N

All life begins in darkness. Our lives are spent searching for light, working towards our own truths and happiness. But in the story of our lives, of which we are our own main character, there is always a supporting cast. Some cast members are fleeting, appearing for the equivalent of less than a page. Others become long-term deuteragonists who support us throughout numerous chapters of our journeys. Others still will stand in our way as antagonists. Each of these cast members is connected in a complex web, like hexagons all aligned, each playing their own crucial part in shaping our stories.

N’s journey brings him into contact with many different characters, all of whom serve a different role. The formulas of the Pokémon world provide it with the structure it so enjoys. It’s easiest to box characters into archetypes: rival, Gym Leader, Champion, villain, generic Trainer. But N is complex; much like most people, he can’t be boxed into just one category. He is just as much a rival as he is a villain and even Champion.

But what makes N any of these things? Certain Pokémon series archetypes are easy to recognize thanks to Trainer classes: the Champion title only goes to the game’s Champion, while villains get labelled with their team’s name in some way. But how does Pokémon distinguish rivals? In practicality, “rival” is a story-based title more than anything. As such, when not relying on non-main series media for clarification, who is and isn’t a rival can, in fact, be argued. There is no “Rival” Trainer class, with most characters that fans consider—and outside sources confirm—to be rivals using the class “Pokémon Trainer.” Even more interestingly, in the first two generations of Pokémon games, rivals Blue and Silver had no Trainer classes at all. Blue doesn’t even get a class when he battles as the Pokémon League “champion”—which, in generation one, wasn’t even a proper noun yet.

Despite this, the rival as an archetype comes from the very first generation. Prof. Oak describes Blue as “your rival since you were a baby,” and Blue reciprocates the sentiment by calling the player his “rival” at the Pokémon League. In generation two, Silver exhibited some similar traits as Blue, including an antagonistic attitude and picking a starter Pokémon with a type advantage against your own. Although he never becomes a Champion the way Blue does, their similarities, plus the repeated mechanical purpose of frequent battling, made it clear that rivals would be a recurring part of the Pokémon series formula.

But generation three shook things up. Not only are there two rivals, but neither Wally nor Brendan or May, depending on the player’s chosen gender, is antagonistic towards the player. Wally also doesn’t choose a starter Pokémon based on the player’s, instead catching a Ralts in the wild. Brendan and May, who do pick a starter advantageous to your own, don’t battle you enough times throughout the game for it to fully evolve. Despite this, it took the fandom at large until generation three’s remakes to finally agree that Wally, who battles the player outside the Pokémon League, is just as much a “primary rival” as Brendan or May, who even in Emerald don’t challenge the player past Lilycove City.

Generation four’s return to basics with Barry, who fights you frequently with a fairly formidable team, still isn’t one-to-one with the series’s first two rivals. Barry’s character is quite competitive, but he’s hardly antagonistic the way Blue and especially Silver are. These examples indicate that, even prior to Black and White, the rival archetype wasn’t strictly bound by personality or even starter Pokémon. The only consistency they share is in their “purpose:” to serve as a routine opponent throughout their games with some amount of competitive edge.

As a result, it’s easy to consider N as one of your rivals in Black and White, even without consulting outside material such as Pokémon Masters EX. N’s role as rival may be obfuscated by his emphasis on leading Team Plasma, but he does fit elements of the archetype all the same.

N’s status as a rival is also enhanced when examined in comparison to the player’s other rivals. At first glance, he seems to have more in common with Cheren than Bianca: both Cheren and N are skilled Trainers aiming for the position of Champion. Where they differ is in their purpose: Cheren doesn’t have a reason to want to become Champion other than for the title, which represents ultimate strength. N wishes to become Champion to attain the ethos that will help him convince others to free their Pokémon.

In this relationship, Cheren is the black to N’s white: Cheren is entirely stuck in the past, when Pokémon games were about fulfilling obligations. Players are obligated to become the Champion because the games are obligated to have Gym Leaders and a championship bout at the end. As a result, Cheren doesn’t know what he’s fighting for. It’s compulsory for him to seek the title of Champion, but that also likens it to nothing more than a chore.

N, on the other hand, is trying to move towards the future—a future where things are different. But there’s only so far he can realistically go in the confines of the Pokémon world: it would be nice if the games could expand beyond the “Catch Pokémon, Battle Gym, Battle Champion” formula, but to separate people and Pokémon altogether would be to end the franchise entirely. Even the Mystery Dungeon crossover games, with casts comprising of only Pokémon, make reference to Trainers, which some Pokémon themselves once were. People, Trainers or not, are the yin to Pokémon’s yang—you simply cannot have one without the other.

You also can’t have a Pokémon game without music. Cheren’s encounter theme song is “Cheren’s Theme.” This is very standard titling from Pokémon‘s past into its present. Games with only one rival, or a rival who can be named freely, will usually opt for some variation of the title “Rival Encounter” or even just “Rival.” Games with multiple rivals will title their encounter themes after their name. Rivals are very special characters, and the music tied to them is equally so, even if their titles don’t reflect that. “Cheren’s Theme” is an upbeat banger with flashy staccato that feels fitting for someone who is serious, but not so aloof as to be entirely distanced from you. It has a bite to it, similar to the songs for more traditional rival characters, such as generation four’s “Rival,” or the songs titled “A Rival Appears” in both generations one and two.

Villains usually get the same titling treatment for their encounter songs, such as “Guzma’s Theme” in generation seven and “Leader’s Theme” shared by both Maxie and Archie in generation three. Although it seems logical that N, who is both a villain and a rival, would follow suit with both standards, he instead, like much of Black and White, deviates from the norm: N’s encounter theme is titled “Prisoner to a Formula.” Just as Cheren finds N’s rapid speech—and the Pokémon liberation he speaks about—strange during their first encounter, “Prisoner to a Formula” is also strange. It’s a waltz with a music box-like melody drifting atop whimsical pizzicato strings and an oboe. There’s undoubtedly a sense of innocence, even whimsy, emanating from “Prisoner to a Formula,” but it’s not entirely civil, either. It, too, has a bite to it like “Cheren’s Theme,” a sense of conflict brewing just underneath the surface. The sense of conflict stems from the formulas of the Pokémon world, which dictate that this encounter theme plays before you and N face off in battle.

N doesn’t hide his fascination with formulas from the player. In Chargestone Cave, he muses that “Formulas express electricity and its connection to Pokémon… If people did not exist, this would be an ideal place.” He also believes that there is an “equation that will change the world,” and by the time his castle rises at the end of the games, he believes he has solved it. But how can someone be a “prisoner” to something they love? As it turns out, quite easily.

“I have a future I must change,” N claims. Without even consciously thinking about it, we all know what the future holds: in Black and White‘s future, N will be defeated, and Pokémon and people will remain together so long as there are additional Pokémon games to be made.

N’s dialogue in Nimbasa City references this singular future, first with N admitting that, “Perhaps I can’t beat you here and now, but I’ll battle you to buy time…” As the inevitable battle that follows begins to wind down and N’s defeat is imminent, he thinks out loud, “Even if I lose, is it different from the future I saw?” And as his final Pokémon falls, he confirms that, no, it wasn’t any different: “The result was the same…” From the start, N recognizes that he must lose in order for the story to progress—something Cheren and even the less battle-focused Bianca struggle to accept at first. And the story’s progression is the only way N may move closer to achieving his goal.

Pokémon characters frequently bounce back from loss. In Red and Blue alone, repeatedly beating your rival Blue has no bearing on his superiority complex. He even calls himself “the most powerful Trainer in the world” when he defeats Lance, even though it should be obvious by then—after losing to you six or seven times already—that he really isn’t the strongest even on a good day. Team Rocket’s Boss Giovanni also doesn’t stay down after his trouncing in the Rocket Hideout and Silph Co.; it’s only after beating him in the Viridian City Gym that he disbands Team Rocket. Other team bosses throughout the series behave similarly, only giving up after being defeated at their highest point, even though, to the player, it’s obvious that they will fall eventually. Each of the battles against them serve as steps to solve the formula of completing the game at hand. The variables that go into these equations are the Pokémon on your team—but regardless of the variables in question, the result is the same.

N understands that it’s okay to lose some battles along the way to his goal of dethroning the Champion. But just because he recognizes the inevitability—the requirement—of loss doesn’t make matters any better for him. N is, in the end, a prisoner to the formulas of the Pokémon world. No matter how pure his ideals or what truths he’s built them on, he, as both a rival and the game’s antagonist, can never truly succeed. No matter what variables you put in, there is only one possible solution to Pokémon‘s equation, and that is the player’s victory.

At first glance, N and Bianca don’t have much in common. N even describes Bianca as being simply unable to become stronger, while it’s clear that N is one of the region’s strongest Trainers. But just like with all people, they have more in common than they think. Many of those similarities come from their innocence about “the real world,” brought about by their respective fathers. As poet Mary Oliver describes in her essay collection Upstream, “I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”¹ Indeed, how can anyone know who they are without having any sort of comparison points to go off of? How can they know what they want to be without knowing what options exist? And how can anyone know what those options are without going out into the world and discovering them? With familiarity comes a sense of safety, but not only does that safety turn out to be false, it also brings about stagnation.

Bianca and N start encountering unfamiliar things right as Black and White begin. To Bianca, high-tech PCs are just as foreign as the endless number of different career paths available to her. For N, meeting Pokémon who love being with their Trainers and Trainers who would do anything to protect their precious Pokémon completely shatters his preconceived notions. The real world’s sky isn’t bright blue with white clouds like his room’s wallpaper—it’s darkening with an oncoming storm. What he’s discovering goes against his very core beliefs, and he doesn’t have the tools to process any of it.

N may be the white to Cheren’s black, but he’s the black to Bianca’s white. Thanks to knowing the player and Cheren since childhood, Bianca knew there were more possibilities for her out in the real world. This gives her the resolve to disobey her father, make her escape, and find new colors to paint herself with. N’s upbringing, however, was so deliberately curated by Ghetsis that he struggles to adapt to a reality that goes against his foundational beliefs. Ghetsis has already painted N black, the color that is the most challenging to alter. And he did so by making sure N’s “world” was as small as possible, limiting his beliefs and his ability to expand them.

