Pokemon

Jessie and James Deserve Better

Alyssa Gonzalez, , , , , , 2 Comments

The pair of Team Rocket agents Jessie and James (Musashi and Kojiro in the original Japanese) are fixtures of the Pokémon animated series. The series subjects them to endless misfortune, and they never achieve their stated goals. They spend much of each episode in various states of explosion, and the warmest welcome they manage among the protagonists is occasional deep mistrust rather than overt hostility. They have earned the love of fans for their insistent theatrics, incompetence as thieves, and impressive fashion sense, but the show itself is much less consistent.

They deserve better.

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Jessie and James Deserve Better
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A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers Reimagined as Pokémon

Alyssa Gonzalez, , ,

A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers as Pokémon

There’s an idea, somewhere between a running gag and a stereotype, that some people collect lovers like a Pokémon trainer collects pets. This concept grades into ugly objectification here and there, up to and including people maintaining de facto bingo cards of the demographics they’d like to bed, but it’s also an interesting thought exercise for the polyamorous lady.

Going it alone is not how this world works. None of us is invincible, nor are we all best at everything. Humans are interdependent, and we need each other. Sometimes, we are each other’s accessibility devices; other times, we’re each other’s levees, holding up what can no longer stand on its own. We look for, and find, people who fit with who we are, and we grow fond of and interdependent with people who can accomplish the things that we cannot. In the best scenario, we’re not just lovers: we are family.

A person and their partners, then, can be rather like a well-balanced Pokémon team.

So, here are the members of my polycule reimagined as Pokémon.

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A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers Reimagined as Pokémon

Making This Body Mine

Alyssa Gonzalez, , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

My navel piercing was exhilarating.  I got it the last time I was in Miami, surrounded by my Miami friends who had no idea why I’d just signed up for such a feminine-coded body modification.  Having friends there made the event exciting; having Ania made it safe.  I faced the needle with enough nervousness that I had to fill out the “I’m the right age” form twice.

Ania has a picture of the face I made when it went in.  I’m not sharing it.

Afterward, though?  The soreness commingled with a heady endorphin rush that I should have expected but most definitely did not.  I was giddy with delight.  If we weren’t already at our financial limit, I might have signed up for another piercing then and there, in that euphoric haze.  I’m looking forward to that feeling again.

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Making This Body Mine

Leavanny Tall Behind

Alyssa Gonzalez1 Comment

I have no patience for people who dismiss the appeal of “childish” things.  I’m overwhelmingly thrilled with how the past two decades have been the decades of cartoons for the older set, of “nerdy” concepts like superheroes and space operas becoming massive cultural phenomena with mainstream appeal, and whole hobbies growing with their aficionados rather than expecting them to leave them behind on their way to fantasy football or whatever it is that boring people do.  One of the things I will never stop being happy about is how, through all the years of pushing me as hard as they could into all the wrong molds, I never managed to lose that spark of joy that I call out of LEGOs and Transformers and model dinosaurs and anatomically-correct plastic spiders and the adorable-cockfighting-for-children simulator that is Pokémon.

I’m glad in general, because the only joy I have ever experienced that isn’t that kind of joy is the joy of romantic love, and because hanging on to that exuberance has made me a better teacher, a better partner, and a better person, and someday, it might make me a better parent.  I’m glad because if they had somehow beaten out of me that ability to swell with happiness when surrounded by tropical fish or gundam model kits or stuffed toy lizards, I am not convinced that I would have survived my adolescence.  I have been sustained by the sheer simplicity of that “childish” joy, able to set aside the continuous terror of a world not made for people like me because the worlds those things inhabit are neat and tidy and written out in reams, because they accept my engrossing obsession without a second thought, because I can touch and handle and feel them (except the fish…) and complete my sense of their being.

I’m alone in the office writing this, my colleagues either attending a presentation or out for the day, choking back tears, because I know another reason why this specific joy means so much to me.

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Leavanny Tall Behind

The Mover Out of Time

Alyssa Gonzalez, , , , , ,

It does not take much to demonstrate the impossibility of many gods.  The bigger a god is, the more of the universe its devotees claim is within its sway, the more improbable its powers have to be to make what we do know about the universe compatible with its existence.  A river spirit or trickster that hides your socks when no one is looking has a small effect on reality, and can hide in the statistical noise that keeps our world de facto unpredictable.  A huge god, though, needs to be simultaneously of massive import, so that its influence permeates many facets and phenomena in the world, and utterly minuscule, so that it has an excuse for when it inevitably doesn’t show.  Thus, we get gods defined as controlling the weather, the course of wars, and whether anyone lives or dies, but whose influence is indistinguishable from the sum of the hundred and one worldly factors in and causes of all of these events; gods who can be expelled from their controlling niche by humans having the temerity to document and measure, as if God were mere quantum uncertainty; gods who use mortal movers as their proxies, merely shifting the problem one layer of agents upward with theological sleight of hand.

Christianity, between its native Abrahamic grandiosity and its wholesale lifting of neo-Platonic idealism, offers some of the largest gods.  Many versions of Christianity have gods so massive that they not only inflict weather events on people totally unrelated to whatever ostensibly displeased them, but they also, the soothsayers tell us, transcend time and space.  This god, even Jewish dreamers like to claim, exists outside of and independent of time, such that past, present, and future are all the same to it.  Events at any point in the universe’s progress are like the pages in a book this creature is reading, and flipping backward or forward is as easy for it as the analogy implies.  It created the universe and now sits outside it, a cosmic voyeur that may or may not ever interfere with unfolding events, depending on the version.

It will not surprise my readers, I am sure, to learn that this god is incoherent with both logic and the facts of our universe.

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The Mover Out of Time