The Animal, Reinvented
I’ve been trying to write this piece for at least a year.
It largely stems from a desire to have better conversations about something that I love.
Thing is — its so culturally vast, so ubiquitous, it becomes difficult to talk about extrapersonally.
It’s in everybody’s perspective, and in everybody’s experience. So I’m not looking for an objective appraisal of a cultural phenomenon — I don’t think there’s much to that kind of objectivity. It shuts out conversation.
I’m also not here to make a narrative or mechanical judgement, either. That’s been done before. Well, I might add.
I’m writing this to address an elephant in the room, and maybe in the process of doing so, reflect on ways Pokemon could be better.
PART 1: WHAT EVEN IS THIS AND WHY IS IT POPULAR
Pokemon is as much a franchise as it is a force of nature. It’s everywhere, and loved by so many.
The communities who share in that closeness are global, and the contributions made by them are as brilliant as they are plentiful. There’s so much good work that couldn’t have happened without the spark of Pokemania.
How odd that a franchise of consumer products can illicit an almost grassroots fanaticism. Sometimes it feels like it’s been around forever.
In saying that, over the 20+ years it has been in the cultural zeitgeist, I find a vast amount of Pokemon-related analytical coverage somewhat unsatisfying.
Usually, discussions of the franchise are very much on the franchises terms.
There’s value in this of course — “The Dex”, a pokemon fan-project by Youtubers Alex Faciane and PokeKellz, discusses “trivia and battle strategy”, with an educational bent. Like Alton Brown’s “Good Eats”, but Pokemon.
Works like this are constructive, interpretive and exploratory. Even social and environmental issues can be discussed through a lens of the franchise. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
Nevertheless, there are very few people that situate Pokemon as a company, product, or interactive art in the real world. Those that do are normally outsiders to the franchise, reporting in with confused astonishment, and pluralizing “pokemon” as “pokemons”.
Every time Pokemon has been newsworthy or the subject of critique, I’ve felt that the understanding of the franchise has been vague and indirect. In fairness, from the outside in, it is.
Pokemon is an outlier.
We often take this uniqueness for granted.
Weird Media
How do we go about pinning down this wild entity?
Sure, Pokemon is a game — or, a legacy of games. But it’s also a multimedia franchise, concerning animal-like creatures. Capturing them, befriending them, and raising them to do sporting battle.
The animated show, the merchandise, the cards, and even the games seem secondary to the world the franchise propagates. But then, the fictional pokemon “world” isn’t what makes it appealing.
There are three main species of pop culture franchise I can fathom: story, universe, and alternative reality franchises.
Story based franchises are successful due to a fascination with a narrative arc. There are characters, things happen to them, and their adventure is the draw of popular appeal — IPs like Twilight and How to Train your Dragon come to mind, but so do many franchises targeted at a more “mature” audience, with less fantastical, more “believable” stories. As long as you can sell it on a mug.
Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are the fantastical places I’m talking about. They are universes introduced to us by some central text — a book series, or perhaps a movie.
While these places are conceived initially to prop up a narrative, as consequences of a story, they become their own context for further stories.
Pokemon is perhaps closer in certain regards, to the universes of Superheroes. Marvel and DC franchises have a core concept of alternate reality, worlds like our own, except. In these contexts, the place and the story are of course important, but their point is to change one thing about reality to magnify spectacle.
The My Hero Academia franchise has its “quirks” — what the franchise calls superhuman powers. The capacity for having quirks manifests itself as an impossible thing in an otherwise mundane world. No place, no singular story, but a fantasy to alter the real world, not replace it.
Alt-reality franchises are, due to their abstract conception, given mascots — like spiderman for example — to marry character relatability with concept. This is often key to their success — believability.
While it bears similarity, Pokemon is only abstractly popular due to the “lead” characters, of Ash Ketchum. There’s no “Spiderman of Pokemon”. In turn, perhaps the draw is in the Pokemon “characters” of say, Pikachu, or Charizard. But just as much as their anime portrays them, they are individuals of a species. Tokens, not types.
Without the existence of the full plurality of the creatures, Pokemon just isn’t Pokemon. Their existence isn’t dependent on people, and they can exist in our world, or in a different one.
So Pokemon is seemingly a creature-centric franchise, with some aspects of alt-reality to it. Believable, but countless and inhuman.