To expand our understanding of Black and White‘s major characters, we can once again look to its music. “Bianca’s Theme” is light and jovial, consisting of mostly higher-pitched, twinkling notes. Just by listening to their encounter themes, it’s clear who between Bianca and Cheren is less serious about battling. “Bianca’s Theme” is also less hostile than “Prisoner to a Formula” thanks to the latter being in minor key and its occasional use of staccato notes. But as appropriate as Bianca’s theme is for her, it doesn’t “say” much about the serious turn her character arc takes. That is instead left to “An Unwavering Heart,” the melancholic melody that makes its first audio appearance when Bianca confronts her father in Nimbasa City.

Bianca’s father is cruel and controlling. He frequently yells and doesn’t allow Bianca to go out on her own. His good intentions of keeping her safe from the difficulties and challenges that come from independence are nullified by the harmful outcomes she endures. When it’s no longer the ceiling of her home but a cloudless sky over Bianca’s head, she has no tools to help her navigate which direction to go, and she struggles in a completely different way than her father anticipated.

What makes Bianca’s father forgivable isn’t the intention behind his initial action but his willingness to change. Or, as LICSW Patrick Teahan puts it, “What makes [someone] toxic [are] the hills they will die on.”² In Nimbasa City, Bianca’s father recognizes his wrongs and respects Bianca’s decision to travel. He even welcomes her to return home whenever she feels like she needs a break. Bianca’s dad initially tried to keep her locked away for the safety of her future, but is eventually willing to let her be independent for that very same sake. By the end of the game, it’s clear that Bianca’s parents will give her the time and space she needs to figure out her own destiny—and the support she needs if she ever finds herself in trouble. Just because you’ve “grown up” doesn’t mean you can’t return home to the love and support of your family.

When N fails to defeat the player at the end of Black and White, Ghetsis doesn’t offer the kind of support that is expected of a parental figure. Instead, he starts verbally assaulting N while “Ghetsis’ Ambitions” roars in the background. While “An Unwavering Heart” manages to sound both gentle yet pained, encapsulating the uncertainty that comes with conflict over the future, “Ghetsis’ Ambitions” is frightening, dramatic, and, most of all, entirely confident of itself and its outcome. These two tracks may sound like total opposites, but in title they’re surprisingly quite similar: Ghetsis is certainly unwavering in his ambitions.

Just as Elesa had to step in to help talk some sense into Bianca’s father, the player has to interject during Ghetsis’s abuse session. But where words worked to sway Bianca’s dad, battle must occur to stop Ghetsis. It’s more than abundantly clear that he is beyond reasonable discussion and unwilling to—and undeserving of—compromise. He opted to keep N trapped in the past, under the guise of roleplaying as an ancient hero, not to protect N from any particular danger, but for the benefit of Ghetsis’s future as the world’s ruler.

The matter of who truly benefits from isolation is paralleled in the Victini subplot in Liberty Garden. Victini’s previous owner was trying to keep it safe from people who would use it for evil, and probably believed that even good-hearted people would negatively succumb to its power. To prove him right, there’s a generic NPC in the area who mumbles about how he would have taken Victini for himself had he known where it was.

But what Victini’s owner did was lock it away from the rest of the world. This cruel and unforgivable solution only gets worse when you realize it took 200 years for anyone to find and free Victini. The owner may have given Victini some toys and furniture, but remaining in an unchanging environment and with no one around for two centuries is flat-out torturous. And while hiding Victini away and making sure no one knows about it keeps it safe for the time being, it also means that if anyone does find it, it’s even easier to steal. Team Plasma was stopped only because they took the island’s visitors hostage and drew attention to themselves. Wait for everyone to leave and then steal Victini, and no one would be any wiser to what happened. Victini would be left to fend for itself, all alone, without any practical battle experience in 200 years. We see what just a few years of not battling does to Champion Alder’s skills—and appropriately, Victini is only Level 15 in the Liberty Garden.

Bianca’s father is quite similar to Victini’s owner. He doesn’t realize that trying to keep Bianca away from the challenges of the real world only makes her less capable of protecting herself when danger does arise. This is most prominently shown when Bianca’s Munna is stolen by Team Plasma in Castelia City, and she needs the help of others to retrieve it.

Ghetsis’s approach is a bit different, however—he specifically prepared N to become the strongest Trainer possible. And he did, in fact, succeed: N is perfectly capable of fending for himself when it comes to Pokémon battles. It’s a different kind of conflict that N doesn’t know how to handle: opinions and evidence that go against his worldview. For Ghetsis, this is all according to plan. The more unshakable N’s beliefs, the less willing, and in a way, capable, he will be to adapt and even change them. But this is just one of the ways past childhood trauma, specifically from a toxic family system, manifests in a grown person’s present behavior and beliefs.

Abuse is a cycle that can seem as unbreakable as the seasons. In many cases, such abuse is far more subtle than the blatant cruelty of Bianca’s father or Ghetsis, making it even trickier to suss out the causes of childhood trauma. But for Bianca and especially for N, their father figures serve as an example of the ways that the past can continue to have a stronghold on the future until those in the present actively work to break free.

Breaking free is never easy. The damage done in a single childhood can take a lifetime to heal. And even then, healing in reality isn’t as simple as it is in a Pokémon battle: scars will remain in the form of memories, intrusive thoughts and beliefs, or even in a physical form that can continue to influence the present and future despite our best efforts to keep them in the past.

The character who attempted to lock N into this horrendous cycle was the very first major character of his life’s story: Ghetsis. Ryoku claims that the sages “haven’t even figured out if [Ghetsis and N] are father and son.” Still, the biological relation or lack thereof between the two doesn’t change the fact that Ghetsis is N’s father figure who raised him from childhood. And he raised N in a world shaped entirely by his own hand.

“That room was the world that was provided to our lord N…” So says the Shadow Triad member just outside N’s room within his castle. But no one’s entire world should be confined to a single room; even Bianca’s father allowed her to visit her friends back home.

And confined N was: locked to a single room in an underground castle, N couldn’t catch even the slightest glimpse of the real world outside. Instead, his room pretends to be the real world. The wallpaper is patterned with clouds, just as Unova is tessellated with clouds both literal and metaphorical, its towns and cities named after clouds in English and patterns in Japanese. But this is not the real sky. This is not the real Unova. It is all the creation of Ghetsis, the man believing himself to be God.

N is a clear parallel to Victini: the latter was hidden away in an unchanging, toy-filled environment to prevent others from accessing its power to bring surefire victory. N was hidden away in an unchanging, toy-filled environment to hone his latent power, to become the ultimate puppet guaranteed to bring victory to Team Plasma and fulfill Ghetsis’s ambitions.

And Ghetsis is certainly ambitious. Although the scope may be small, he is already capable of creating entire worlds and controlling the person within them. What’s to stop him from expanding his scope and controlling all of Unova? The only difference between N’s room and Ghetsis’s ideal Unova is the size of the box each one can fit into.

Strip away all the instruments besides the music box of “Prisoner to a Formula,” the theme of N in his present, and you get “The Pokémon Child, N,” the haunting melody of N’s past. Now the innocence that permeated “Prisoner to a Formula” is laid bare. You’d think it would be perfectly fitting for a room filled with only children’s toys, but the song instead fills the room with an unsettling feeling. Before even getting to examine the contents of the glorified box of N’s room, its very music fills the player with unease, telling them something is terrifyingly wrong. As Concordia says, “There is nothing more beautiful and terrifying than innocence.”

Innocence is untouched, dangerous in how easily it can be manipulated by the influence of others, no matter how good or bad their intentions. Symbolically, children can represent both “purity” and “innocence”³ because they are uninfluenced. N’s childhood before being abducted by Ghetsis is more representative of this than the typical child, as he grew up in a forest away from people and, thus, their biases. The room N was brought to once Ghetsis abducted him keeps this theme relevant in the present. Although the room is fit for a child, inspecting the toys reveals that they’re new, indicating that Ghetsis kept N trapped not only in this singular room but in a perpetual childlike state, never replacing his toys with anything more age-appropriate. And there is an almost childlike purity to N throughout the game: he refers to Pokémon as his “friends” and the act of catching them as “befriending” them, even when talking about the legendary dragon.

Children “can also stand for mystic knowledge,”⁴ another trait associated with N and his supernatural ability to speak to Pokémon. Finally, the child can represent “openness to faith,”⁵ just as their uninfluenced natures make them open to accepting ideas without question. They simply don’t know enough yet to know what to doubt and what to believe. If someone with enough ethos, such as a parental figure, “teaches” them something, they are almost certain to take it to heart.

We generally think of this process of absorbing outside influence as removing innocence. It can instead, however, lead to a different kind of innocence, one in which a lack of knowledge, experience, or understanding prevents someone from seeing how their beliefs may be built upon false notions or may even harm others. Once N was taken to that room where no other ideas could reach him, he had no means of questioning Ghetsis’s teachings. Without knowing that there are in fact kind Trainers in the world, how else was N supposed to interpret the unending succession of abused Pokémon Ghetsis brought to him? This upbringing combined with N’s unwavering dedication to keeping Pokémon safe, leading him to behave antagonistically towards people outside of Team Plasma. It even clouded his ability to question Ghetsis’s true motives.

Concordia attributes both “kinds” of innocence to N, saying, “N was touched by [the abused Pokémon’s] plight, and started pursuing [his goals], thinking only of Pokémon. N’s heart is pure and innocent.” And there’s good reason why N “think[s] only of Pokémon:” as the sole human raised in a forest full of Pokémon, N is literally “The Pokémon Child.” And in the same way that abuse survivors “raise themselves” due to their family’s negligence,⁶ N was still raised by Pokémon even after Ghetsis abducted him. The abused Pokémon that Ghetsis brought to “teach” N were the ones who “looked after him” in his room. They, together with the Pokémon of the forest, who N thought were happy because there were no other humans around, confirmed to N what Ghetsis wanted him to believe.

Ghetsis also wanted N to believe he was the chosen hero of Unova, but didn’t give him a name to match. For someone who has special titles for all his musical themes, N himself doesn’t have a distinct name. N, when lowercase, is instead one of the most common variables used in mathematics. N is, in the end, nothing but a variable in Ghetsis’s schemes, able to be replaced with anyone Ghetsis deems capable of serving as his puppet.

