) of cute little animals to fill the pantheon on their weird little cute cult. The two of them had a little curio cabinet and they'd collect the little plastic character figurines that were sold out of vending machines in Japan. They started collecting these off of eBay… Shit, eBay was practically new itself back then.

Now here's the part you'd never believe, but trust me, it was real: when they searched for this stuff the first time, there were seven results on eBay. Seven. Single digits. Searching for Pokemon or Pokémon gave one page of results. Not specific pokemon figurines, just the general term.

Is that not going way the fuck back?

I do like that people are obsessed with this game to the point they quantify elements of it with calculus and deeply philosophical essays. Other than that, it doesn't really appeal to me. It's just not my generation's thing. Well, it wasn't supposed to be… I think that friend still has the little curio cabinet full of those toys. I'll try to get a picture of it if his own children haven't swallowed them all or something. By the way, think about that: some of the first people into Pokemon in the USA have kids old enough to be into Pokemon now… or to have outgrown pokemon, I guess if they got started early enough.