There are zero cultural touchstones for this. No wonder our grandparents couldn’t grasp the concept.
So what’s so attractive about this unique, fictive possibility? What about the concept of these fantastic creatures clicks so well in the global, 21st century imagination?
I feel like once we have the tools to define Pokemon’s core appeal, we can be better equipped to discuss Pokemon more solidly, as a meaningful text rather than a natural disaster.
I’m not concerned with finding some reason to hate the franchise.
Neither am I searching for answers. I want to examine this massive aspect of popular culture so that we might ask better questions about it.
There is a notion that pokemon is a purely escapist fantasy. It’s very difficult to argue against that, largely because those that love pokemon the most are unlikely to dissect it. Why examine reprieve?
It’s an easy answer to accept, but to be frank, it does a massive disservice to the franchise. Reducing its recipe to simple sugar content, it’s rendered unimportant and trivial.
These aren’t words I’d use to describe Pokemon.
PART 2: ANIMALS OF THE MIND
According to The Pokemon Company, Pokemon are not to be thought of as animals. To the point of Taboo.
Read the style guide, and this becomes painstakingly clear. Animals cannot coexist with pokemon, but pokemon are something different than animals. Pokemon replace animals.
There’s some distance, of course. They have magical powers — they can command elements and psychically break your mind into little bits and pieces. Pokemon can understand speech, but they can’t speak themselves. They have agency, but not too much agency.
This is an uneasy answer. They are clearly made distinct from humans, and usually take the form of worldly animals. Lizards, mice, insects and serpents. The ecosystems described and portrayed by Gamefreak mirror the ecosystems of our own world. Discussions of extinction, predation, habitat destruction and genetic engineering are concepts often explored in various franchise media.
Taboos are a kind of masking tape. They exist so we won’t have to consider things that challenge our structured idea of the world. For example, the externalities and internalities of our bodily forms must remain separate — we make a private room for that business. Our houses must be sealed, less the distinction between home and world be unclear. Sweet and salty must remain separate — some folk refuse pineapple on their pizza. Etcetera.
So let’s call Gamefreak out on their taboo. Why aren’t pokemon animals? Their believability, and perhaps success, seems to be closely linked to the real-world appeal of animals.
If we are to think of them as animals (which, let’s be real, we do), what consequences might that entail?
In turn, what makes them different than animals? In making the animal into a pokemon, what is made better? What is made permissible?
Now, I’m not just talking about talking about physical animals, or anything strictly belonging to Kingdom Animalia. That explains away, it doesn’t engender analysis.
While humans are of course animal themselves, we understand ourselves as a species and as an entity through our comparative distinction with the rest of animal kind. So much philosophy has been dedicated to answering the question “what makes humans different?”
Now — this comparative path to understanding is not entirely universal, nor is it self-evident. It’s a very broad take of a Western approach. An approach that’s been hoisted on many cultures, and instantiated the world over. It’s not more valuable than any other, but due to history of cultural conquest, it’s particularly global.
Either way, it’s clear that animals are soaked with social meaning, and are involved in human lives totally. Even when their presence isn’t physical; the metaphors we use to communicate are loaded with ideas, visions, and concepts of various non-human animals.
So what happens when animals begin to disappear from our lives altogether?
Greater Distances
Satoshi Tajiri is responsible for the core conceit of the Pokemon franchise. When he was a kid, he’d wander around the woods near his home, catching Rhinoceros beetles, collecting them, and making them fight other people’s beetles.
(Sidenote: Bizarre and unethical as this may sound, beetlefights are generally not injurious to the creatures — being closer to snail races than deathmatches.)
Tajiri felt that the opportunity to go out and explore wilderness was disappearing. With increasing urbanization, kids wouldn’t have the experience of gamified bug-catching.
In short, Tajiri’s mission statement was to revive and conserve (and somewhat exaggerate) a kind of relationship to the animal. The disappearing animal in the disappearing forests.
In truth, the animal had been disappearing for much longer. Since the industrial-capital revolution, animals have had less of a physical presence in our lives.
Enter John Berger. We’ll be talking about him quite extensively.
He wrote incisively about this distancing in his 1980 work “About Looking”. Where before the physical animal signaled threat, mysticism, livestock, and livelihood, they have since become abstract. Thrown into a “physical marginalization” they are made distant. Yet, as Berger notes, “The animals of the mind cannot be so easily dispersed.”
