Teenage Pokemon: Console Class Battle Royale

New Teenage Pokemon every Sunday morning

_{[Teenage Pokemon is a cartoon show about Pokemon in their middle stage of evolution — not a girl, not yet a women. New episodes every week.]}

When I was growing up, social classism wasn’t really an issue in “gamer culture”. Sure, if all you could afford was a Genesis, then you might be quick to say that games on the SNES or IBM computers weren’t as good. However, if you had any friends with a SNES or an IBM computer, you can bet your butt you’d be over their houses multiple times a week to play all the exotic games found on those foreign consoles. Outside of a little irrational need to defend our commitment to the one console we owned, we didn’t let classism get in the way sticking together, and more importantly, in the way of playing great games.

These days, it’s a different story. Self identified “Hardcore Gamers” look down on “Casual Gamers”, “Art Gamers” look down on “Mainstream Gamers”, “PC Gamers” look down on “Console Gamers”, “Videogame Cool Guys” look down on “Videogame Hipsters”,  and so forth. Not only is this ridiculous, but it leads to people playing fewer games. People who supposedly love videogames are now prone to defining themselves by what games they don’t play in order to differentiate themselves from whatever gaming social class they’ve deemed to be “below them”. We live in a world where people go to brag about what videogames they don’t like on websites for videogame enthusiasts? That’s pretty darn strange!

That’s the stuff that inspired this episode of Teenage Pokemon. It’s a phenomena that’s worth discussing in great detail, but first, let’s watch Tara Long as Misty get mildly upset for a few seconds. That should be a hoot. 

After you’re done, let me know what you think of this episode. We tried to take all your constructive criticism from the pilot into account to make something better. I hope you like it.

*Credits*

Lead Animator- Dave Ernst

Misty intro animation- Nick Shoen

Character design- Lindsay Collins

CGI Effects- Anthony Gonzalez

Misty- Tara Long

Mr. Mime redesign- Sarah Thomas