The catch, however, is that the person must actually fit into the equation. Ghetsis’s plan to convince the masses to release their Pokémon required making it seem like the hero of Unova had returned and also wanted Pokémon liberation. N’s ability to speak to Pokémon and his unyielding love for them was what made him the perfect person for this job. Ghetsis would no doubt make do if he had to replace N with someone else, but doing so would require changing the plan entirely. Someone like, say, Bianca, simply couldn’t pass as the hero of Unova. While the name “N” can be read as a replaceable mathematical variable—which is the way Ghetsis perceives him—variables can’t be replaced with just any value. Most of the time, there’s only one value a variable can be for the equation at hand to work.

This gives mathematics its perceived “black or white” quality: either the equation is correct, or it’s incorrect. One plus one is always two, and one plus one being anything besides two is wrong. This is why N loves equations so much: there is no “gray” when it comes to math. It’s correct or it’s incorrect. Either people are always cruel to Pokémon, or people always treat Pokémon well. There is no “sometimes.”

But life isn’t always so mathematical. As we well know, there are, in fact, always “sometimes.” People aren’t always cruel to Pokémon, and people don’t always treat Pokémon well. But we can’t separate people from Pokémon just because some people hurt Pokémon, just like we don’t stop people from caring for children just because some people—even parents—hurt children. Instead of slapping a bandage over the problem, we should try to understand the root causes behind why these problems happen. Then we can properly work towards a society where caregivers are knowledgeable and in the right mental headspace to raise their kids—or a society where people understand how to better work with Pokémon, not making their Pokémon simply work for them as tools. But for someone to know how to do that, and to unlearn what was taught by all the different traumas inflicted by the world, they must first step out of their cave.

N‘s childhood is almost a one-for-one replication of Plato’s allegory of the cave: his whole life was spent in an enclosed room, with no way to leave and discover what lay outside in the real world. Because of this, the only things he got to see were curated entirely by Ghetsis, giving Ghetsis free rein to instill into N false ideas of what reality entailed. When N finally gets to exit his room, he is confused, angered, and hurt when he sees Trainers and Pokémon living together in harmony, as it goes against everything that he knows.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is aptly titled: an allegory is a story that uses symbolism or metaphor to get its “meaning” across.⁷ But metaphor and symbolism can be interpreted in many different ways. This is paradoxically both ironic and perfect when it comes to Plato’s cave allegory, since one of its most common interpretations is how what we directly perceive isn’t always the strict truth. Our perception is highly flawed due to how easy it is to influence and how difficult it can be to tell that it’s been influenced at all. Everything is diluted through multiple filters before we finally get to “perceive” it ourselves. Those filters can come from the source portraying it,⁸ or they can come from within ourselves thanks to our preconceived notions and internal biases. Have you ever passed on trying food with a certain ingredient because you had a bad experience with that ingredient in a completely unrelated dish? Or have you perhaps convinced yourself that a video game was “bad” before even playing it because you saw that one of the monsters in the game was styled after soft serve ice cream? But two different people can perceive the exact same thing differently, so perhaps the world’s number one ice cream fan would find the aforementioned game to be the very best before it’s even released.

Most looks at Plato’s allegory tend to stop at this key idea. The full allegory, however, goes a step further to detail the duty of the person who can step out of the cave. The cave itself is one of the allegory’s symbols, however. There isn’t actually a physical cave that we can leave to find Forms, or the true, ideal, and unchanging version of things as discussed in the Shadow Triad chapter. In fact, Forms “don’t exist in our spatial and temporal physical world” at all, meaning we can’t perceive them with just our senses.⁹ To discover Forms, people must use their wisdom and essentially work backwards. Just like how Bianca discovers who she wants to be by determining what she can’t or doesn’t want to do, people can “perceive the World of Forms by recognizing” that what they perceive all around them are merely shadows.¹⁰

Doing so is no easy task, however, meaning only a true philosopher could manage it. Plato also insists that philosophers are “the only [people] who can be trusted to rule well”¹¹ because they best “understand the true Forms of ideals such as friendship, goodness, truth, wisdom, virtue, and justice,” and can thus “integrate this knowledge … into the physical world.”¹² As a result, the philosopher who leaves the cave must lead the rest of the people, teaching them the truths and ideals they’ve discovered in their pursuit of wisdom, justice, and goodness.

Both Alder and N think they are the philosopher king who has set out to teach everyone what they discovered about “goodness” when they left their caves. Alder feels he must teach Unova about the joys of simply being together with Pokémon as opposed to pursuing meaningless strength. N thinks he must teach Unova about how people are oppressing Pokémon and need to free them. Alder’s task is far easier, since his beliefs already mostly align with the status quo. N’s ideas are so opposed to the norm that they will be met with much more resistance, but even Alder still struggles to convince particularly battle-focused rivals to loosen up.

The resistance these two kings meet also stems from Plato’s allegory: after the philosopher sees the true world outside the cave, he returns to teach the remaining prisoners what he’s learned. What he says is so detached from the “reality” they’re accustomed to, however, that they can’t fathom any of his ideas and even threaten the philosopher with violence.¹³ Thanks to Pokémon, both Alder and N can defend themselves when met with resistance—although neither would like to. Like the rest of Team Plasma, N is generally subject to the criticism that he wants to free Pokémon yet battles with them. The defense for N is the same as it was for the Team Plasma Grunts: he has no choice because battling is the only way to get things done in the Pokémon world. Despite how naturally gifted he is at being a Trainer, the last thing N wants to do is engage in battle, but battle he must in order to defeat the Champion and gain the ethos required to convince others to release their Pokémon.

This does raise the question of whether that ethos would actually be enough to succeed at his goal. The answer is yes. Ghetsis’s two speeches in Accumula Town and Opelucid City had many onlookers who began questioning their beliefs with his words, and others who flat out agreed with him. Imagine, then, how influential it would be if the person who just defeated the Champion released his own Pokémon before telling everyone else that they should do the same. The Champion is thought of as the greatest Trainer in the region, a Trainer almost every person in the Pokémon world can only dream of defeating—and this victor against the Champion would be allied with the legendary dragon that founded Unova. N’s words and actions would be unfathomably influential by that point.

But surely N wouldn’t be so influential as to convince everyone to release their Pokémon, right? That’s true, but that’s also not a problem. All N would need is for some people to follow him at first. As Ghetsis explains, the number of people who release their Pokémon will grow over time, hexagons of one color flipping to take on the color of their neighbors as they’re surrounded on all sides. “In no time … [h]aving a Pokémon will be considered a bad thing! [People who want to keep their Pokémon] will be[come] unable to face public opinion and will release their Pokémon!” This is especially beneficial for N, who would rather not force people to see things his way. He won’t give up until everyone agrees, but he also won’t stoop to brute force the way Ghetsis would, and this method allows everyone to release their Pokémon of their own volition.

This kind of mentality can even be seen within the Pokémon fanbase itself: most fans didn’t think N could possibly be a rival until external media such as Pokémon Masters EX explicitly categorized him as such. Once a source that was deemed both significant and credible enough released the idea into the wild, more and more people started believing it themselves until it became nigh indisputable. What was once considered a fringe opinion less than a decade ago now seems like common sense. And as more and more people repeat the idea, the more believable—the more “correct”—it seems.

But N isn’t the only character who must convince others that his ideas are “correct” through battle even though he wishes not to. Alder abandoned the Pokémon League—and battling altogether—when his partner Pokémon died so he could pursue a leisurely lifestyle of teaching others how to live, laugh, and love their Pokémon. While he lucks out in not needing to battle Cheren when their beliefs don’t align, he isn’t so fortunate when N starts racking up Badges and beelining towards the Pokémon League. To protect the bond between people and Pokémon that he holds so dear, Alder must, for the first time in years, battle in an attempt to stop N in his tracks.

As these two would-be kings fight to defend their beliefs, we may wonder why it had to come to this at all. It can be almost impossible for people who haven’t experienced blatant indoctrination—or who have never really had their beliefs challenged—to understand just how difficult it is for someone in N’s situation to accept differing viewpoints. No one can possibly disregard what they’ve been taught at the drop of a hat, even when faced with evidence proving the contrary. Deconstructing such beliefs is essentially a lifelong process. As Anthea explains in N’s Castle, “Trainers battle to practice their skills and to grow in experience, but never to hurt their Pokémon. My lord N has realized this, deep down in his heart…but he has spent too much painful time here in this castle to admit it…”

Despite this, the only person N actively pushes away is Prof. Juniper. In Chargestone Cave, she says that “all people [should] get to decide for themselves how to relate to Pokémon.” It sounds reasonable, especially since we’re predisposed to believing that people and Pokémon should always be together. But if you applied that same logic to children, it would mean it’s okay for parents to inflict corporal punishment upon their kids or send them to work in the mines at age ten so long as that’s how they choose to “relate to them.” Parents who were raised that same way very well may perpetuate such upbringings without external factors to prevent them.

If we allowed Ghetsis to “decide for [himself] how to relate to Pokémon,” well, we know how that would go.

Besides Juniper, there is no one who N flat out denies. N does in fact open himself up to other ideas, at least in his own way. N actively invites the player to try to stop his plans because he can tell how much their Pokémon love them. N even shows Alder some semblance of respect after defeating him at the Pokémon League. “In order to forget the pain in your heart [from losing your Pokémon to sickness], you wandered Unova…” he says. “Who knows how long it’s been since you’ve had to fight with your full strength? I actually kind of like that about you, though.”

Alder, the supposedly open-minded, kind, and wise Champion, on the other hand, offers no such consideration towards N. “I lost. I should have been able to demonstrate the bond between me and my Pokémon,” Alder tells you after his spectacular loss to N. “That would have shown that brat the worthlessness of his outrageous dreams.” Calling N a “brat” while still bitter over his defeat is understandable, if not somewhat juvenile. Calling N’s dreams “worthless,” on the other hand, is taking matters a step too far.

