I doubt I’m surprising anyone by putting Shinji here. Shinji’s been my favourite character for a long time now. I can still remember being a kid and wishing that Shinji was a character that existed somewhere since I got fed up with nicey wicey stories where the moral was communicated so clearly that I felt pathetic watching the shows. For me, there was something great about watching him be cruel and not have the show constantly say that he’s wrong for doing so. As a kid, well teen by the time I discovered Shinji, I didn’t know much of media or really where and how to look for new ideas. I just had vague ideas on what it was I wanted to see from a nasty character. So why has Shinji stuck with me?
Part of it is that as true anti heroes and true anti villians go, Shinji is a really really well done one, never slipping too far into either direction. He never truely becomes ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’: every time he does something cruel there’s a sympathetic tinge and whenever he does something nice there’s a hint of selfishness or brattishness. He simply has a morality that is very different from how most people would like to admit their’s is.
I imagine that some day Shinji will be replaced as my favourite character. I doubt he’ll ever be replaced as my favourite pokemon character though.
For one it reveals for the first time that Shinji is okay letting his pokemon wander around.
1st appearance
tag battle
Hikozaru blaze activates episode
ect
Okay, maybe not. Still this is an awesome episode full of great details. I think I'll just dive right in this time though.
This episode begins with a throw backs: Champion Shirona and Ryou of the Elite Four are in battle on the TV. Shinji is watching. So that's already a reference to Chamipon Shirona Enters, that Agehunt filler and the Satoshi/Shinji rivalry. All the references thanks to two of the characters expressing an interest in Shirona feel very natural.
So what is this episode really about? Shinji being nice to his pokemon? Not really. Dodaitose? A little. Satoshi. Yes, pretty much. To prove this, I might as well look at the episode placement. This is the 100th episode of DP and the third Shinji episode after Hikozaru's Tears: the first being a 'Shinji is actually pretty badass' episode, the second contains Shinji calling Satoshi out on a different hypocrisy and before that there were episodes: Reiji is revealed to exist and be a nice person who cares for Shinji. The viewer's mind is being asked to see the possibility of reforming for Shinji and/or Shinji's POV (depending on the intelligence and/or genre knowledge of the viewer) in various different ways by DP 100 but it doesn't actually happen. It's what we get in the next episode that shows that this is a Satoshi episode: the first Jun episode. Jun a very extrovert and Shinji lusting character (to the level of seeing no fault in him) appears. It's pretty hard not to think 'you missed him by one episode Jun'. Yet if Jun had been there, he probably would have forced the episode down a more 'Satoshi is a hypocrite for no real reason' route. The hypocrisies that Shinji brings up wouldn't have been left. This episode says that Satoshi is a hypocrite who isn't that different from Shinji, only not directly. It also asks 'why doesn't Satoshi use blaze?' Overall the idea that Satoshi will have to change and not see Shinji as a complete villain if he is to defeat him is very much suggested. It also says that Shinji has a point.
So my question then is how valid is the point that Shinji raises in this episode?
Okay, let’s begin by looking at Shinji’s points.
Shinij’s first point: Just asking if Satoshi has been working on Hikozaru’s blaze and it’s a good question too for it hints at the problems in Satoshi’s training as well as why the problems are there.
I love this scene since it does a does a wonderful job of showing why Shinji and Satoshi are similar and why they’re not. Shinji here shows that he can’t see the difference between his deep dark forest training and Satoshi’s bright happy training. We can see that Satoshi’s pokemon are happy when they’re training with Satoshi whereas Hikozaru was emtionally destroyed but no one stats this in the show. It’s all shown.
And Satoshi: he doesn’t reply to Shinji. Instead Hikari does. If I was an ikarishipper I’d probably consider it evidence but I’m not so I won’t go into that. What I will say is that Hikari takes on an interesting role in this episode: she is kind of naieve. At least that’s what I’m taking from her attitude. She doesn’t even try to pick up on the obvious moral argument and instead points it out as a countermeasure: a statement of the effectiveness of the training. It’s arguable that she’s given up on the moral argument and is instead going for a ‘safer’ argument.
So Shinji goes along with Hikari’s point and comes back round to insulting Satoshi. I really like this about Shinji’s writing. The show could have spun it so that he brings it back to the morality theme but it doesn’t instead it goes with what is natural for Shinji to say. This gives us more than just a moral message but also well, entertainment.
So Shinji’s second point: That Satoshi just relies on raw power to battle.
