A Brief* Response to Ill Met By Moonlight Conference: Fairy-Type Pokémon

For many people, the behemoth Pokémon franchise is the place they encounter fairies in the day-to-day. It is the new frontier where children encounter fairies and fairy stories, but what can fairy-type Pokémon tell us about the reception of this stalwart Romantic image in C21?

The design of fairy-type Pokémon plays on a number of stereotypical associations with fairies, but looking more deeply into the lore and design choices of the creators shows a wilful engagement with both dark and light aspects of fairy ‘history’. Pokémon designs generally try to walk a line between ‘cute’ and ‘badass’, but it’s the rare fairy-type Pokémon that engages with the ‘badass’ side at all, with the series managers keeping the fairies themselves and the trainers who use them light and fluffy. Most fairy Pokémon are pink, round, coded female, and they’re often associated with cherry-topped foods. Even breeds that don’t seem to conform possess some of these attributes for at least some of their evolutionary line: Marill may be blue, but he has a round body and a ball on the tip of his tail; Togekiss may not be round, but Togepi is an adorable little egg baby; Mawile isn’t pink or round but it can be read as a woman with a ponytail. In fact, even evolutionary lines that seem to diverge from the expectation of fairies, like Ralts, still have elements of these essential fairy-type traits – prominent round shapes in the design, and feminine ballerina or opera singer associations, which are entirely different in the masculine line where the fairy typing is not present. The rare ‘badass’ or scary design in a fairy-type Pokémon, like Grimmsnarl, grows from a pink imp, and combines the image of a traditional Japanese Tengu monster with a name that evokes the fathers of Western Märchen, The Brothers Grimm. Grimmsnarl is both a fairy-type and a dark-type, two opposites in the Pokémon game mechanic, and therefore embodies a dichotomy of light and dark, mischievous and malevolent folkloric creatures which the types are respectively based on. This may account for the species’ darker fairy looks, and would most likely be read as such by the player.

These dichotomous monsters, such as Grimmsnarl, Galarian Weezing, and Klefki, are from the newer Pokémon games. By contrast, the clichéd girliness is perhaps found most in the Pokémon retroactively given the fairy typing: gen 1 monsters like Jigglypuff and Clefairy might have always been associated with supernatural** powers drawn from the moon, they were normal-type before fairies were introduced into the game. For many people it is their adorable shapes and pink colouring that heralded their change to fairy-typing, and their existing aesthetic which became the base for the wider Pokémon fairy canon. A deeper look, however, shows that from the very beginning Pokémon’s fairies have been diverse: Mr Mime may has a somewhat troubling psychic energy that, upon being bestowed with the fairy type, brought an uncomfortable, not-cute side to the fairy type, and even the ur-cute fairy Pokémon Jigglypuff is characterised as a malevolent spirit by the anime. Jigglypuff has a great sonambulous power, but is consistently annoyed by human and Pokémon vulnerability to it, and so turns to pranking instead. The prank it chooses is benign, turning its microphone to a pen and drawing on faces, but this anticipates the Pokémon franchise’s later engagement with fairies as unpredictable spirits of folklore and creating a user base that understands that, although we may want to engage with fairies for their aesthetic appeal, they are given a power that we do not want to oppose. What we can glean from this is a modern interpretation of fairies that, although heavily influenced by the modern glitter-and-frills conception of the fairy, also reaches back to the fey-folk of more traditional folklore, and marries the two together, creating a rich image of the fairy as a cute but dangerous creature – a cupcake that will beat the shit out of you.

Pokémon also mines some of the tropes we get from fairies in literature for the mechanics of the series more widely. Even before the fairy-type was introduced in gen 6, the way that the games were structured harkened back to fairies: encountered in the long grass of the wild, a fighting game which focussed on aesthetics, the series protagonists are children of just 10-years-old, and the game’s objective and series tagline (‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’) is based on the idea of collecting and categorising rarely-sighted monsters with mythical powers into a codex (or ‘Pokédex’). These all give Pokémon a connection to the western fairy tradition, which sees all of these as themes and tropes in the literature and even outside of literature, as people engage with their beliefs in fairy-folk. Moreover, this has only grown as the games have embraced new technologies: Pokémon Go has enabled a liminal space between the world we inhabit and the world Pokémon inhabit and created a Samhain-esque overlap where our phones bridge these two separate worlds. The effect of this is to give the Pokémon franchise a nostalgic magic, even as it utilises the newest technologies of VR and gaming, and to push the ancient narrative of the fairy firmly into the 21st century.

Changes made by the franchise signal a direction that engages with fairy lore from both a western and a Japanese perspective that shows a flourishing engagement with fairies by its user base, but also by artists and creators seeking inspiration. Without even looking into the lore for any individual fairy-type Pokémon, we can see that, even for the casual player, the connotations of a fairy-type Pokémon match up with the expectations created of the fey by global folkloric and literary traditions. Although Pokémon is a modern storytelling medium, it continues and builds on the work of past writers and illustrators and allows its users to perceive a nuanced and traditional view of fairies, all with a pink cherry on top, and experience an immersive entertainment experience in the dangerous, dazzling world of the fey.

* I did also take some notes at the conference that are more directly relevant to my current project, but it was a lot of fun to hear other people’s research, and it got me thinking, and thinking leads to writing.

** I’m not sure if ‘supernatural’ is the correct word to use for Pokémon, as all the monsters have powers derived from natural elements, psychic energy, or magic, but for lack of a better term I use it to connote what, in the world of the user rather than the characters, would be considered magic.