N’s mentality essentially boils down to, “People always hurt their Pokémon, so there should be no more Trainers.” It’s easy to fixate on how his posited “solution” to the perceived problem is too extreme, and for good reason. But why does no one, not even Alder, try to meet him where he is? If someone were to say something along the lines of, “Parents always hurt their kids, so there should be no more parents,” it should be clear that the person is speaking from a place of personal trauma. Instead of running to defend the societal insistence that parenthood is an obligation, we should instead try to meet this person where they are, to ask them why they believe what they do, even if it means questioning our own beliefs. From there, we can all reach the healthier conclusion that some parents are wonderful, but some are absolutely not, so we should find the root cause of this and work to minimize it as much as possible.

But no main character in Black and White takes this approach with N or anyone in Team Plasma. In Castelia City, Burgh asks Ghetsis, “What you guys are doing… Aren’t you going to strengthen the bond between people and Pokémon even more?” According to A. S. Ferguson, “the purpose of the cave [in Plato’s allegory is] … to absorb the prisoners so that they are unaware of the [world] outside, and are, indeed, turned away from it.”¹⁴ It’s obvious how this applies to N’s upbringing, but it also applies to everyone outside of Team Plasma. The cave they’re in, shaped by the formulas of the Pokémon series, insist that people and Pokémon already have a perfect relationship, so questioning it just makes certain people more stubbornly dig in their heels.

This isn’t to say that people must always change their opinions when hearing an alternative take. It’s entirely valid for someone to use Ghetsis’s rhetoric to reinforce their original belief that they will continue to be with Pokémon. But the only way to do so properly is by actually considering the other argument first. In Accumula Town, N introduces himself to the player and Cheren, and tells them that he’s interested in liberating Pokémon. Cheren’s response is to wait for N to leave, then say to the player, “Strange guy. But I’m not going to worry about it.”

Cheren believed in the Pokémon series creed that “Being a Trainer is good (and all Trainers should strive to become the Champion)” without question. Because of this, he dismissed N’s ideas without a second thought. Imagine if he, or anyone else, had simply asked N, “Why do you feel the way you do about Pokémon and Trainers?” Hearing N explain about his experience with abused Pokémon—and how Ghetsis brought them to him while he was locked away in some underground room that he was never allowed to leave—would have certainly changed the way they thought about N. They would have recognized N’s good intentions much faster and helped him deconstruct his old worldview. It may even have resulted in everyone focusing their efforts on thwarting Ghetsis much sooner.

As the YouTube channel Feeling Philosophical states in the video “Plato’s Theory of Forms,” “Obvious ideas are typically the assumptions that need to be questioned most, even though it might be against what is commonly believed. Plato goes against conventional wisdom [that the world we see is the real world] with his Theory of Forms, and so it is important for us to open up to these new ideas and try our best to understand them, so we don’t become too ideological and defensive over the beliefs that we currently have about the world.”¹⁵

N’s indoctrination at the hand of Ghetsis made it that much harder for him to question what he perceived as the truth about the world, but he at least made an effort by reaching out to the player. Every other character, on the other hand, had been indoctrinated by the formulas of the Pokémon world, and thus didn’t even think to try to understand N until after Ghetsis proclaimed his plan in N’s Castle. N must certainly take some responsibility for his actions despite the trauma at the root of them, but the characters around him are never that much more “in the right” even though—and precisely because—they fight to protect the unquestioned status quo.

Sometimes all it takes to understand someone is asking a simple question. As Socrates’s character says in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, “I ask not in order to confute you, but as I was saying that the argument may proceed consecutively, and that we may not get the habit of anticipating and suspecting the meaning of one another’s words; I would have you develop your own views in your own way, whatever may be your hypothesis.”¹⁶

N asks questions throughout Black and White, not in incredulity like Ghetsis, but because he genuinely wants to understand. It starts in Accumula Town, with, “I can’t help wondering… Are Pokémon really happy [confined in Poké Balls]?” It grows into, “Do you really believe that Pokémon battles help us understand one another?” in Chargestone Cave. He even gives Juniper a chance to say her piece by asking, “What do you have to say for yourself?” instead of simply “anticipating and suspecting the meaning of [her] words.”¹⁷

As the pieces finally start to fall into place and he comes to understand the viewpoint you’ve hoped for him to see all along, he asks after his final defeat, “Two heroes living at the same time—one that pursues truth and one that pursues ideals. … Could they both be right?”

And, of course, in Chargestone Cave he asks the player, “Do you have a dream of your own?”

Alder spends much of Black and White asking Cheren what he would use his strength for after becoming Champion—in other words, what is his dream? It is N who asks this of the player, not so that he can confute you, but so that you can come to your own conclusion.

Even if that conclusion is the same as the belief you held beforehand, what’s most important is that the question was asked of you, and that you do your best to answer it. When a question is asked regarding your beliefs that you cannot answer, it means you haven’t given your beliefs enough thought. Questions shouldn’t be asked to try to convince others of your “correctness;” they should be asked because you want to learn, aligning with Plato’s view of the difference between the noble philosopher and the deceitful rhetorician as referenced in the chapter on Ghetsis.

N and Alder are both kings, but neither is a philosopher until Black and White come to a close. Alder thinks that with the death of his beloved partner came a revelation, but he doesn’t see Volcarona’s sun for what it is until he realizes that N’s “heart was truly inspired.” N’s journey across Unova is essentially him navigating his cave until he can find the exit. For both these kings, their journeys are crucial to their development, and, in line with their individuality, expressly one-of-a-kind.

The Champion is one-of-a-kind, yet it’s fairly typical for them to share their battle themes. The second generation’s Champion battle music is far more associated with Trainer Red than with Champion Lance. In Emerald, Steven’s battle theme from Ruby and Sapphire is given to Wallace while Steven himself borrows from Brendan and May. Palmer only started using the Frontier Brain track when the Battle Frontier was established in Platinum; before that, he used Cynthia’s own theme. With the sole exception of Blue, whose own unique track would go on to be remixed for the VGC championship bouts starting in none other than Black and White, it wasn’t until after Black and White that the Champion started getting a truly exclusive battle track. So while it may seem odd on the surface that Alder shares his battle theme with the Subway Bosses, it’s not only tradition, but quite fitting: all three characters are powerful post-game bosses with a theme that perfectly fits the stakes of their battles.

N, however, isn’t found in Black and White‘s post-game at all. Instead, he shares his battle theme only with himself. “Battle! (N)” is his battle theme from the start. Like “Prisoner to a Formula,” it’s off-putting, with a lot of staccato, erratic percussion, and a bold lower register that drives it forward. There’s also a constant feeling of tension caused by repeating tritones into fifths and fifths into tritones—unnatural, dissonant notes that never offer a sense of melodic resolution. Although he won’t reveal his connection to Team Plasma right away, N’s battle music already feels fitting for a villain. Even the series’s more ill-tempered rivals like Silver, Gladion, and Bede have an upbeat kick to their battle music compared to the ominous feeling behind N’s.

Compared to “The Pokémon Child, N,” which strips away the ornamentation of “Prisoner to a Formula,” N’s final battle theme, “Decisive Battle! (N),” adds to “Battle! (N).” Additional instruments and sound effects make the song even more intense than before, befitting for a final showdown. A ticking clock “express[es] the past and the future”¹⁸ that is so integral to Black and White‘s themes while also indicating the urgency behind this battle. A new pipe organ and chanting enhance the original song’s innate mysteriousness and imbue it with a sense of nobility indicative of N’s status as both a genius and a king.¹⁹ These are also musical elements that are typically reserved for and indicative of final battles, including the spectacularly iconic “Dancing Mad” of Final Fantasy VI, adding to the connotation of N’s battle as a finale even though Ghetsis serves as the true final battle of the games’ story.

Besides these thematic concepts, N’s battle music was also composed with math in mind. Using the keyboard’s middle C as “0,” composer Junichi Masuda uses chords and intervals of only prime numbers. Even the durations of notes and phrases are prime numbers²⁰ to connect to N’s mathematical genius and preference of prime numbers that can’t be divided any further.

The connection between music and mathematics goes deeper than the ability to assign certain notes prime and composite values. N’s last name “Harmonia,” bestowed upon him by Ghetsis, blatantly originates from musical terminology. With the mathematical “N” and musical “Harmonia” together, the stage is set for Black and White‘s look at the overlap between math and music.

Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who was one of Plato’s influences, is generally considered the “father of math and music.” He is typically thought of as the first person to attach math to music, and thus “founded” music theory as a concept.²¹ His many ideas would be used by Aristotle,²² contemporary of Plato, to form a curriculum that would be called the quadrivium in Medieval Europe. This long-standing curriculum included math—or numbers—and three other subjects in relation to math, one of which was music—or numbers in time.²³

China was another country that “associated [music] with number symbolism.”²⁴ The relevance of this fact is enhanced by how, according to Tresidder, “Yin or Yang qualities were allocated to the semitones of the earliest Chinese octave, music thus becoming a symbol of the vital duality holding together disparate things.”²⁵ This ties music and its connection to math even more strongly into Black and White‘s themes.

The connection between math and music has continued well beyond the past and into the present, in which modern music theory posits that there are essentially “rules” regarding the order or “combination of notes,” and that those rules come from music’s innate ties to math.²⁶ On the surface, this makes quite a bit of sense. A lot of music theory involves numeric patterns and mathematical operations. Ratios can even be used to express intervals, which are integral to a piece’s melody and harmony. As explained by YouTube channel Two Minute Music Theory, “The more simple the ratio, the more consonant the interval. Therefore, the more complex the ratio, the more dissonant the interval.” A perfect fifth is the simple ratio of 3:2, while a tritone can be expressed as a horrific ratio of 64:45,²⁷ giving mathematical reasoning behind its unpleasant sound.

This should be perfect for someone like N. Formulas express even something like music, neatly compartmentalizing things into “right” or “wrong,” “works” or “doesn’t work,” “good” or “bad.” Still, the notion that music can be “right” or “wrong” is questionable. Individuals have their opinions on music they like and dislike, but that has no bearing on whether certain music is innately “good” or “bad.” For people who aren’t acquainted with music theory, the idea that music isn’t influenced by culture and is instead “universal” the way math is²⁸ is just as, if not more unbelievable than the notion that Pokémon should be liberated from people.

