why pokemon sucks

       So long story short today has been utterly excruciating. After I stumbled my way to the BA on 2 hours of sleep around 7:30 and after I finished stitching together photos manually for two hours for the recruitment books I was blessed with the kind of transcendent headache that completely numbs your entire perception of the world. 
       Needless to say I probably couldn't tell you what we talked about in Human Sexual Behavior or Principles of Advertising; but what I can tell you is that Jessie and James are far and away the least dynamic characters of any television show.
       This realization came to me as I attempted to eat my Chicken Club Quesadilla from Moes with a fork and was greeted with an explosion of chips to the face. This is a seemingly insignificant occurrence on the surface but if you probe deeper into the extended metaphor of life, this frontal assault by fried corn is representative of everything Pokemon has ever been.
       In the late 90s it was virtually impossible to be a kid and not get immersed in Pokemon culture; to paraphrase Colin Meloy, when the Pokemon came the Pokemon came hard. It was a completely unexpected import that went from a bizarre thing Japanese exchange students were obsessed with to pop culture phenomenon in a matter of days it seemed. You closed your eyes and when they opened again there were gameboy games, trading card games, stuffed animals, shirts and most importantly a cartoon.
       I remember very vividly the first episode of season one of Pokemon. I remember meeting Ash Ketchum and Professor Oak and watching him first leave Pallet Town on his coming of age quest to become the very best (that no one ever was). The first season of the television show followed the story of Pokemon Red and Blue pretty closely with the strange twist that Misty and Brock inexplicably decided to abandon their posts at the Gym to run around with a pompous little spiky haird dweeb, and it was all fun and games. This however would not have made for a very interesting television show, so they had to include the element of danger with the aptly named Team Rocket characters of Jessie and James who seem to exist in a perpetual state of failure and possess not but the singular ambition of capturing poor Ash's Pikachu.
       The fact that in every episode Team Rocket fail to capture this Pikachu would be something you could overlook if it only went on for one season, but as it stands Team Rocket have failed to capture Pikachu 520 times (look it up on wikipedia if you don't believe me). What is it about this Pikachu that's so special that these two halfwits and their talking cat just can't take a hint and give up already?
       This is perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Pokemon universe. I've not watched every episode of this show (how could I and still be a legitimately interesting person?) but I have seen probably more episodes than any 20 year old should admit, and at the end of each episode I have to ask myself "How is this still on television?"
       Everything changes from season to season, in the real world, and in Pokemon. It seems that with each new iteration of the series we get more and more pokemon added, and we're in a different world, but all of the characters are still the same. Brock, Ash, Team Rocket, Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny-- they're all still there and they're all still exactly as I left them back in 7th grade.
       Which brings me to the point of this little observation, which is that animated series always seem to exist in this weird world where there is no passage of time. Characters never age, event's never change the face of their world, and for the most part what happens from day to day has little to no impact on the state of affairs in next weeks episode. However, at the start of day one of Pokemon there were only 151 known species of Pokemon, as it stands in the Diamond and Pearl universe there are now 493.
       The only explanation I can think of for why the decades it would take to discover 342 species of animals never happened is that the writers think we're all still in comas because of "Dennō Senshi Porygon."
       In closing I think you all should probably steer clear of the show unless you'd like to play the drinking game we made to it my freshman year.

PokeCrunk

       Mix a tall drink of your choosing and sit down to watch the 3:00 poke-hour that Cartoon Network shows every day. Every time a Pokemon you don't know the name of is shown on screen, drink. 
       It's pretty simple, but who knows? Maybe you'll actually get some value from the show after a round or two.