Berger suggests a sort of duality that comes about in this dispersal: animals in Western thought are made into either pets, or spectacle.
Pets are those animals who are dependent on us for survival. They have been folded into near-human status, affectionate or not, we care for them as companions. Where once animal life ran parallel to human life, pet life is that of its owner. We project on them a kind of agency and thought that would normally be assigned to fellow people, but in doing so, lose their authentic wildness.
On the other hand, Animals as spectacle are those animals that are truly, authentically wild. The problem, as Berger notes, is that these imaginings of wild animal are near fictional. Through machinations of film and account, we attempt to capture their true liveliness, but usually end up making fictions of our own to spectacularize their majesty. At what point does this idealization become completely separate from the animal’s reality?
Following that, are Pokemon spectacle? Or are they pets?
Let’s put a pin in that question and go to the zoo.
Performing Spectacle
The discussion of animal-human distance leads to an interesting institution for Berger: The Zoo.
He describes the zoo as a multi-purpose site.
On one hand, zoos exist to flaunt colonial wealth. Of course, not to be seen as crude, there’s the justification: socialized edutainment for the unwashed masses! This secondary purpose, Berger points out, is that of an attempted consolidation: caging an animal with hopes to display its true nature. To attain spectacle, and a satisfying experience of the true animal.
But, by removing the animal from its context, it can’t be a true animal. The spectacle that was paid for — the vicious hunt, the powerful stampede, is absent. The animal will not perform for us our expectations.
They will eat kibble and sleep.
But despite this gulf of expectations, we still try to show our kids the wonder of nature, hoping that the zoo will be the experience parents don’t get anymore.
More than anyone’s let down with the zoo, Berger notes that kids get it the worst. You’ll hear them asking their parents why the tiger’s sleeping or the lizard is hiding. You’ll see them banging on the glass in hopes of eliciting a reaction — any reaction.
Why kids though? Obviously, children are less likely to temper expectations — but their expectations may far outstrip our own.
Children are surrounded with images and tales of the animal. In almost every cultural artifact offered to young folk, animals are front and centre. Toys, movies, picture book allegories, games, you name it, and somehow there’s a frog playing baseball or something.
Funnily enough, this particular themeing of childhood began around the industrial revolution, first with the children of the upper class, and then the rest as time went on. We try so hard to keep the animal in the imaginary of the child as the possibility of the animal fades from our lives.
Pokemon, in a manner of form, was an inevitable hit. Pokemon couldn’t be as viral if it were about robots, or human characters — perhaps this is why Medabots and Digimon were beat out in the end: Pokemon speaks the animist language of colonial youth media.
But that’s not the end of it — I don’t think pokemon would have had the same success if it had been introduced in the sixties or seventies.
To elaborate, let me offer two amendments to Berger’s schema. The first mainly addresses the timeline, while the second recentralizes colonialism in how we see dominion over nature.
PART 3: NEOLIBERAL ANIMALS, OLD EMPIRES
Berger’s analysis was largely concerned with the Britain of the 60’s and 70’s — a pre-neoliberalist economy with somewhat socialist tendencies. All that was about to change.
Today, zoos are run far more like private ventures. The barrier of entry can be costly. The time they require is seen as an anomaly to those who don’t occupy wealth. In many cases, they are rendered totally inaccessible.
So what happens when a child doesn’t even have a disappointing point of reference to the animal?
The animal has been so far removed that the animal of the mind serves as the clearest image. At some point, the depictions of animals are all we have going — with no reason to doubt the delusion.
Furthermore, with the physical touchstones of animals gone, there’s reason little to anchor depictions to reality. For the children of Neoliberalism, the dragon is just as real as the giraffe.
The animals we see on BBC nature documentaries are, for all intents and purposes, just as real as those in Jurassic Park. They are fed to us by the same screen and authority.
In the meantime, we may still have pets — those animals that are more human than animal. Even then, the prospect of pets may become distant. While global pet ownership has tripled since the 1970s, the amount of American households with cats and dogs has been shrinking since 2007. With smaller apartments and growing wealth disparity, pets may become somewhat unattainable. In a way, the pet-human relationship may be the only interaction a child may be able to access and comprehend.