It’s reasonable to say that there’s no “right” or “wrong” way to play or make music. Different cultures have their own kinds of music theory, with their own “rules,” their own “truths” and “ideals” for the way notes can be combined and ordered.²⁹ And, personal preferences aside, they all sound good in their own ways—none is “better” than the other, none is more “right” than the other. There’s a time for the “rules” of western music theory, and there’s a time to break those rules. Even something like the “unpleasant” tritone can have its effective uses and make for fantastic music.

But while we can detach math from music, we can’t detach math from itself. Math is considered a “universal language.” In fact, it’s considered so universal that astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei is attributed with saying that “Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.”³⁰ This saying gives some extra zest to Ghetsis shortening N’s name into a variable, positing Ghetsis as a god writing his own universe with his own twisted form of mathematics.

For all us mortals, however, math is still considered universal. Certain words don’t have direct translations across different languages, and those that do may still posses cultural connotations that can never truly be conveyed by words alone. But one plus one is two in the United States just as much as it is in Japan or Brazil. Numbers are unchanged no matter where in the world you go. There’s no getting lost in translation.

It’s not just numbers and operations that are universal, either. Concepts, from the rudimentary to the advanced, similarly exist beyond the borders that would normally separate people, such as culture or class. One such basic concept is “natural numbers,” which is where N’s full first name, “Natural,” comes from.³¹ In fact, while a lowercase “n” is a common mathematical variable, an uppercase “N” is used in math to represent the set of natural numbers, those being positive integers, or the numbers we use to count things. These numbers are the ones that, in a general sense, make operations simple. One, a natural number, plus two, another natural number, is three, yet another natural number. Two times three is the natural number six, and so on. Their simplicity can even be considered “childlike,” or even reminiscent of childhood math, tying in with N’s childlike innocence and purity.

But just how universal is math, really? Even a concept as simple as natural numbers has a gray area: since most people begin counting from one, the non-negative integer zero isn’t always classified as a natural number. In addition to debatable definitions, there’s also framing to consider. No matter how “universal” “ten divided by five” is, you can’t just plop a worksheet in front of a student and expect them to complete it when the directions are in a language they don’t understand.³² And that’s not even getting into math’s infamous “word problems.” “Ten divided by five” becomes a lot less “universal” when written as, “If Team Plasma liberates ten Pokémon from five people, what’s the average number of Pokémon each person had?”

The reason why “word problems” like these exist is precisely because it’s important to frame math. Similar to how Alder tells Cheren that what he chooses to use his strength for is what’s important, what we use math for is far more important than the math itself. Whether it’s something of low to mid stakes, like using math to help with budgeting, or high stakes, like using math to create life-changing machines, it’s what you do with math that gives math its value. Sure, equations can be thought of as “right” or “wrong,” but what does it matter if “two times three is six” or if “x – 1 = 3 if x = 4?” None of that actually matters if it isn’t framed in some way. Two times three is six finally matters if I only have five dollars on me, so I can’t buy two three-dollar Poké Balls just yet.

The only way to frame things is for them to be touched by humans—humans whose perceptions and biases are clouded by all sorts of subconscious factors. And that’s actually a great thing, as long as we recognize that those biases are there. Our perception may be flawed in how we can be unconsciously influenced, but that is exactly how we come to have our own ideas. Our differing interpretations of an allegory’s metaphors and our opinions on the benefits and drawbacks of the world’s formulas make us unique. Because of that uniqueness, we can learn from each other and then better make our own dreams into a reality.

“I love Ferris wheels,” N nonchalantly informs you before boarding the Rondez-View Ferris Wheel in Nimbasa City. “They’re like collections of elegant formulas.” But that non-prime collection of formulas was brought together by civil engineer George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. The formulas could not create something like a Ferris wheel by themselves, and most people besides Ferris Jr. likely wouldn’t have even thought to combine those formulas together in the first place. It’s also notable that Ferris wheels have come to represent connecting people, especially in Japan where Black and White were developed, where Ferris wheels are frequently associated with dates. On top of that, Ferris wheels are made with many different formulas working together, not just a single equation separated from the rest.

Thinking of math or equations as purely black or white limits math’s true possibilities, just like how thinking of someone’s beliefs as either entirely right or wrong limits your understanding of them and limits your own potential to grow. Instead of thinking of math and its equations as either right or wrong, they’re better thought of as tools to determine the results of bringing together different ideas, with nothing beyond the “equals sign” besides infinite possibilities.

When there is something beyond the equals sign, such as the end result of the player’s victory in any Pokémon game, consider that there may in fact be multiple valid values for each variable. As mentioned previously, the most common “variables” in a Pokémon game are the Pokémon you choose for your party. And while there are some Pokémon that make beating the game much easier, it’s still possible, with the right levels and strategies, to complete almost any game with almost any Pokémon, with some players thriving on beating entire games with a single Pokémon the entire way through.

Math is hardly as universal as it seems on the surface. As Ph.D. and mathematics teacher Jay Wamsted says, “The only universal language is the one we make by doing the hard work of communicating with each other.”³³ N’s thoughts on formulas may have been founded on the initial assumption that equations are “black or white,” but the true, ideal purpose of math lies in the ways humans can use it for different purposes. Just like “truths” and “ideals” or Yin and Yang, the “logic” of something like math and “emotion” that comes with human influence are actually inseparable. They are two sides of the same coin; you can’t have one without the other.

“Many ancient traditions,” Tresidder claims, “did not make a sharp distinction between feelings and thought. A person who ‘let the heart lead the head’ would once have seemed sensible rather than foolish.”³⁴ The people of ancient Unova agreed with this concept, too, as statements such as “Have the heart of king” and “King acts with love” are written in the Abyssal Ruins, not statements like “King acts only based on logic.”

Chronologically, the Relic Castle was built after the Abyssal Ruins, and it takes much inspiration from Ancient Egypt. In Ancient Egypt it was thought that “‘The heart is the source of all knowledge’ and ‘What the arms do, where the legs take us, how all parts of the body move—all of this the heart ordains.'” In other words, functions we now associate with the brain were once “believed to be functions of the heart[.]”³⁵ The heart isn’t just “The symbolic source of [emotions] but also of … truth and intelligence”³⁶ and even willpower.³⁷

It’s not unusual for concepts to change so thoroughly over time like this. But then we can’t help but ask, when were things “true?” Have they ever been “true,” and if not, will they ever be? Which interpretation of the heart versus the mind is “ideal?” How can we ever hope to know?

In Plato’s analogy of the divided line, Plato describes the world as if it were on a line divided into four unequal parts. The five points, A, B, C, D, and E, form line segments representing different “worlds.” Line CE represents the “intelligible world,” while AC represents the “visible” or “physical world.” Within the “physical world” is line BC, where “actual, physical things themselves sit;” and line AB, the mere shadows or reflections of the physical things and intelligible world that we perceive.³⁸

The further right you go along the line, the more “true” the world. Line DE is where the ideal Forms exist, the truest essences of them all. Right before them is line CD, which represents “mathematical reasoning.”³⁹ To the Ancient Greek philosophers, “the truths of mathematics are independent of our perceptions” or “of our mind.”⁴⁰ As Plato would say, someone could be raised in their metaphorical cave to believe that “2 + 2 = 5,” but that is just wrong, period. The “truths of math” are absolute and unchanging.

Forms themselves are also meant to be unchanging, which is what allows them to represent the true and ideal nature of the things and concepts they represent. If Forms could change, then how could we even begin to define such lofty concepts as “goodness” or “justice?” If the thing that makes us all “human” isn’t consistent, then how can we even be sure that we are “human” at all?

To avoid a full-blown existential crisis, the question we should ask is whether Plato’s Forms are exactly as he described or not. Aristotle posits the Third Man Argument as an objection to the Theory of Forms. The Third Man Argument centers around the concept that Forms must have the property of the thing or concept they represent. In that case, there has to be another Form to tie together the first Form and the object or concept, and then another Form for them, and so on indefinitely.⁴¹

In other words, Forms are meant to “explain properties” such as “human-ness,” but, as YouTube channel TeacherOfPhilosophy describes, “nothing is explained because the explanation can never get started if behind every Form there’s another Form…and so on.”⁴²

The Third Man Argument isn’t without its own imperfections, but it wouldn’t be philosophy without questions. What is perhaps even more important than the substance of the objection itself is the fact that Plato himself seriously considered it. In Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, Plato “assails his own theory of [Forms].” As renowned translator Benjamin Jowett explains in his introduction to his translation of the dialogue, “The arguments [Plato uses] are nearly, if not quite, those of Aristotle; they are the objections which naturally occur to a modern student of philosophy. Many persons will be surprised to find Plato criticizing the very conceptions which have been supposed in after ages to be peculiarly characteristic of him. How can he have placed himself so completely without them? How can he have ever persisted in them after seeing the fatal objections which might be urged against them?”⁴³

As TeacherOfPhilosophy explains, Plato may have eventually come to reject his own theory of Forms, or he may have thought there was a solution to the Third Man Argument. Either way, Plato was “definitely” “aware of the problem and knew it was worth thinking about.”⁴⁴

Black and White are the Parmenides of Pokémon. Some fans may find it surprising to see Black and White “criticizing the very conceptions” which are meant to be “characteristic” of the series. How could catching and battling Pokémon possibly be unethical? Maybe the writers thought there was a “problem” with Pokémon‘s formulas and hoped to work out some sort of solution. But even if the conclusion that is reached turns out to be the same as the conclusion held before, it’s important to question our preconceived notions all the same, so that solution can truly be “worked out.” And there’s no better Pokémon games to do so than the ones so innately tied to Plato’s ideas.

Both Alder and Drayden delve into some of Plato’s ideas, siding with Aristotle that Forms aren’t consistent. In the Celestial Tower, Alder explains that after his Pokémon died, he came to realize “that strength isn’t something that remains unchanged forever.” Drayden tells you in his Gym in the post-game that the “energy in our hearts is powered by truth, ideals, or maybe dreams” and “That probably changes with what you hope for in your life.”

