It’s just come to the attention of the general community that The Pokémon Company has a job posting for a Director of DEI. This has resulted in concern that Pokémon has become the latest to fall prey to the woke ideology.

While it’s true that this is an unsettling development, I’m not as worried as others seem to be, for reasons that I’ll go into.

But first, I’ll go over why my fellow Pokémon fans are understandably concerned.

Wokeness degrades everything it touches. It’s concerned with the ideology rather than the quality of the product. Where it infiltrates, tokenism and virtue signaling become the order of the day. The usual consequences involve the quality of the product suffering, investors losing out on stock value, and in many cases, sales tank because customers disagree with the implementation of political ideology in a product that was otherwise less divisive.

So, if The Pokémon Company is looking for a DEI director, does that mean that Pokémon is falling to woke?

While this development is far from welcome, and may call for action on the part of the community, it does not mean that Pokémon is already a lost cause, as some might make it out to be.

For one thing, The Pokémon Company are not the main developers of the core Pokémon games. That would be GameFreak.

You might remember that Nippon Ichi Software America (NISA) was among the first companies to jump onto the anti-GamerGate bandwagon when game journalists initiated their slander campaign against gamers upset about the state of games journalism. One might imagine that Nippon Ichi Software (NIS) games turned SJW as a consequence.

But they didn’t. And here’s why: NISA doesn’t develop games. NISA is a localization company. The games were still made by NIS in Japan. The worst NISA could do is make changes to the original product in such a way which constitutes censorship, which one could get around by getting the Japanese originals and playing the games in their original languages. Whether NISA censors the games they localized or not, they must recognize that to do so would risk alienating their core audience of JRPG purists. And, as it so happens, NISA’s censorship has been minimal, if at all existent. The main issue with NISA is whether they can localize a DLC package without turning it into a buggy mess.

Knowing this, consider the fact that The Pokémon Company, which is largely a merchandising and localization company, is looking for a DEI officer. There wouldn’t be much expectation that such a person, if hired, could do much to damage the brand.

Now, I know that some might present the picture of the jacked woman from Scarlet and Violet as evidence that Pokémon has already been going the woke route:

Oh, hold on… That screen was from Pokémon Colosseum, released in 2003 (2004 in Japan and Europe). Here’s the one from Scarlet and Violet:

Aside from the fact that this is an obvious example of the cherry-picking fallacy, as there are many NPCs in SV that have many body types (the female protagonist is standing right there), it also overlooks that sometimes comically jacked characters are used for irony, particularly when they’re women. It’s also nothing new that sometimes ambiguous characters are used for humor, and for some reason, we’ve all collectively decided to overlook it when it was employed in FFVII and its remake.

Having said that, the fact that The Pokémon Company is seeking a DEI director at all is concerning. But there’s another side to this that’s not being understood: that the posting isn’t new. It was only recently discovered by the general community. Unless I’ve been misinformed, the posting is years old. Thus, the position hasn’t been filled, perhaps because The Pokémon Company wasn’t actually serious about filling it. What’s more, the posting was packed with buzzwords.

When you consider this, what it looks like to me is that the posting was formed to fill out some arbitrary checkboxes to satisfy some unsavory consultants, rather than a sincere desire to pay someone $200,000 a year to destroy a brand and piss off investors.

I know that taking a moment to look at a matter rationally might not be as fun as rushing out in some indignant rage, but it’s important that we understand the reality of the matter, so we can make more strategic moves.

Still, I know that some might see the posting, and feel tempted to flood it with joke applications and résumé’s. To this I say, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Now, if you want to reach out to someone who is in an official capacity to express your concern, the best way to go about this is to make your concerns known to the Japanese company, GameFreak. While you can try to reach out to Nintendo of America or The Pokémon Company, because they are largely merchandising and localization companies, they wouldn’t have much say over how their respective parent companies are run. Basically, it’s companies like Nintendo of Japan and GameFreak that hold sway in how the products are made, and the direction that their respective merchandising companies go in.

When writing to a company in Japan, it helps to know that the culture is way different. The Japanese are far more likely to respond to respect. If you come off as entitled or condescending, they’re not likely to listen to you. Also, it might not hurt to run your message through a translator to get your message in the Japanese language. There may be someone there who can read your message in your own language, but it’s less likely. Perhaps include a disclaimer that Japanese isn’t your first language.

Woke is coming for the things that we consider fun. It may be late in the game, considering the effectiveness of the boycotts against Bud Light and, more recently, Planet Fitness. Still, we can’t let the woke mind virus destroy the things we love. Even if the tide is turning in our favor, we can’t let up in fighting back.