Intention

First of all, please don't hate me for doing my project on this. I am from Turkey, and even though most people know what Pokemon is, people rarely play it and they only watch it when they're very very small. Pokemon is not a big thing in Turkey like it is in United States. I was one of the people who have never played, I don't think I even knew there were games. I have watched one or two episodes of the show when I was very small. I also did not know the existence of a game called Super Smash Brothers. So when I came here, I was very surprised by how much people loved Pokemon. I did not understand why they got so excited about catching this creatures and making them fight. That just seemed cruel to me. I'm in my second year in Carnegie Mellon, and I still feel the same. (Except about Super Smash Brothers, I've gotten really good at it and have WiiU and GameCube at home here now that I play with my housemates from time to time.)

Context

I did not know this, but after talking about my project with someone, I've found out that I'm not the only person to think of this. Apparently, Pokemon being animal cruelty is a topic that came up many many times. However, that doesn't seem to have affected the franchise or the fans very much, as most of the reactions I've gotten about my project were people telling me that I'm wrong. There are even games online that is from the perspective of the pokemons as they try to escape from the people that captured them and even the main protagonists of the game are presented as evil. This is also similar to what I will try to do; I want to present Pokemon the way it is in my mind right now. The way I think about Pokemon is still that it is animal abuse/cruelty. The show is of little kids wanting to be champions in some event and capturing creatures and making them fight. The game is of little kids wanting to be champions in some event and capturing creatures and making them fight until they faint. In the comments, I expect to get upset critiques saying that I'm wrong and Pokemon like to be captured. 

Process

I was initially considering creating a game that the player could play as a Pokemon and see that he/she is just being captured and either being forced to fight or put in a collection or being forced to fight and then put in a collection. This idea was discarded after I found out that there was already a game that was exactly this. So I decided to make a video that would show how similar Pokemon and animal abuse actually are. 

Here is the video but I'm not sure how much I advise watching it since I did the project and could watch it only once total because I felt so horrible.

Basically, what I did was that I put a part of a video of animals being forced to fight, then I put one of the same thing from Pokemon, then I repeated the whole thing to show the similarities. 

https://drive.google.com/a/andrew.cmu.edu/file/d/0B2NP19fNnKOcS3RiMHZYcUk1Q2c/view?usp=sharing

Reflection

My inner critic is satisfied since it feels like it reached the goal, but I think a part of me died inside from watching all the animal abuse videos while trying to find an appropriate one to fit with my project. I learned not to watch these videos again and if I did something differently, maybe I would do something fun like the write-up suggested.

Attribution

"Image - Pikachu.JPG - Heroes Wiki - The Ultimate Good-guy Resource - Wikia." Heroes Wikia. Hero.wikia, n.d. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.

  "Ash vs Gary | Charizard vs Blastoise (HD)." YouTube. YouTube, 16 June 2013. Web. 09 Nov. 2015. The video is from the show Pokemon. 

  "Watch Sickening Moment Hundreds Cheer Elephant Fight Where Innocent Animals Are Forced to Brutally." YouTube. YouTube, 07 May 2015. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.