Forms “change” because people change—not just collectively but individually. Factors that differentiate us, such as our height, age, personality, and beliefs, change within ourselves as time goes on. Who’s to say your “true, ideal self” exists at age 25 over 35 or even 45? And who’s to say that there’s an ideal or true Form of “blueberries” when some people prefer them tart while others prefer them sweet—and that preference itself can change, too?

N’s idea to separate people and Pokémon can be seen as analogous to Plato’s theory of Forms. Plato’s divided line shows the perfect truths and ideals existing in a realm completely separated from the physical world we inhabit. According to N, Pokémon can only become “perfect” once again if they are separated from humans. We can see where he gets this idea from thanks to Reshiram and Zekrom: they were once the same Pokémon—and perhaps even “perfect”—but then split apart into what they are today when the two hero brothers disagreed with each other. Perhaps keeping Pokémon separated from people would have kept the original legendary dragon as it was, but then we wouldn’t have gotten Reshiram and Zekrom, who are perfect in their own right, both equal to each other.

Just as N’s initial beliefs surrounding mathematics limited its possibilities, Plato’s theory of Forms has its limitations, too—limitations that Plato recognized and considered. Even Plato knew that he could be wrong, because the purpose of philosophy isn’t to be “right,” it’s to learn. Learning is a lifelong process, with questions leading us to slowly but surely uncover truths and ideals we never thought possible. And just as Plato can be wrong about his own beliefs, as long as he’s willing to give the opposition fair consideration, N’s incorrect assumptions and subsequent questioning of them are what allow him to change and become a better, more perfect, version of himself.

Appropriate to the concept that ideas and beliefs—truths and ideals—can change over time, many fans are finally starting to consider and even champion the possibility that N can in fact be a rival. Despite this, it’s still taking some time for people to open themselves to the idea that N can be a Champion. The justification dissenters opt for are generally tied to series traditions surrounding the Champion, and understandably so. Black and White question the series formulas while abiding by them. That abidance makes using past series traditions fair game when it comes to interpreting its characters and concepts.

One such tradition involves the player’s induction into the Hall of Fame after defeating the Champion. The corresponding argument against N as a Champion is either that “N didn’t enter the Hall of Fame after defeating Alder” or that “When you beat N, you don’t get inducted into the Hall of Fame.” The latter is very easy to rebuke, as the final showdown was in N’s Castle rather than the Pokémon League proper, and it’s followed by a battle with Ghetsis. The “first clear” entry—which is lumped in with the Hall of Fame entries—in the PC is more indicative of how you fight both N and Ghetsis to literally clear the game. Whether N is a Champion or not, the battle against Ghetsis would always shape the status of the “Hall of Fame” entry.

The former argument is a bit more valid as a dissent, but it’s still worth pointing out that after N defeats Alder, he besieges the Pokémon League with his castle. We can’t deny that he doesn’t have the opportunity to enter the Hall of Fame properly. Still, it would be kind of sad if it was the case that you could defeat the Champion fair and square but if you somehow forgot to enter your information into the Hall of Fame, your victory doesn’t count.

“N declined the title” is another reason that gets repeated by dissenters often but actually has no foundation in the games, save for perhaps N calling himself “a Trainer who far outmatches the Champion.” The problem with this argument is that no one questions that the victor of a battle “outmatches” the loser. When the player defeats Blue in the first generation, it’s because they surpass him as a Trainer. When the player defeats Steven, Diantha, and even Cynthia, it’s not because they’re equal to them but stronger. The championship bout is meant to represent two Trainers fighting at their strongest, so when one person emerges the victor, they establish themselves as the stronger Trainer.

Misunderstandings over N’s dialogue aside, it is true that N’s goal is to defeat Alder rather than to act as reigning Champion. N intends to have everyone release their Pokémon after his victory, so there isn’t much reason to undergo the formalities that come with the Champion title. What does it matter to N if he is considered a “Champion” when there will soon be no more Trainers and thus no more Champions?

This may seem to indicate that N is, in fact, not a Champion after all. But in actuality, N is indeed a Champion, at least in essence. Whether he has an official certificate granting him the title or not, N’s final battle fulfills the same role that the Champion battle traditionally fulfills, that being the one that signifies the end of the game specifically after obtaining all the Badges and defeating the Elite Four. Even if N is the Champion “only” symbolically, symbolism is a key element of storytelling that shouldn’t be overlooked. And, as explored in the dozens upon dozens of previous chapters, symbolism is used extensively in Black and White, making this interpretation as valid as any other.

It’s important to recognize that N serves the same role as the Champion, whether literally or figuratively, because it opens up the possibility for even deeper interpretations of Black and White. As Black and White‘s initial Champion battle, N takes the games’ streamlining of gameplay and story to its ultimate conclusion. N being a Champion doesn’t detract from his status as both rival and villain, which means that the final battle with N—and the penultimate battle of Black and White—is with the three most important characters in every Pokémon game. The battle serves as a culmination of the storylines of the villain, who is the most important character to the story’s primary conflict; the Champion, who is the most important Trainer in the region; and the rival, who is the most important character to the player themselves.

Pokémon has always been a series in conflict with itself. The final battle with the Champion detracts from the more impressive—and more important, in terms of stakes—victory over the evil team that threatens the safety of the entire world. All the while, the rival is at risk of being either too invasive and thus an overall detriment to the game experience, or not involved enough to their own character’s detriment. N, as all these characters at once, ties together what would otherwise be—and oftentimes are—three entirely unrelated storylines.

Black and White brought together Pokémon‘s three separate storylines more than a decade before Scarlet and Violet, and with a final boss that is relevant to all three, to boot. Pokémon may have always had such storylines all in a single game, but they have been mostly detached from each other. Black and White return to the very essence of Pokémon by attributing narrative relevance to its mechanics that would otherwise exist only out of obligation. In doing so, N becomes the center of each of the three separated storylines, and thus they converge—and they are all the better because they are together instead of apart. No character feels superfluous, no scene feels like mere padding. Every detail is relevant to the story at large precisely because all the primary plot points are related to each other.

Some fans would prefer to believe that this is all undermined by Ghetsis being Black and White‘s true final boss. However, this view is rather reductive. As discussed in his chapter, Ghetsis is built up as a villain players want to defeat not only to stop his plans, but to support N, who is Ghetsis’s biggest victim. When looking at media, it’s important to analyze or critique what it is, not what it isn’t. As it stands, Black and White are about N being indoctrinated by someone, and N spends the games deconstructing that false worldview. It stands to reason that players would at some point get to battle the character who indoctrinated N, and Black and White account for this by escalating Ghetsis’s character in such a way that makes him an appropriate endgame boss.

What “could” Black and White have “done differently?” The answer is, quite literally, anything at all. To say a game “should have” done something differently is a slippery slope in criticism. In order to do certain things differently, such as removing Ghetsis’s battle from the end of the game, the entire story would need to be rewritten to accommodate for the changed ending. And since that “version” of the story doesn’t exist, there’s no way to say if it would have been “better” than what we do have. While it’s understandable that different people have different preferences, such as how some fans prefer every Pokémon final battle to be with a “proper” Champion and end with the player entering the Hall of Fame, preferences are not the foundation for fair judgment. Black and White would have to tell an entirely different story in order for it to end differently. The way the games do end is instead a result of the story that is told, one with themes about manipulation, and both abiding by and pushing series boundaries.

Ghetsis being the true mastermind behind Team Plasma is how Black and White stay within the Pokémon series’s traditions while N is the character the games use to question and push them. At the same time, Ghetsis’s status as the person who manipulated N makes the battle against him inextricably tied to N and thus to all three storylines just like N’s own battle. The battle against Ghetsis doesn’t detract from N in any way—it is simply an extension of the battle with N, and a natural culmination of Black and White‘s full story.

Champion in title or Champion in spirit. Penultimate boss or part of a final boss battle gauntlet. These terms exist to help explain certain video game concepts and why they’re used—in other words, how and why they “work.” But think back to our look at music theory: it isn’t the end-all be-all for determining if music is “good” or “bad.” It’s not the only standard to which people should hold music. Instead, it should help give listeners a way to express what they like or dislike about something—and it should give composers tools to use or disregard as they see fit for the music they’re trying to make, for the ideas they’re trying to convey.

In the same way, game design concepts are used to understand, in a general sense, what works and “why.” Once you know that, you can break those “rules” when appropriate. As long as what is chosen works for the story at hand, seemingly different things can be used for the same purposes.

N uses and alters series traditions in a way that feels paradoxically familiar and fresh. The understanding of what makes rivals, Champions, and villains “work” allows him to take their best qualities and expand upon them. Being open to such interpretations is also important to open up the possibility for even deeper connections between N and other characters, and a deeper understanding of Black and White as a whole. Because while Unova is physically detached from other regions, it is still connected to them—and N may obviously be connected to the characters he meets in Unova, but there are more characters who are surprisingly crucial to N’s foundation.

For N to become—or surpass—the Champion, he has to travel the region and obtain the Badges just like the player. It is sometimes believed that N earns no Badges on his journey, particularly because of the cute little detail that appears on each of the Gym statues. Cheren and Bianca’s names appear on each statue to indicate when they obtain that Gym’s Badge. This even occurs retroactively, because Bianca always obtains her Badges after the player, and sometimes even Cheren does, too. N’s name, however, never appears on these statues, leading some players to believe that he simply never gets any Badges and somehow “cheats” his way into the Pokémon League. But that raises the question: how do you explain all the Trainers on Victory Road who also aren’t listed on the statues?

As evidenced by the lone Ace Trainer in front of the Quake Badge Gate, people can only enter Unova’s Victory Road if they have all eight Badges. Just like how the strangers on Victory Road don’t have their information displayed to you on the Gym statues, it’s more reasonable to attribute the lack of N’s name to the fact that you hadn’t met him until after you started your journey. The information you see on the statues is instead limited to your childhood friends, the two characters Juniper introduces to you at the start of the game. Even Unova’s Hall of Fame abides by these rules. You can only access your own entires, but as Alder tells you each subsequent time you defeat him, he “always feel[s] a little awed by the names,” plural, “engraved [there,]” no doubt referencing the Champions who came before him.