At the end of the day, the beast may as well be fictional, and the only animal-human relationship we now know is that of pet and master.
But regular pets are boring.
Continuing Colonialism
On the topic of power — my second amendment to Berger’s chapter is just an underscoring of how zoos remain institutions of euro-colonial prestige, and establish our understanding of nature.
The enlightenment idea of the zoo of course, sounds familiar. Great beasts from faroff lands, conquered by the million arms of the Queen’s great Empire. Each captured species, a badge of victory — much like a hunter’s trophy room. Yet, in lieu of bloodthirst, the pursuit of knowledge drives the itemizing of the world.
Functionally, public participation in institutions like the Zoo is secondary. Priority was initially to lead the way in both extent of empire, and to power the empires scientific prowess. Animals, dead or alive, are both trophies of rule and resources for scientific advancement.
And, like any hoarder, there’s the claim to value. A full collection will be priceless to the sciences. And what great empire should lead the world of rationale?
And yes, that the notion of an advanced, imperial civilization is not at all innocent.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “advancedness” was on a sliding scale from savage to scientific. In a circular logic, it could justify the conquest of a land and its inhabitants, claiming a weird paternity while it steals the resources to do more of the same. An “advanced” human (read: wealthy white European) was fundamentally more deserving of all of life and nature than a human labeled “savage”. Aside: guess who was doing the labeling?
And things could get really bad when certain people are literally dehumanized. If you’re not familiar with the history of human zoos, please familiarize yourself with the life of Ota Benga.
Today, these institutions don’t function actively, but have a passive legacy in reminding people why London’s Zoo is a mark of pride. European knowledge of nature justifies European claim to nature. European claim to nature excludes indigenous right to their land, and turns all nature into fuel for the empire. What’s left is a two-pronged imprint of ideas:
“White European people have right to nature because they know more about it” and, following the logic: “the superiority of civilized, white Europeans is justified and self-evident. Look at how good our zoo is! Look how much we learned while you were sitting around dying of the pox we gave you!”
The stories of fulfilling this dream are massively romanticized to this day. To find new creatures, to shape science — to prove we can still do it. After all, Bigfoot’s still out there.
I’m not suggesting that something like Pokemon plays a part in white supremacy. But the way you frame human entitlement to nature may serve to paint hundreds of years of colonialism as a natural, justified thing.
Your mission of reaping information through the hunt smacks familiar. The Pokedex is your checklist, and a completed ‘Dex is a point of pride. Look how much you’ve taken.
Between the loss of the physical animal, and the lingering colonial mission, there is a cultural hunger for colonial fantasies of the animal. To continue colonizing, expanding the empire. To explore new lands and rediscover the beast — not to hunt it, per se. After all, wouldn’t it be cooler if they could be our pets?
PART 4: PERFECT TIMING
If there was a kind of tension between Bergerian animals as pets and spectacle, of colonial power and self-evident-facts, they were all but conflated by the early 90’s.
Banished into fiction and abstracted into “common sense”, the colonial flexing over exotic beasts is a reminder of Western-cum-Capitalist superiority — but without the problems of the actual animal.
Pokemon appeals to a very colonial vision of nature. It satisfies the vague neoliberal discrepancy between spectacle-animal and pet-animal, and allows for continued imperial expansion in a newly-replenished wilderness.
Pokemon are wild creatures captured, but instantly made loyal pets. The doors of domesticity are opened forever by technology. The pokeball brings the animal into guaranteed human companionship.
However, the creature’s animalhood is not lost. Through ferocious battle, pokemon are able to flex their spectacle. The wolf does not become the Chihuahua, it remains a wolf — but a wolf in our service. It is harmless to us without the need to sully its animalhood by defanging the proud beast.
All throughout, humans remain in power. In control. We are the captors, and we are the masters. Our index of species is tallied and enviable.
The colonization of the animal kingdom, made subject through human superiority, is as spectacular and satisfying as it needs to be. Pokemon is a colonial fantasy that paints us the perfect animal for the remnants of a rotten ideology.
To better shape the edges of this form, I’d like to sharpen focus by comparing Pokemon and a thematically similar franchise: Monster Hunter.
Monster V Monster
In January of 2018, Waypoint’s Austin Walker traced very similar colonial trajectories in his review of Monster Hunter: World. He wrote of scale, and of spectacle. He wrote of the believable vitality of the creatures he was hunting.
