Autistic Coding in Pokemon Black and White

This is the 100th post on this blog and I'm using it to talk about video games, go figure. 

I've been playing a lot of Pokemon to deal with the stress of the pandemic. (I've actually discovered I'm pretty good at breeding for stats!) The more I've gotten to know the characters in the franchise, the more I've noticed a lot of them resonate with me as an autistic person, and I think that's worth discussing, if only because various sources cite Satoshi Tajiri, the series creator, as autistic (and whether or not it's confirmed, it's definitely possible if you look at certain elements in the series, in particular collecting things, animal empathy, and eye contact being a form of aggression). Original protagonist Red, who last appeared as an adult in Sun and Moon/Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, is portrayed in the games as a man of few words; although in the first games, Red and Green/Blue, this was because he was the player character and was designed for the player to project onto, in later games where he appears he often seems selectively mute, which I've seen many autistic Pokemon fans run with, many even drawing fanart of him communicating using sign language. 

I'm going to talk about a game that's a bit closer to home, though - literally. 

The fifth generation of Pokemon games, Black and White and Black 2 and White 2, take place in a region called Unova, which is loosely based on my home region of the greater New York City metropolitan area. The first games to not be based on a region of Japan, Black and White introduced a number of new features and were more experimental than probably every other Pokemon game to date, and as such they were received with mixed reviews from fans at the time but have largely grown to be cult classics in the fandom since. Their greatest strength was that they had more emphasis on the story than games past and provided more engaging characters to interact with, one of whom is widely regarded as one of the most beloved characters in the franchise altogether, if the amount of fan content is anything to go by. 

And said beloved character is very much autistic-coded.

In fact, Black and White actually have at least two autistic-coded characters, and interestingly they can actually be contrasted with each other in terms of family experience. You'll definitely interact with the first one, since he plays a major role in the plot, and depending on what you enjoy challenging in the postgame you might bump into the second one if you're good enough at the game. Let's take this one at a time here.

N as he appears in Black and
White 2. (Image description:
a light-skinned young man
with long green hair and a
gentle smile glances sideways
at something or other, his
cap in his hands.)

The first one is, of course, the beloved one, who introduces himself to you as just N. N is short for Natural Harmonia Gropius, his name referencing both his love of math and of the natural world - despite being human, he's capable of talking to and understanding the speech of Pokemon, having been raised by them as a small child before being adopted by his foster father (who may be his biological father and temporarily abandoned him only to re-adopt him as part of a greater plan, but this is never stated). N initially believes that people and Pokemon should be separated, as he's been raised to believe this since the only Pokemon he was allowed to interact with by his father were Pokemon abused by their trainers, and he's installed as the puppet leader of a PETA-like group named Team Plasma who state that their goal is to get everyone to release their Pokemon and make this a reality. The truth of it all is that the real leader of Team Plasma is N's father, Ghetsis, who just wants to be the only person with Pokemon and plans to take over first the Unova region and later the world, and he revels in his cruelty. The player eventually defeats Ghetsis, and N goes off on a two-year journey to do some soul-searching as his entire world has just come crashing down around him, but he returns just in time to help defeat Ghetsis during his second attempt to take over Unova in Black 2 and White 2. Now more worldly and understanding the connection between people and Pokemon, he's ultimately completed a more compelling character arc than...pretty much any character in the series to date, and players adore him for his depth of character compared to other characters, antagonists or not. (A large number of players also adore him for his looks, but that's its own thing.) 

To many fans of the series, N reads as autistic, and I'm wont to agree with them - although a lot of his lack of social skills comes from the fact that his father essentially kept him socially isolated for his entire childhood, he still has noted autistic conversation traits - he talks very fast, for one. His text will move at the fastest possible speed, and if you set the game text to go as fast as it can he actually will still talk even faster (which was programmed just for him). He has the stereotypical autistic math skills that not all of us have in real life, sure, but his actual hyperfixation of choice is Ferris wheels, and he'll happily tell the player how beautiful he finds them, even confessing his role as the King of Team Plasma to you when you're on a Ferris wheel with him. He also very firmly believes that he's doing the right thing, and his animal empathy - a common trait many autistic people report having - allows him to bond easily with Pokemon around him and ask for their support as his friends. Ultimately, his worldview is shattered when his father's true motives are revealed, and he proves to be an anti-villain, his father's betrayal of him and his compassion for Pokemon motivating him to stand with the player against Ghetsis.

Ghetsis, it should be noted, has not been a very good father. In fact, he's an abusive parent, keeping his son locked away from society save for two adoptive older sisters, shaping his behavior by infantilizing him and keeping him in a room filled with child-like things with his Pokemon, and grooming him to be a puppet ruler who genuinely believes in Team Plasma's stated motives whilst Ghetsis machinates in the back and prepares to take over. In the end, Ghetsis actually turns out to despise his child, referring to him in the climaxes of both Black and White and Black 2 and White 2 as "a freak without a human heart," which resonates with a lot of autistic players - how many of us have been told we weren't human enough, or we weren't being human correctly? It stings, and many of us have even heard it from our own parents or other people we love, which brings us in particular to empathize with N even more as he's already processing his father's own betrayal and childhood abuse. It's no wonder that N goes off on a journey for two years after the events of the first games - he needs to get away and see new places and experience the world on his own terms, not those of his abusive father. When he returns in the sequel games, he's still the same gentle young man he was in the first games - and is certainly still somewhat naive in some respects - but he's definitely far more mature and is willing to stand up to his father directly. 