Additionally, N’s declaration to the player at Nimbasa City is that in order to stop him, “your only hope is to collect the Badges from each area and head for the Pokémon League.” This implies that N will do the same, because if N could just find a way to skip getting the Badges and going through Victory Road, why can’t the player? It’s not like players ever needed a certain number of Badges to challenge the villains in previous games. If N could challenge the Elite Four without any Badges, surely Alder could make an exception for the player to accompany him to the Pokémon League peak to await N there. He doesn’t make such an exception, however, because N wants to battle Alder fairly—which implies getting the Badges beforehand—meaning the player must do the same.

N is also spotted in close proximity to some Gyms, even leaving the Nacrene Gym as the player enters it for the first time. This indicates that he is “ahead” of not only the player but even Cheren. To outspeed the player implies great skill and power, and this is reinforced by certain Gym Leaders’ dialogue. When Drayden says “I don’t know the depths of N’s power” in Black Version, it doesn’t mean that he didn’t battle N. It means N didn’t have to go all out against him to win.

N’s great skill is also indicated by gameplay details, specifically when it comes to items. Unlike Cheren, the more strategic battler of your childhood friends, N never has held items on his Pokémon, even during his final battle, but it actually makes a lot of sense as to why. Why bother decking out your team if you’re going to release them all after the battle anyways? The easy answer would be to gain any edge you can, but this simply implies that N battles so well that he doesn’t need any held items to help him.

On top of that, think about just how difficult things must already be for N because he releases his Pokémon after every battle. To reward player exploration, there are wild Pokémon in the routes surrounding each city that have type advantages against the nearby Gym Leaders. Thanks to this, it isn’t too bad to use newly caught Pokémon right away. But their levels are always notably lower than those of the nearby Trainers’ Pokémon, giving them disadvantages all the same. It’s no small feat to have to build an entirely new team after each battle you partake in—but maybe N’s just a natural.

Even if there is no true “universal language,” communication is the foremost way we can connect with others. Because N can communicate directly with Pokémon and understand them in turn, he not only battles more effectively, but his Pokémon trust him, too—perhaps even more than the average Pokémon already trusts its Trainer. What N doesn’t realize until the end of Black and White is that this is further proof that Pokémon become “more perfect” when they’re together with people rather than when they’re apart from each other.

Using his innate abilities, along with his Pokémon “friends” as he innocently calls them, N breezes through Unova’s Gyms. He always remains a few paces ahead of you, earning his Badges off-screen before you even visit the Gyms. Then, to top it all off, he reaches the Pokémon League before you, and usurps the Champion mere moments before you can reach the League’s peak. For many players, this feels familiar, similar to another rival they had a long, long time ago, in a faraway region…

Black and White take many concepts from the first generation of Pokémon games that only existed for gameplay purposes and imbue them with narrative relevance. Cheren exists to question the true purpose of a rival, especially when they are always destined to lose to the player. N, however, directly parallels another rival entirely: Blue, your rival from the very first Pokémon games—the rival who started it all.

Blue is considered an iconic rival for a whole slew of reasons: nostalgia, thanks to being from the very first games; an association with Gary Oak from the anime series; and his obsession with “smell[ing] you later,” even though the only thing that reeks is his foul attitude. More recent discussion has admittedly shifted thanks to rivals like Hop who manage make some players feel guilty about winning against them. The general consensus earlier in the Pokémon series’s lifespan, however, revolved around how rivals are “at their best” when they give you a sense of satisfaction or even catharsis when you defeat them. Blue does this brilliantly because he’s a rude, annoying jerk. It’s highly satisfying to wipe that smug, three pixel-wide grin off his face all eight times that you beat him.

The YouTube channel Design Doc sums up the classic consensus very well: “Blue is one of the best rivals in the series … because he feels the most like a genuine rival. … He’s not really a villain, but he is the antagonist, a cocky kid who … taunts you whenever you see him and, most importantly, he is very persistent … Earlier generations of Pokémon games are better at making you want to take your rival down, where in something like gen. 6, you do it because the game just tells you to.”⁴⁵ There’s a similar idea at play with N: he battles you often and unexpectedly. You also genuinely want to take him down, because if you don’t he’ll separate people and Pokémon for good.

Design Doc also attributes Blue’s effectiveness to how he ties into the game’s “story” at large. “From the start of the game, the player’s arc is clear: beat these Gyms and become Champion. But Blue is on that same arc as you, and he seems to always be just one step ahead, developing his team as you develop yours. You can beat him, but you need to keep up until a final battle for the title [of Champion]: a simple and perfect climax to the rivalry. The game’s progression is the story of the rival’s drive to match and surpass you, and for you to surpass them.”⁴⁶ Again we see more blatant similarities between Blue and N. In the prior quotation, you can replace the name “Blue” with “N,” and it would perfectly describe Black and White. There are some key differences, however—differences meant to enhance the tradition that was established by Blue.

As Design Doc says, “[Blue]’s not really a villain, but he is the antagonist.”⁴⁷ That’s because the villain in the first generation is Giovanni. Unfortunately, he is a villain who isn’t the antagonist. No matter how cool fans may think Team Rocket is, they are but an inconsequential blip on the player’s radar in their games, since they hold no relevance over the main story, that being the story of the player and rival challenging the region’s Gyms to see who can become Champion.

Villains don’t have to be the primary antagonist, but if they’re not the antagonist or protagonist, what is their purpose? In the first generation, villains are used to add diversity to the player’s battles. As a result, Blue is a combination of the game’s rival and Champion, but he is completely irrelevant to the substory involving Team Rocket.

As unrelated as Team Rocket is to the player’s primary goal of gathering Gym Badges and becoming Champion, however, they did set the stage for every following Pokémon game to include a similarly extraneous evil team. All the while, the rivals fluctuated in relevance regarding the goal of becoming a stronger Trainer, no longer getting the chance to even challenge the Champion themselves.

N is a return to the basics, being both rival and Champion like Blue, but also entirely new as the key figure of the evil team. As a villain, N gains an extra dimension of nuance added to the nuance in his roles of rival and Champion, and finally fans get to see a version of Blue that is integral to all facets of a Pokémon game, not just two out of the three.

In terms of gameplay, Design Doc describes how in action games, players must adapt to their rival’s ever-evolving fighting styles to keep up with them, adding a sense of escalation to their battles.⁴⁸ Blue’s Pokémon do evolve throughout the game, but once you have a strategy figured out for him, you’re mostly set. This design point is actually far more relevant to N. Unlike other Pokémon rivals, N’s team changes with every fight; even the copycat Hop doesn’t change his team as often as N does.

This can actually be seen as an indirect reference to Blue: throughout his games, Blue mentions how he’s always catching new Pokémon. On the S.S. Anne, he makes the claim that he’s “already caught 40 kinds” of Pokémon, and in the Pokémon Tower he mentions catching Cubone for his Pokédex. Before battling him for the final time at the Pokémon League, he claims to have “assembled teams that would beat any Pokémon type”—and while it’s easy enough to believe, we never get to see proof of that. He has Pokémon of varying types on his team in an attempt to always have an advantage over the player, and he does make the choice to deposit his Raticate so he doesn’t have two Normal-types, but otherwise his Pokémon are always the same.

N, on the other hand, catches and uses many different Pokémon throughout his journey, almost like a player would. As of generation nine, N is still the Trainer with the highest number of different Pokémon used in the games. But where Blue catches a lot of Pokémon to fill the Pokédex at his grandfather’s behest, and so he can have extra Pokémon ready to target the Gym Leaders’ weaknesses, N catches many Pokémon because he insists on releasing them after every battle. He doesn’t want Pokémon to battle more than is necessary, so he releases them so they don’t have to get hurt more than once.

While this comparison is between N and Blue, Blue’s drive to become the Champion is the foundation of Cheren’s character arc: being “the very best” is just what Pokémon Trainers do, so they’re going to try to do it. Blue has no motivation beyond that. Like the Design Doc video states, in X and Y you beat your rivals, who have no real motivation to be Trainers at all, out of obligation⁴⁹—but a rival like Blue similarly has no real reason to want to become Champion other than “because the game just tells [him] to.” As a result, he’s not only characteristically bankrupt, but also mechanically equivalent to just another Gym Leader: a single team, except you have to fight him more than once.

N’s nuanced character makes him interesting from a writing standpoint, but it also manages to add nuance to an otherwise static gameplay system. Much like Blue, N appears to challenge the player without warning, keeping them on their toes. N adds to this with the surprise of a completely new team with each battle. Like Blue, N makes his way to the Pokémon League while repeatedly challenging the player. N also shows through the gameplay that he has caught many Pokémon along his journey, unlike Blue, who simply tells the player that he has and hopes the player believes him.

Blue also makes some interesting declarations at the Pokémon League that are especially hard to believe. In the first generation, he tells the player, “I am the Pokémon League champion! … Do you know what that means? I’ll tell you! I am the most powerful trainer in the world!” This isn’t a one-time thing, either. This dialogue remains unchanged in FireRed and LeafGreen, with the exception of some punctuation alterations and that “trainer” and “champion” finally became proper nouns. Even after the reveal that there are two regions besides Kanto, Blue still thinks of himself as “the most powerful Trainer in the world” for defeating the Kanto Elite Four, with its “challenging” members such as Bruno with two Onix, Agatha with an Arbok and a Haunter, and Lance with two Dragonair. The saying isn’t dumped on the player out of nowhere, either. Blue preps the player for this at Silph Co., when he claims, “I’m going to the Pokémon League to boot out the Elite Four! I’ll become the world’s most powerful trainer!”

This line even goes beyond Blue himself. Your rival Trace in Let’s Go doesn’t call himself the strongest after defeating Lance the way Blue does. But when the player beats Trace, he references the line by saying, “OK! I admit it! … [Y]ou’re the strongest Trainer in the world!”

As for our other Blue-like character, N doesn’t outright call himself “the strongest Trainer in the world.” What he says is, “I’ll defeat the Champion and become unbeatable, unlike any other!” By calling himself “unbeatable,” N is describing himself as the world’s strongest Trainer indirectly. Blue’s specific dialogue isn’t neglected in Black and White, however. It’s just that N isn’t the person who says it.

