hey ur post abt Volo has made me so curious, what are ur Volo thoughts 👀
so so so many volo thoughts if i'm being honest. so so many
so first of all what you need to understand is that there is a lot of history in japan. you can probably get a better understanding of it by reading up on the subject or seeing what other people have to say, but i'll summarize.
-pokemon legends arceus takes place in the sinnoh/hisui region, which is analogous to the real life hokkaido region
-the galaxy hall is modeled after the hokkaido government building
-there was some really fucking messy colonialism happening in real life. this was during the mid meiji era, i wanna say? and the japanese folks showed up, saw the indigenous ainu people living there, and forcibly assimilated them.
-also noteworthy that the jomon people lived there a while back? but those people just kind of.... faded away. you can mostly see their cultural influence on the modern day in the pottery that they made.
With all of that historical context out of the way. Let's look at the game itself.
The clans are pretty much just fantasy Ainu, but it's... hm. The way that they're treated by the narrative, knowing how violently their culture was destroyed, can be uncomfortable at times. Because we don't see much of that in the modern day sinnoh, we just see descendants and people who look like them. we can assume they survived, but their culture... not quite so much. i don't know, it's just kind of a big mess.
but let's talk about the celestica. their ruins are greek inspired, but historically they'd be closer to the jomon. in the fragments and old verses you find, cogita laments that the celestica have left hisui, and from some of the content in hgss, i think it's pretty safe to say that the celestica went to johto and merged with the culture there. but it's a strong feeling of loneliness and cultural isolation that cogita's writings bring to the table.
and then we've got volo. volo, who seems to have a complex relationship with cogita. she berates them for laziness, and yet they still come back to her. why? i think it's because they're lonely. they're like if found family was just as bad as bio family. they desperately want each other for some sort of connection, some sort of culture, but can'tstop grating on each other's nerves. it's.... honestly quite tragic. and they don't seem to even like their job sometimes, when they get to talking about their true interests, but then they call you their "favorite customer" despite never selling you anything. so it feels like our late 19th century merchant is just putting on a customer service act. except, they can't actually keep that act up when it comes to their special interest. which is incredibly cute <3
everyone seems to focus on volo's mental breakdown as their "true" character. but i don't think that's it. their behavior, in fact, is erratic. it's not the behavior of a schemer, it contradicts itself. that's why i think that their words on mount coronet were some sort of manic episode. that they had more fondness for the player than they let on. They're full of contradictions that I want to explore. they took a picture with their togepi. they have three friendship evolutions and try to kill a teenager. also, how can you not find it cute how badly they want to infodump?
There's something they say that just... absolutely fascinates me. It's around the time of the lake trials, and it's haunted me as a core facet of their character.
I want to know exactly what happened in the past that led us to this particular present... Or more accurately, I suppose... I want to know where I came from and where I'm headed. I want to know my path, so to speak.
Maybe this is reaching. But doesn't this just scream "twenty something who's lost and doesn't like their job, who is desperately searching for a future in the remnants of a culture that vanished before they were born"? I've leaned a lot into the indigenous coding in their characterization, how they feel lost and isolated and it's that alienation that makes them willing to tear down the entire world, how they push others away and long for comfort, how they don't really know who they are because all they've ever done is retail.
I didn't mean to stay up this late writing, but... they definitely hold a very special place in my heart. and i wish more people would try to understand them the way I do.
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