Joseph Earl Thomas at the VQR:
Ask your kids, or some nerd born in the ’80s, about a Pikachu and slip into a twenty-minute explainer suffused with a network of interlocking songs, toys, anime, games, plushies, and manga, each of which makes no sense on its own.
“Isn’t Pikachu a squirrel?” my kid asked me recently. “Ain’t he?”
“I think he’s a rat,” I corrected him.
“Electric-mouse-type Pokémon,” my daughter clarified. “Skwovet is a squirrel.”
The semiotic density that these figures have accumulated since their absorption into mainstream culture is hard to overstate: An eight-foot-tall Pikachu poses for photos with strangers on a Tuesday in Oaxaca’s zocalo, dodges riot police in Turkish protest footage, and is the fulcrum to one of Vince Staples’s best bars (“Death row till they put you in the Pikachu to fry”). They’ve blended into rap music and contemporary literature to the point of inseparability, such that, without them, there is no full accounting of today’s tomorrow.
more here.
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