And their believable injury. And their believable succumbing.
Conquered creatures turned resources. Resources for more hunts. Ad infinitum.
Walker also touches upon this colonial feel of the game:
“For as long as the modern West has colonized…it has reduced the lands in its margins to hunting grounds. Distant regions are places where bounty can be gained, both literal and metaphorical…”
Monster hunter surely plays to that new colonial fantasy — of venturing out and subduing animals — real animals. Yet, like Walker mentioned, they are animals of pure spectacle. The monster’s death is bittersweet, as the reality and regret of death kicks in.
The Palico is testament to Monster Hunter’s position. The one animal we can fold into companionship is no great dragon. In fact, the animal-as-pet is really just that — a common domestic cat. In a way, the Palico has become even more human — talking and bipedal, it is as far away from “beast” as you can get. The ideal pet. Almost human, but clearly subservient, Meowster.
There are elements of the Monster Hunter franchise, such as the anime, that attempt to consolidate the pet/spectacle division like pokemon do. But the core of Monster Hunter is successful because it happily reinforces that distinction.
However, Pokemon is more successful, I think, because it sells a solution for that distinction. While Monster Hunter is clearly a colonial fantasy, it appeals to a very twentieth century duality of the animal — oft leading to a classic kind of violence toward it. This rawness could, like in Austin’s case, invite pangs of (dare I say it) ethical reflection.
All the while, Pokemon plainly recreates animalhood from the bottom up to better fit colonial fantasy: willing, spectacular, subservient.
So what conclusions can we draw? Pokemon’s particular appeal comes from a number of distinctly colonial factors.
Do I think this was intentional? Not necessarily. Satoshi Tajiri was pretty smart for nailing a fascination and pastime in a synthesized, interactive format. And it’s a tricky thing — when certain ideologies are so engrained in a culture, it’s not really worth blaming folks for finding historically problematic aesthetics alluring.
One thing that should also be addressed — while Japan itself was obviously amongst the colonized, part of the efficacy of Western empiricism was the hegemony it instilled. In order for it to work, those being colonized have to be conditioned to believe it’s justified.
Is everyone blameless? Frankly, I think that Pokemon helps to reinforce an unhealthy idealization of animals and nature — folding the natural world into potential subservience.
Pokemon are to colonialism what the Stepford Wives are to Patriarchy.
PART 5: MONEY TO BE MADE
There’s no escaping the fact that people are profiting off of this.
Pokemon is a big company. Game Freak may be an independent studio, but the franchise beats the tar out of most other, much older media universes.
Profiting off a franchise with ethically fishy consequences is of course, a bit questionable. The Pokemon Company remains both outwardly quiet on the possible repercussions of the artistic work it sells, while being tremendously thorough with the portrayal of pokemon internally. Have another look at these style guides -The Pokemon Company absolutely cares about the particulars of their image.
If you play the core series of games, or watch the anime, often there are overarching messages of “working together as equals”, or “protecting the environment to live in harmony.” Or my personal favourite: “don’t abuse the yellow mouse, it’s bad”.
The bar is set pretty low — these are all fairly common sense moral lessons. Even when Pokemon attempted to breach the “dogfighting” aesthetic concern in Pokemon Black and White versions, the addressing fell flat.
Spoilers: at end of the narrative, the PETA stand in, Team Plasma, ended up kind of David-Caging the whole issue into a dark conspiracy:
“Now that the stage is set, we can seize people’s minds and hearts...We and only we will use Pokémon, and we shall rule the powerless populace!... I’ve kept my silence so no one could piece together what I planned.”
In other words, “Pokemon welfare? Pah, it was all a ruse! We’re actually just power hungry!”
Oh. Ethical conundrum solved I guess.
So far, through my time with the franchise, I don’t feel like I’ve ever got anything more than vacuous lip service about what The Pokemon Company can do for the world.
I couldn’t think of a time where The Pokemon Company ever did anything philanthropic or humanitarian. Do they have to? No, they’re a for-profit company. They can be as greedy as they want.
But their continuing claim to “apolitical” fuzzy platitudes while being bigger than Mickey Mouse is frustrating.
