Intelligent Design
This week saw a For Our Consideration op-ed from William Hughes about the bitter battles and unexpected camaraderie of Pokémon Go. A local church played a prominent role in the essay, because it just so happens to also be a Pokémon gym, a crossover that seems to be more common than one would think especially when considering the emphasis these games put on “evolution.” But as El Santo points out Pokémon evolution isn’t exactly evolution:
The weird thing is, the way it’s portrayed, it really doesn’t seem like evolution at all. The starter Pokémon always look like babies, and the later evolutions always look like adult versions. So they can always go around it by saying that it’s more like they’re further down their natural life cycle. Shoot, the bug Pokémon go from caterpillars to cocoons to a winged insect. That’s not how evolution works.
And in a mammoth post, Pgoodso tried to explain this strange semantic choice:
There’s actually lots of speculation as to exactly why the Pokémon “evolve” instead of a more apt term like “transform” or “metamorphose.”
The origin of the game itself comes from the lead developer’s insect-collecting hobby, so he obviously had metamorphosis in mind when developing the game. However, the Japanese term for what, say, a butterfly does as it matures, is “dappi,” which indicates a shedding of the skin or molting. It is apt for insects, but isn’t exactly a clear description of what the non-insect Pokémon do. Charmeleon isn’t a pupa or chrysalis stage between Charmander and Charizard, or a Charmander shedding a carapace. It’s seemingly an immature or pubescent stage in a continual maturation process.
Another Japanese word for metamorphosis or transformation is “henshin.” Now, “henshin” is also the term used for what certain Rangers who are Mighty and have Power do, as well as certain robots in disguise. So it’s possible the writers of Pokémon decided “shinka,” which means evolution or progress, would be better suited and more apt for transforming animals, as well as less likely to get them sued or, at least, less likely to relate the Pokémon to superheroes and shape-shifting robots.
The best word for metamorphosis, which more specifically refers to the insect life cycle changes we would ascribe that word to in biology is actually “hentai,” which, literally translated, doesn’t mean “pervert” or “pornographic anime” but “body change,” with a connotation of mystery, ickyness, or weirdness. Obviously that word has come to have many other connotations in and out of Japan the developers might have wanted to avoid, even if it was used in the proper context. So again, shinka/evolution may have just worked out better for all involved.
One much more mundane possibility is that it could be down to file size. Pokémon was one of the most data-packed cartridges ever produced for the Game Boy. Due to the limited space, there wasn’t any room for a direct translation of the Japanese script of the game because of how much more information is communicated in a single written kanji character than in an English letter. “Metamorphosis” is 13 characters long in English and, no matter which word you actually use, is just two characters long in Japanese.
So the entire text had to be rewritten in English in much smaller and/or simpler terms. As such, it’s entirely possible that the reason the word “shinka”/“evolution” was used instead of “hentai”/“metamorphosis” or “henshin”/“transformation” was because, quite literally, those few additional letters in the English version of the game could have either hit the limit on the cartridge’s RAM or ran off the edge of the screen. You can see the other effects of the limited space in the variable way the text will either spell out numbers or just use their single characters (sometimes “one,” sometimes “1”), as well as the removal of spaces in certain phrases: Squirtle is described as a “tinyturtle” in the Pokédex, for example. They were looking to shrink words and concepts in as many places as possible, so “evolution” may not be an inaptly used concept, typo, or mistranslation but a simple tightening of the editorial belt.