redwoodalchan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
redwoodalchan) wrote2013-06-22 10:32 am
redwoodalchan) wrote2013-06-22 10:32 am
Entry tags:
Revisiting Grings Kodai
In which I take another look at the villain of the 13th Pokemon movie. For those of you not in the know, Grings Kodai is a successful businessman who's arguably the evilest character ever to appear in the anime (only certain game villains are worse).
For those of you who follow my sporkings over on Das Sporking, he's also the guy featured in my "Do Not Want" icon.
And since I am utterly failing to come up with any decent fanfic ideas for him, instead I'll just share my latest revelation about the character.
See, most people who see the 13th Pokemon movie absolutely hate this guy. He has his fans (such as myself) but they're very much in the minority, and I, at least, like him more for what he could have been than for what the movie actually gave us. When I first saw the movie, I wrote him off as being so unabashedly, unapologetically, thoughtlessly evil that he couldn't possibly be real. But now that time has passed and I've become a bit older and wiser, I suspect that the opposite is true: people hate Kodai because he is realistic (by Pokevillain standards, anyway).
Most villains in Pokemon, across all media, seem to just be crazy people who go around causing trouble either for fun or power (generally), or else in the name of some sort of lofty ideals. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's basically the deal. Kodai, though, works rather differently. He's a businessman, who will do anything to hold onto and increase his money and power, even if it means wrecking the environment, scapegoating and torturing innocent pokemon, and threatening children. All of which, if you get right down to it, sounds rather a lot like what shady business leaders at companies like Monsanto or BP do in the real world. And much like real-world companies, Kodai is able to get away with his bad behavior by presenting a good face to the public and keeping most of what really goes into his operations out of their eyes--something which is rarely attempted by Pokemon villains and generally very easy to see through even if they do try it (to be fair, it's easy to see through Kodai's schemes too, but that's largely because the audience has prior knowledge of how evil he is).
It's long been my opinion that Pokemon is actually surprisingly astute about pointing out societal evils--the Hoenn games basically predicted the effects of global climate change even before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out, for example. And what does the Pokemon anime do several years after the fact? It makes a movie in which the bad guy is a relatively realistic corrupt corporate executive (albeit one with a more supernatural slant) and basically focuses on what a complete monster he is. Granted, I'm not quite sure how much of this is deliberate. All the same, one thing we can say with reasonable certainty is that people generally do not like it when people act like Kodai.
Now, if only they knew how common his behavior was....
For those of you who follow my sporkings over on Das Sporking, he's also the guy featured in my "Do Not Want" icon.
And since I am utterly failing to come up with any decent fanfic ideas for him, instead I'll just share my latest revelation about the character.
See, most people who see the 13th Pokemon movie absolutely hate this guy. He has his fans (such as myself) but they're very much in the minority, and I, at least, like him more for what he could have been than for what the movie actually gave us. When I first saw the movie, I wrote him off as being so unabashedly, unapologetically, thoughtlessly evil that he couldn't possibly be real. But now that time has passed and I've become a bit older and wiser, I suspect that the opposite is true: people hate Kodai because he is realistic (by Pokevillain standards, anyway).
Most villains in Pokemon, across all media, seem to just be crazy people who go around causing trouble either for fun or power (generally), or else in the name of some sort of lofty ideals. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's basically the deal. Kodai, though, works rather differently. He's a businessman, who will do anything to hold onto and increase his money and power, even if it means wrecking the environment, scapegoating and torturing innocent pokemon, and threatening children. All of which, if you get right down to it, sounds rather a lot like what shady business leaders at companies like Monsanto or BP do in the real world. And much like real-world companies, Kodai is able to get away with his bad behavior by presenting a good face to the public and keeping most of what really goes into his operations out of their eyes--something which is rarely attempted by Pokemon villains and generally very easy to see through even if they do try it (to be fair, it's easy to see through Kodai's schemes too, but that's largely because the audience has prior knowledge of how evil he is).
It's long been my opinion that Pokemon is actually surprisingly astute about pointing out societal evils--the Hoenn games basically predicted the effects of global climate change even before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out, for example. And what does the Pokemon anime do several years after the fact? It makes a movie in which the bad guy is a relatively realistic corrupt corporate executive (albeit one with a more supernatural slant) and basically focuses on what a complete monster he is. Granted, I'm not quite sure how much of this is deliberate. All the same, one thing we can say with reasonable certainty is that people generally do not like it when people act like Kodai.
Now, if only they knew how common his behavior was....