Consider the introduction of Pokemon Go, which I think was a tipping point of sorts. Despite the short-sightedness and under-staffing of Niantic, Pokemon was mapped on to the world. It collided with every day life in a global way. And really, neither Niantic nor the Pokemon Company had anything to offer. Shoulder shrugging, mostly — a kind of “oh, yeah, I guess we’re really popular” with a furious dismissal of any kind of responsibility.
And that’s when I realized that the franchise, as massive and ethically complex as it is, gives back nothing. It’s a clear failure of the company.
In my undergrad I once came across an interesting article. It was written early in the franchises history, and talked about how knowledge of pokemon creatures help school kids to better grasp complex environmental relations of pollution.
It started to occur to me that pokemon could play a bigger role in addressing the very problems that inspired its conception. I’m not much for private funded projects, but like, a Pokemon charity that gives money to animal sanctuaries, environment conservation, or even intentionally raising awareness of threatened species would be a satisfying-enough answer.
It just strikes me as a good business move to cover your bases. A tiny dent in massive profits could be enough to start a scapegoat project. A program to point to when someone asks what you’re doing for the world.
I mean, the only reason I can see why The Pokemon Company doesn’t instate a program like that is, well… it might not be kosher with the style guide.
If pokemon being seen as animals threatens the “apoliticalness” of the franchise, explicitly anchoring the fantasy creatures to real animals in any way would be well - taboo.
There are obviously implicit parallels between most of the Pokemon franchise and the animals of the real world. But until a public-facing member of staff says “This is Yungoos. It is based on the Mongoose”, the company has an out.
I’ve seen interview after interview of people like Junichi Masuda (longtime Producer and Director of the games) saying things like “while they might bear similarities to animals, Pokemon are not animals in any way.” And with a totally straight face. It’s infuriating.
When Charlie Hall of Polygon was interviewing The Division 2’s creative director, the director danced the same dance. Insisting that a post-revolution Washington D.C. was not a political context, he smiled, played the fool, and moved on. It’s totally bonkers, but Pokemon’s been doing it for ages now.
This head-in-the-sand approach serves them well, frankly. No actions need defending. The writers can patch things up in obscure video game lore bit-by-bit. If you pay attention, you see the hairy parts of Pokemon slowly be retconned in the games: the PC isn’t just a box, it’s a resort! It’s not a pokemon egg, it’s a magical egg-shaped cradle!!
The company has no responsibility to the world it makes billions from. It has no responsibility to the dubious colonial way it frames nature.
Owning up seems anathema to the world of Pokemon.
Doing Better
I don’t really want to chant “No ethical consumption under late capitalism” forever. Video games are also an art — careful and considered, and made with a clear love and passion for the possibility of something else. A nicer world. A more cooperative society.
But art is fundamentally political — and conversations will be had about its place in the world.
I wish pokemon was more art than product. I wish the concept of pokemon could be framed in an active, positive context. Instead, to keep forever profitable and inoffensive, they remain passive — ignoring criticisms and doing no good.
The most recent core installments — Pokemon Sun and Moon, featured indigenous Hawaiian culture with no efforts to bring attention to real-life historical persecution. It could have been the perfect jumping off point to discuss how nature and culture aren’t for the imperial taking. Or alternatively, how to move forward while making things better for victims of colonization. They’ve breached harsher topics before — those of war and extremism.
To be honest, I’m still hopeful that Pokemon can offer moments of reflection. In Sun and Moon, the same games where they absolutely screw the pooch regarding indigenous struggles, there’s a rare moment of lucidity.
It’s the climax of the game. You, and your friend Lillie, have chased Lillie’s corporate, delusional mother into an alien “Ultra Space” dimension. The mother, Lusamine, sits unaffected with her new child, the alien and powerful Nihilego.
The timid Lillie bravely confronts her estranged mother. They argue — Lillie expressing frustration that her mother treated her like an object. Treats pokemon like objects. “We are not things for you to collect!” she yells.
Lusamine responds: “How am I different from any Pokemon Trainer like your little ‘friend’ there? What do you do with a pokemon you can’t use? You remove it from your party, as you please.”
There’s hints, if not promises, to do better. The writers and localizers may not have a great amount of sway here, but they can help to tilt the core tenets of the franchise to a more reflexive, constructive place.
If pokemon isn’t going to be a good business, then I hope, maybe one day, it tries for a good artistic statement.