Shinji really stresses this point actually. He points it out again during the battle and this time, it’s very much seen that Shinji is being completely understandable.
Shinji: A useless Pokemon with a useless trainer, huh? “Hang on. I believe in you.” Do you think that alone will help you win? If you don’t think about a newly-evolved pokemon’s special traits and keep using brute force, you are nothing more than a reckless trainer.
Sure, Shinji words it cruelly but what he says still rings true. Of course Satoshi does understand it better when Takeshi puts it more kindly.
It is much the same point: that Satoshi’s refusal to consider the sort of pokemon he is fighting with leads him to being a weaker trainer. That Satoshi can’t expect his usual methods to work all the time.
And after the most famous scene of the episode Shinji makes a third and final point about Satoshi.
Shinji and Satoshi’s rivalry in it’s simplest form tends to be seen as:
Shinji believes that it’s the pokemon’s fault if a battle is lost. Shinji therefore sees pokemon as tools
Satohsi believes that it’s the trainers. Satoshi therefore sees pokemon as friends.
What I love about the third point is that it turns it on it’s head. As suggested by Hikari’s reaction:
Even though she had just seen Satoshi say
Indeed Satoshi even points out, checking with Hikozaru even,
Okay, so lets talk about the three points raised:
That Satoshi’s training isn’t that different from Shinji’s.
That Satoshi is reckless in battles.
That Shinji’s Dodaitoise acts separately from Shinji.
The first point suggests that Shinji has little understanding of pokemon’s feelings but the last suggests that he understands Dodaitose’s. Of course, it can be argued that Shinji has more of a reason to care for Dodaitose’s feelings with the fact that not only is Dodaitose Shinji’s starter but also a pokemon that has been shown to have impressed him many times: that Hikozaru didn’t do until the very end of the show.
The second point well... Satoshi isn’t just reckless in battle. He’s reckless everywhere. And Satoshi continues to be after DP ends. He tosses himself of a tower to save his pikachu in the XY opening episodes. He gets involved with defeating evil teams. He has always been reckless and likely will always be. It makes him entertaining but it also makes him annoying. It gives him a way of showing his morals but it’s also his greatest weakness.
And the third point I think is the most interesting, especially since Satoshi talks about Dodaitose having a personality as though he’s been in denial of such an idea. He even checks with Hikozaru to see if that’s really the case for all his pokemon. Satoshi the great believer in friendship between pokemon and humans has casually dehumanised Shinji’s pokemon. I’m not going to pull a Satoshi is evil. I will however pull as ‘so did the audience.’
Dehumanising is a pretty fascinating thing in and of itself: it lets people be cruel to others without guilt, it lets people box in whole identities, and it builds itself into a habit. When only a certain kind of character or being is humanised, people start to dehumanise by default those that aren’t typically humanised in an interesting case of people insisting on sticking to cliches. I don’t find Satoshi’s actions evil so much as human. It’s something that I see people do on this site all the time, even when it’s been pointed out to them that they’re basing their thoughts on things like sexism, racism or just plain cliches.
With that, I can totally believe that people just assumed that Shinji’s Dodaitose was evil, even though we had no evidence of any evil. Plus as a member of the fandom, I kind of remember the whole ‘woah personality’ thing. That kind of helps.
So why did we just assume that Dodaitose wouldn’t have a personality?
I’d say it comes to three things:
Contrary to what the show would like to claim, the vast majority of the pokemon in the show do not have a personality. Even Satoshi’s pokemon can be lacking in character. When the show does this with his companion’s too... and then introduces boring characters of the day with equally boring pokemon... yeah, there was never any reason to assume that Shinji’s pokemon’s personalities would be given much depth.
When we have seen Shinji’s pokemon’s personalities it’s always been in the negative. Eleboo’s bullying is the first time we see personality from any of Shinji’s pokemon. Then there’s that his pokemon join in with Shinji’s training.
We dehumanise Shinji’s abuse. I reckon that it’s a defence mechanism to stop us from hitting huge amounts of depression, but to see Shinji’s abuse as something that we could be doing is important too. Whilst it’s not great to dwell on misery, when you admit that you can be a bad person you can better yourself. This isn’t the best episode to use for this, but it is true that Shinji’s story refuses dehumanisation at least in the most popular methods. His story is never ‘explained’ with such a backstory that would allow the audience to say ‘ah that’s not me’ and certainly not to the level of ‘only abused people ever do anything wrong’ that some shows have reached. If anything a lot of his points are things that the fandom had been saying about Satoshi for years. He is disturbingly relatable and I love that about him... and I’m getting off topic aren’t I?
