Our Pokémon Year

Learning to love the latest thing my kid has learned to love

“Hey, Dad!”

“Yeah, buddy?”

We’re driving somewhere. Running an errand, heading to the store, going to get a haircut—that part’s not important. We’re in the car, and I know my son is about to unleash some knowledge on me.

“Did you know that Eevee is the best Pokémon?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah! Eevee is a Normal Type, but they can evolve into so many different things! They can evolve into Vaporeon if you have a Water Stone or Flareon if you have a Fire Stone or Jolteon if you have a Thunder Stone or Espeon when leveled up with high friendship during the daytime, but not if you’re in an area with a Moss Rock or Ice Rock or while knowing a Fairy-type move.”

“Oh. Okay… well, I won’t try that last thing, I guess.”

“They can also evolve into Umbreon or Leafeon or Glaceon or Sylveon. Plus there’s a Gigantamax version of Eevee but that one can’t evolve into the other things but it’s already a lot bigger and has more power.”

“I see. Sounds like a pretty cool character, if you ask me.”

“You know what other characters I like? There’s—”

There have been other obsessions before this one. There was pirate year, where his birthday cake was a pirate map and his favorite gift a pirate ship and the cartoons were all pirates and the Halloween costume a pirate too and you couldn’t walk into any room in the house without stepping on a plastic sword.

There was the Star Wars year—that one happened to coincide with the onset of COVID, so I have a picture of him conducting his very first virtual preschool class, sitting in front of the laptop wearing a Darth Vader mask and dourly clutching a lightsaber, a memory I hope only one of has retained because it’s the saddest picture I’ve ever taken. We had the requisite Star Wars shirts and pajamas and LEGO sets and a “May The Force Be With You” banner that hung on our kitchen wall for four months after his birthday because we didn’t see any compelling reason to take it down and needed all the encouragement we could get at the time.

There was a monkey-themed party one year and a couple strong seasons of Harry Potter, and a handful of other short-lived infatuations scattered along the way, but now we have firmly and definitively arrived at The Pokémon Year, and so I find myself fully immersed in the long-running and nearly-ubiquitous world of fantasy, one that I do not personally understand the first thing about.

I’m forty years old, and so I missed the broad onset of Pokémon in my own childhood by a few years. This means I’m wholly at the mercy of an enthusiastic seven-year-old who I am fairly certain is making half of this up as he goes. He’s very confident as he delivers these soliloquies, mind you—mapping out the worlds and characters and lore of this expansive universe in great detail—but I often feel like Mac from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia being told that burning trash creates stars:

For her part, my daughter—who has gone through her own waves of fixation, from pandas to Elsas to Bluey—gamely goes along with her older brother’s version of events, leaving me as the confused tourist in a household canon that is probably not accurate but has enough passionate adherents under my roof to qualify it as a legitimate breakaway sect of Pokémon.

My wife and I persevere through all of it—the monologues and the cartoons, the almost-certainly-rigged card games where the rules invariably bend towards whatever cards my son is holding, the Saturday mornings where he wakes us up at 6am to work through the finer points of what a VMax Pokémon is versus a G-Max one, the cards scattered on the floor in every room of the house.

We get him the Pokémon shirts and pajamas and order special cards off Amazon that are probably counterfeit but only if you’re cop and we spend a half-hour scouring the aisles of a warehouse discount store because they showed a Pokéball bean bag chair in this week’s mailbox flyer but we can’t find it anywhere and once we finally do locate the last poorly-labeled box I have to ram the gigantic thing into the backseat of my Honda Civic because the minivan is still in the shop but he’s going to love this dang beanbag for his birthday and oh yeah the whole birthday party is Pokémon themed so we’re going to need to bake him a Pikachu cake and I’m not a baker and neither of us is a cake decorator but we’re going to make it work because it’s Pokémon year, dangit!

[deep breath]

There’s a view of the world, a view of parenting where this kind of indulgence is spoiling them, or foolishly allowing the silly things of childhood to take over our lives. One where we shouldn’t go all-in or let them get too deep into things they’ll have moved on from in a year or six months or next week, or where we can simply smile and nod our way through the things they’re breathlessly telling us about.

But I want to see their worlds.

I want to know about the things they love. I want to hear all about them, even if the descriptions don’t always stick in my brain alongside all the other stuff I have to remember as an adult, the responsibilities and duties and fears and preoccupations that crowd out the ability I once had to develop encyclopedic knowledges of fictional worlds, the ability that they now possess and display on a daily basis.

I want to hear all about it, even if the descriptions are wrong. Or rather, I want to hear about it especially if the descriptions are wrong, because if they are they’re only wrong in the sense of not conforming to some corporate canon that I have no need to understand, but they’re absolutely right in the head of a little kid, a kid who will only exist in this form for a fleeting moment before they themselves evolve into a different one just like their friend Eevee does, replaced by another version and another and another and another and then one day they’re an adult just like me, one I will love and cherish and get to tell about the year all they could talk about was Pokémon.

They probably won’t remember all the details then.

But I will.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

My wife baked and frosted, I did the detailed icing. I think we pulled it off.

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