The second autistic-coded character has a much better relationship with his family, or at least the family member of his we see in the game. (In fact, they're extremely close with each other and have impeccable teamwork - because they're twin siblings.) He's also the character I see the most of myself in out of every character in the entire franchise, except for the fact that I don't resemble a weird Muppet.

A screenshot of Emmet from the Pokemon anime.
(Image description: weird train Muppet with huge
sideburns beams delightedly at something or other
- okay, for real, this is a subway conductor in an
elaborate take on a Japanese railway employee
uniform with large pointed sideburns and a
face drawn in a way that resembles a Muppet.)

This is Emmet. He likes double battles. He likes combinations of two Pokemon. And he likes winning more than anything else.

He also likes infodumping, oversharing as a method of introduction to other people, and scripting when he's talking to people he doesn't know (probably in an attempt to prevent said oversharing, but it doesn't seem to work). Emmet and his brother Ingo (their names respectively are derived from 'outbound' and 'inbound' and in Japanese are directly this - Ingo is Nobori and Emmet is Kudari) run Unova's battle facility, the Battle Subway, which is an optional feature you can challenge in both Black and White and their sequels and is, like other battle facilities, usually recommended for postgame because taking these on generally requires you to have a deeper understanding of the game. Emmet is in charge of double battles specifically, and you'll also eventually run into him if you do multi battles, where he'll team up with Ingo against you and your teammate. 

I know, there's a very obvious point I can make here: he works with trains. He and his brother run the Unova MTA. There's a big stereotype with autistic people and trains that actually does have a basis, and it's actually a stereotype I can occasionally fall into much to my chagrin (I love historical steam locomotives - and one electric locomotive called the GG1 - and am my family's go-to for, ironically, navigating the New York City subway system because I took to it like a fish takes to water). So before we get into the actual autistic-coded behavior, I just need to get this out of the way. Yes, he's a subway conductor who does pointing and calling and whose signature Pokemon is a nearly 200-lb 7-foot long levitating electric eel that isn't unlike the third rail that powers the actual subway. Anyway. Moving on now.

In both the games and the Pokemon Special manga (which isn't canon to the games), Emmet is blunt and direct, contrasted with his older twin brother Ingo's more dramatic way of speaking, and in the manga especially this leads to him saying things he probably shouldn't:

Here Emmet bluntly tells White (the stand-in for the female player character in the games) that her inability to win battles is helping develop the Battle Subway as a facility by describing her as "an example of a trainer who gets overwhelmed and loses every single match." The smile on his face clearly indicates that he doesn't realize he shouldn't be saying it this directly.

His overeager tendencies when it comes to battling can be off-putting on top of that, and he spends a lot of the manga actually getting yanked around by the collar by Ingo whenever he gets too overzealous about it. Besides the image above, here's a few more:

A collection of images of Emmet being yanked by the giant collar on his coat by his twin brother that I've curated. In nearly every image Emmet seems almost oblivious to the fact that he's about to be pulled away.

For whatever reason, the manga artists decided to give him this big arm-swinging walk, which is weirdly similar to my own (though mine is on a smaller scale) - I recently actually identified it as a sort of stim I have, which only adds to Emmet's lack of neurotypicality. 

The thing that stands out to me here is that Emmet is more or less allowed to be autistic. Ingo's there to make sure he doesn't unintentionally make anyone uncomfortable and lets him know when he's done so, but otherwise he's just allowed to exist as himself, and he has an overall supportive and positive relationship with his twin brother that especially shows itself in their seamless teamwork when they're battling together. It's actually a notable contrast with N, whose autistic traits are actively shamed by his own father, who refers to him as a "freak" for existing the way he does. In fact, this is actually shown very clearly - although we don't see a backstory for the twins, the fact that Emmet is completely comfortable with himself indicates that he probably grew up in a more supportive environment and was allowed to be his weird self, as opposed to N, who was shaped and groomed into an image Ghetsis wanted and was abused and forced into compliance for someone else's goals - not unlike what ABA therapy does to those of us who are unfortunate enough to go through it. The fact that they appear in the same games makes it especially interesting. I don't necessarily think their autistic coding was intentional, and I don't think they were intended to contrast each other, but it happened that way for people like myself - autistic people looking for representation - to go and find it. 

And you know what? Even when it's not intentional, it means a lot to a lot of autistic people to see ourselves in human characters. So often the characters most like us are aliens or robots, or otherwise non-human creatures, so every time a human character reads as autistic - whether they're canonically so or not - it makes us feel more seen. Pokemon Black and White released in 2010, with their sequel games arriving in 2012, and since then we've actually had many strides in positive autistic representation in media - the series Everything's Going To Be Okay (featuring an autistic actress playing an autistic character!) and Entrapta in the reboot of She-Ra being confirmed to be canonically autistic are two examples, and ironically the outcry against Sia's film Music even coming from non-autistic people technically counts as a third because it means we're getting there and our voices are being heard more. That said, it's both fun and deeply comforting to look back at characters - often dearly beloved characters - and see that we were there all along, if not by name. 

And we always will be.