Oh, just to keep things simple I’m going to use my headcanon pronouns for Shinji’s Dodaitose and Satoshi’s Dodaitose. I see Shinji’s as female and Satoshi’s as male. I will stress here though that these have no basis in canon.
It’s also interesting, because Dodaitose has an interesting personality. Right from the start Dodaitose is shown to have some sense of connection to Satoshi’s Naetal. She is shown to be looking at Naetal before the evolution even happens. I like to think that she’s able to sense that the evolution is about to happen and that’s why it’s framed that way. It isn’t the only explanation though. Some have suggested that it’s purely just that they are the same sort of pokemon and she feels some sort of breed loyalty. It’s ambiguous and that’s fine since both suggest that Shinji is right: she has her own morals that differ from Shinji’s, much like how Pikachu’s morals haven’t always lined up with Satoshi’s. (That it’s a shame Team Rocket didn’t drown scene from Kanto comes to mind.)
She also approves of Shinji’s training. It’s later revealed that she’s always approved.
Why am I saying that she approves when she went against Shinji?
Because she talks to Hayashigame about how to battle! Not Satoshi. She deals with how Hayashigame should have taken Satoshi’s commands, not really caring if Satoshi gets the message or not. That Satoshi was watching from the bushes is beside her point.
We know that Dodaitose has got some heart. She could have struck Glion down when she was showing Hayashigame how to battle, but she didn’t. She puts more effort into making sure that he understands the lesson than Shinji does. She makes a point of showing ideas rather than just teaching them, much like how her trainer will use other pokemon’s power to build up his own pokemon’s abilities.
She is a better teacher than Shinji is. I’m trying to keep headcanon out of this, but it wouldn’t shock me, if it was from watching Dodaitose he got his ideas about using pokemon to power up his moves. He isn’t too impressed with the fact that she went off to teach Satoshi’s pokemon a lesson but he isn’t angry with her either. She naturally would be a better teacher in a way too though. She is after all an actual pokemon: she knows how a battle feels and what it’s like to charge up a move. This is something that neither Satoshi or Shinji could ever really replicate though one of the big differences between them is that Satoshi at least tries to.
In all honesty, now I think about it why is it that we’ve never seen Satoshi try anything like this? He actually have more opportunity to do so, what with him travelling with people. Just imagine a scene were for example, Iris’s Emonga does something cool and Satoshi asks if she could help teach Pikachu to do something similar. Yeesh, maybe Satoshi didn’t deserve a non TR win from his Dodaitose after all if Satoshi’s going to be that spiteful. Okay, we’re not supposed to take it as Satoshi’s being spiteful. My guess: the creators never figured out the potential in such an idea and hence it’s never been even hinted at. It wouldn’t be the first time they hadn’t thought all their implications through.
Only, if we were supposed to see Satoshi as being spiteful, this episode calls Satoshi out on it at least, in the sense of calling Shinji out on something similar:
Shinji: My brother had collected so many badges, but one single loss caused him to quit the challenge entirely. One would think he is upset, but no he keeps smiling like an idiot. I can’t forgive him for that. I won’t become like my brother. The way my brother handled things was wrong.
I ask, what is the difference between Shinji wanting to be nothing like Reiji and Satoshi wanting to be nothing like Shinji? After all the music, the fact that we clearly see that lacking bitterness is not causing Reiji issues outside of Shinji, the fact that even outside of framing Shinji is being a controlling jerk all suggest that Shinji is wrong. Would Satoshi refusing to be Shinji like really be that much better? Heck, going back to the point Shinji made about how their training is similar: is that really such a bad thing? Heck, in most shows the fact that they had common ground would be the point where they start to get along. There is something wonderfully human about the fact that they start to resent each other instead. Not only that but the show, out right shows that Shinji’s training and Satoshi’s training differs in the way that matters: cruelty levels.
