An Endless Battle

I thought about what iconic image I wanted to take and mold into my own, and this came to mind:

This is an image that strikes a cord with my childhood, as well as I'm sure it does with many people in this class. I still play Pokemon games all the time, but there's something about those pixelated early games that were just so great. This particular image comes from Pokemon Yellow.

But what to use it for? I wanted to make some kind of statement with my piece.

I  thought about doing a 16-bit heart, doing something about having to weaken and capture a heart. I'd have that be the pokemon in need of capture, and have it be at low health and paralyzed. (For those who know the game, I thought about doing an immobilized by love joke too).

But I decided against it.  Not that it doesn't have some truth or symbolism to it, it's just a little obvious and didn't feel like the right style for this assignment. I thought of doing a clock, my GPA, and a few other ideas, but they all seemed too on-the-nose. I wanted something subtle that made you smile first, then made you think about the message behind it.

Then I recalled a recent conversation I had with a friend, in which she told me a guy at her school was trying to convince her the Digimon is better than Pokemon.

Now, I like Digimon. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a fan, but they have a cool idea and some great games and tv shows behind them. But this conversation, much like the Mewtwo picture above, awoke in me a sort of nostalgic feeling, but this time it was a feud. I wanted to capture that feud in my image.

This is the image that I made.  This is kind of a cute image, using the most famous characters from each franchise as the avatars representing their corner of the fight. Pikachu, the favored pokemon of the main character in the anime, and Augumon, the main character's digimon from the anime.

I made the perspective be from the Pokemon side because 1. that's the image I wanted to use and 2. that's the side I'm coming from.

So the challenge is declared in the same way characters in Pokemon challenge you. I made Pokemon's level the highest it could be and made its health infinite to represent the size difference between the franchises and their fan-bases. I left Digimon's level low, which in hindsight was pretty mean spirited, but children are always a little vitriolic when debating franchises, and I was tapping my inner child for this one.

I went through many iterations of this project, all of which I'll include below. Before I decided to take it to the level of the franchises battling, I just flipped the expected on its head by making a digimon appear in a pokemon world.

Then I decided to make it a little more over-the-top by saying it's not just a mash up, but a battle between worlds. I liked this, it felt sort of like a friendly competition.

Then I decided to make it more personal. I made the characters in the images representative of the larger corporations as a whole, picking Pikachu and Augumon to represent Pokemon and Digimon respectively. This is still sort of like friendly competition? But it definitely felt a little more titanic, using the major characters to represent two huge bodies fighting.

Then I made it very personal. I added the levels and health, and made Pokemon by far the superior.

And finally I landed on the original image above, including the "Digimon wants to fight" text. That's probably the most personal one of all, and definitely the clearest in terms of what the image is supposed to capture.

Truth be told, that one invokes the feeling I get when people try to say Digimon is the better franchise, but if I had to do it again, I'd just stick to the first image I made ("A wild Augumon appeared"). I never really had a problem with Digimon, it was just fun to debate it, and I like the idea that we can just get along. Inverting the classic Pokemon battle image by using an intellectual property that has so often butt heads against it is enough of a statement for me. I don't need to be mean spirited about it also.  I also feel like it would've been much more subtle, which is kind of what I wanted when I started the project, and not what I ended with.

At the very least, I could've made Digimon level 50.