This episode allows Satoshi to be seen in the negative and isn’t pessimistic about it. Satoshi’s worst qualities are presented as things that he can work on. Indeed, Shinji could work on his worst qualities too. Of course, there is a difference between pointing out faults and working on them. Whilst Hayashigame learns from this episode, I find it hard when looking at BW to say that Satoshi learnt anything from his rivalry with Shinji. Even the rest of DP has a big issue when it comes to showing that Satoshi learnt from this episode: Rock Climb. However that’s not to say that Satoshi doesn’t change from this episode. This really is the start of him beginning to give up. This is the arc of his own doubt that ultimately leads to him despairing after the full battle. This episode shows that Shinji’s rivalry really takes a toll on Satoshi and leaves him unable to fight back. It’s showing the emotional and human side of the rivalry by letting Satoshi feel each impact of Shinji’s better ability to debate, his willingness to use anything against Satoshi and now the fact that Shinji has supporters that have personalities. He is unable to make any of the great points on why Shinji is wrong not because he’s thick, but because he’s watched Shinji do increasingly messed up thing after messed up thing and Satoshi isn’t allowed to distance himself from it in any way. Shinji’s appeared in episodes that have had nothing to do with him.
Not only that but after this episode, the few ways that Satoshi thinks he can fight Shinji are utterly dismantled. Satoshi defeats Shinji in the poke-ringer which is similar to fighting him in battle. Not only that but Shinji not caring about Satoshi’s win is something that’s treated as inevitable. Then comes a battle that Shinji has no choice but to acknowledge: the Jindai battle. Satoshi sees no evidence in the full battle after that that Shinji has changed. With this, Shinji appears to Satoshi as both a concept and as a character. When taken as just a concept Shinji is someone who represents something that is deeply uncomfortable: abuse in general. It tends to be from this side that most people that do like Shinji like him. After all, when it comes to real life, abusers are all about power and control, which does match with the basics of Shinji’s character. Though he believes that what he’s doing is right, at the end of the day his tool based thoughts are still based in wanting to be a better battler. That he is able to debate with Satoshi lets the show give Shinji more interesting arguments and lets it feel more like a debate. When the audience is allowed to agree with Shinji, it’s tempting to say that all that happens is that they believe that abuse is okay, but the truth is that when you let people think the message become stronger. Yes, some people will get the wrong message but chances are they were looking for what they wanted to see and would have taken it as okay never mind how it was presented. Is there a limit to that? Yes. I’d say ambiguity is fine but anything that suggests that abuse is okay is going too far, though with media in constant change, this can change. There does need to be plenty of work that makes it clear that abuse is wrong to balance things out or you just end up giving abusers a platform to speak from. Sure they should be understood but only in so far as to understand how to avoid being one, which can be better done if they are made relatable that can only be done by giving them fair reasonable points. For me personally, Shinji doesn’t cross this line, but I know that for other’s he has. I’m comfortable with the idea of people disliking Shinji for this reason, especially as a Shinji fan, though I can get uncomfortable if they word that discomfort in certain ways. What I’m saying is that if you dislike Shinji because his abusive ways make you feel guilty, GTFO.
The reason I bring up Shinji’s relatbility in a post that’s about Satoshi, is because really this is the ultimate challenge that Satoshi must face. For everyone has an abusive side that they must challenge or they too become part of the problem. They are two sides of the same coin and that coin is training and in real life the coin could be any number of things. It’s unclear so the audience automatically puts into whatever relates to them best. In my case, it’s my faith as a Christian for I see people use my faith to be cruel to others all the time and it makes me feel sick. For other’s it could be social interaction in general. Fandom, social justice, and so on: all of these are possible.
Now it’s possible that it wasn’t even that thought through. I know I’ve been implying that all of this is deliberate but in the rather likely chance it isn’t, that doesn’t change that it’s there in the show. Satoshi and Shinjij’s rivalry was written the way that it was and it’s always going to be part of the show. Even if the show recons it, it’s something that has happened. Shinji is now a character that can exist in the pokemon world with all that that implies. He could meet Erika and set the Pokemon Gym People on her. He could meet Iris and battle her. He could meet Shooti and battle him. He could meet one of the moe characters and make them feel worse. He could meet Eureka and get on with her and that could be more terrorfying than them not getting on. As for Satoshi, he has met Shinji and he’s met Hikozaru with all that that implies. He’s been through huge emotional turmoil and come out smiling. Not only that but he’s become a strong trainer and knows that trainers aren’t all kindness in even more detail than ever.
Torterra, #389 – Continent Pokémon Ancient people imagined that beneath the ground, a gigantic Torterra dwelled. Small Pokémon occasionally gather on its unmoving back to begin building their nests.
It was once believed that the entire planet was a gigantic Dodaitose. Explorations in the early days of sea travel revealed this thought to be false. Some joke that the entire multiverse is shaped like this earth-shattering Pokémon.
(P.S. Daily new Pokémon drawings, follow to see them! As always, e-mail [email protected] for inquiries on prints of all existing drawings and commissions.)