Before entering the throne room where N and his dragon await, Ghetsis appears to tell you, “The king of this castle is the strongest Trainer in the world.” And to make sure players know he is referring to N and not himself, he adds, “He is accompanied by the legendary Pokémon. He has defeated the Champion. Added to all that, his heart burns with the desire to improve the world. If that’s not what makes a hero, what more do you need?”

In this ploy meant to frighten the player into thinking they can’t win, Ghetsis describes N using traits that would normally describe the player in any other game: their “desire to improve the world” manifests through them defeating the evil team, and they almost always catch a legendary Pokémon in the process. Although many players would likely disagree that N is the “strongest Trainer in the world” because the player character is always the strongest in every game, Ghetsis’s logic is pretty solid considering that characters who aren’t the player can’t do what N did.

What’s especially important about this dialogue, though, is that it all but confirms N’s connection to Blue. The callbacks go beyond rewriting Blue’s character tropes and into the realm of explicit references. This also draws our attention to even more ways N differentiates himself from Blue: one is that Blue didn’t have a legendary Pokémon by his side, although the player may have if they found one of the three birds around Kanto before entering the Pokémon League. The other difference is that while N did in fact have to defeat a Champion to get to where he is, Blue did not.

In fact, for all this talk of Champions, Alder is surprisingly not present. But even this can be seen as a throwback to the first generation, attributing meaning to what would otherwise have none. Now that we’ve opened ourselves to the idea that N is a parallel to Blue, Alder can more easily be seen as a parallel to how the first generation lacked a Champion altogether.

It’s never explained why there is no Champion when Blue challenges the Kanto Pokémon League. Players have no choice but to believe that Blue was the first person ever to defeat the Kanto Elite Four, “Two Onix Bruno” and all; or that the previous Champion up and abandoned the Pokémon League and all of Kanto without a word, something even more drastic than what Alder did, and no one took their place since. With that in mind, it’s fair to similarly believe that no one got through Unova’s actually fairly challenging Elite Four after Alder left, so N’s appearance was the first time Alder was actually obligated to return to the League.

Even the idea of a “Champion,” which has since become a concept so integral to the series that it is even used in competitive play, was used arbitrarily in Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow. The player and their rival want to be “the strongest Trainer,” but how does one achieve that? As a video game, and especially as an RPG, Pokémon requires tangible ways to indicate the player’s achievements. From a Pokémon’s ever-increasing levels to Gym Badges, the player always has some sort of “proof” of how far they’ve come. Becoming the Champion is just another way to mark your progress—in this case, it determines that the game is “over” and the credits should roll.

Like Team Rocket, the arbitrarily implemented role of Champion would go on to be a defining characteristic of the series. There is a crucial difference between the two, however. On the one hand, Team Rocket has a clearly defined role as the games’ “villains.” On the other hand, there is literally no Champion to set the expectation for any subsequent Champion’s role beyond their defeat signifying when the game is “over.” This is a major factor as to why other generations’ Champions are so inconsistent when it comes to the role they play outside of the Pokémon League. Champions like Diantha, Cynthia, and Steven, when he is Hoenn’s Champion, are never shown directly dealing with their region’s evil team, and there’s a simple explanation as to why: the first generation’s Champion also didn’t help stop any evil team. But that’s because he didn’t even exist until the last five minutes of the game.

This makes N’s supposedly nebulous role as pseudo-Champion even more intentional. In the first generation, Blue is arbitrarily crowned Champion to provide a game-concluding battle. Lance himself confirms it is arbitrary after the player defeats him. “You are the Pokémon League champion! …Or, you would have been, but … [your rival] beat the Elite Four before you.” Blue can defeat Lance and be considered the Champion, but that also suddenly changes the criteria for becoming Champion, and now the player has to defeat one extra Trainer to get the title themselves.

The practical purpose behind this is so that the final battle can be against your rival, but it is narratively achieved in an entirely contrived fashion since the way you earn the Champion title in the Pokémon League is never established to begin with. “Champion Blue” exists solely because Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow need a final battle.

But in Black and White, there are no arbitrary details. The battles with N and Ghetsis end the games, and they do so after proper narrative buildup that goes both hand-in-hand with and beyond the gameplay. The battle against Blue may be “a simple and perfect climax to [your] rivalry” according to Design Doc,⁵⁰ but that’s all Blue has: an arbitrary rivalry. Defeating N at the end of Black and White may not grant you the title of Champion, but it will put a stop to his plan to separate people and Pokémon. It will also help N come to understand your point of view and perhaps even share it. You want N to change because you know his heart is in the right place, even if what he’s asking for is unreasonable.

The reason you want to beat Blue, though, is so he doesn’t get the satisfaction of thinking he’s the stronger Trainer. You want Blue to eat your dust, but you don’t want character development for him. There is no nuance in the writing of generation one, so there’s no reason for you to want Blue to “become nice” or to change his ways. Blue is static, unchanging—some think he’s the true, ideal Form of a Pokémon rival, but as we’ve explored, Forms can and do change, just like how people change over time, and in doing so become better, more perfect, versions of themselves. Blue is a fine “idea,” but he is hardly a “character.”

Black and White take the “ideas” of the Pokémon series, such as Gym Leaders, rivals, and Champions, and breathes narrative life into them. As previously discussed, these ideas all stem from the need for particular gameplay functions. Each function, such as boss battles that test the player’s ability to navigate Type advantages, is given an appropriate form—not a Platonic Form, but a regular form, as in a structure or shape. In the case of the aforementioned boss battles, the form taken is a Gym Leader. The “form” of Pokémon characters follows their gameplay function.

The modernist principle that “form follows function” was championed at the Bauhaus, greatly considered to be “the single most influential modernist art school of the 20th century.” This German school’s influence on architecture, interior design, and industrial design is felt even today.⁵¹ From an artistic perspective, “form follows function” is simple to understand. If the object you’re designing is a chair, its function is to be sat in. So a chair’s form should serve that function in some way, usually by being comfortable to sit in. But does that mean there’s a “perfect” way, or only one “right” way to design a chair? The answer is “absolutely not.” In fact, while it’s important to design with function in mind, especially for objects that will see practical use, the Bauhaus teachings emphasized individual creativity.

There were many ways in which the Bauhaus broke free of traditional art education, but it was simultaneously “deeply concerned with intellectual and theoretical approaches to its subject.”⁵² As mentioned previously, you learn the “rules,” the “how’s” and “why’s” of something, for the purpose of knowing when to abide by them and when to break them. The reason the Bauhaus did this stems from the its founding. One of the key concerns that led to the school’s establishment were the “anxieties about the soullessness of modern manufacturing.” To combat against this, “The Bauhaus aimed to reunite fine art and functional design, creating practical objects with the soul of artworks.”⁵³

A “practical object” with the “soul of artworks” sounds like a great descriptor of the Pokémon series, or even video games as a whole. Video games are the pinnacle of composites. They combine narrative, visuals, and sound, all of which are art forms on their own, with gameplay. Some may see video games as pure entertainment or just another product with no substance beyond its gameplay, but even gameplay can become “art,” imbued with a “soul” of deeper meaning and emotion.

Depending on your stance, the most recent Pokémon games have been greatly lacking in “soul.” They can come across as mere corporate obligations to appease shareholders on a nearly yearly basis instead of giving them the necessary time and care to become “art.” The “soul” innate to the series—the joy and sense of wonder of exploring new worlds and befriending new creatures—is buried beneath mounds of capital. But even the earlier games had a soullessness to them, with characters that existed solely to fulfill gameplay obligations. That is, until Black and White finally began to apply a Bauhaus approach to the series’s own version of “form follows function.” Because of this, when Black and White “follow tradition,” it feels far more like an intentional narrative point rather than like an obligation.

Black and White do this, of course, by breaking free of its own groundwork. By questioning the series’s foundation, Black and White come to fully understand themselves. The games can then keep what works and enhance it, both mechanically and narratively. The Pokémon series foundation becomes the design theory that can freely be broken or recast based on the individual games’ needs. As the Bauhaus’s own founder Walter Gropius said, “The boon of imagination is always more important than all technique, which always adapts itself to man’s creative will.”⁵⁴

In his blog, Masuda confirms N’s full name to be “Natural Harmonia Gropius.”⁵⁵ The arguably most well-known Gropius in history is Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and one of the greatest modern architects. This connection ties the Bauhaus even more directly to Black and White. The way Gropius described one of his projects built using Bauhaus principles, the Harvard Graduate Center, can also be applied to Black and White: “If the college is to be the cultural breeding ground for the coming generation, its attitude should be creative, not imitative.”⁵⁶ If Black and White are to be the cultural breeding ground for the upcoming generations of Pokémon games, its attitude must be to creatively break free of its foundations, not be entirely imitative.

All works of architecture are “collections of elegant formulas.” Engineering and mathematics are used to build practical and functional spaces. This is combined with artistic skill, the innately human element that gives everything its individuality while also implementing components that other areas of study can’t account for, such as comfort and appeal. To add to that, it isn’t a single person who builds an entire building, and it isn’t always a single person who designs it, either. Gropius himself highly valued collaboration, as indicated by the fact that he worked “with the younger architects that made up The Architects’ Collaborative” to design the Harvard Graduate Center, and he commissioned many different artists for the purpose of displaying their works inside the building.⁵⁷

Yet another way the Bauhaus finds itself affecting Black and White is indirectly. The Bauhaus may have been German, but its teachings and styles had a major impact on Europe and the United States.⁵⁸ And after the German government of 1933 closed down the Bauhaus,⁵⁹ many of the school’s artists and teachers, including Gropius, fled Germany, bringing their influence directly to the United States,⁶⁰ where they would be passed on and on.

The people influenced by the Bauhaus weren’t limited to those taught its artistic principles or who learned about them in an art history course. Since “the Bauhaus also incorporated mass production techniques” in its creation of art and objects, many of its artists’ works were meant to reach “a wide audience.”⁶¹ Many people have been exposed to Bauhaus-inspired works, and thus have been influenced by them, unknowingly or consciously. If you’ve ever been in awe of a New York City skyscraper, with their “floor-to-ceiling windows”⁶² and predominantly angular shapes to make the most of the space allotted to them, you have been influenced by Gropius and the Bauhaus.

Almost everyone in this day and age is inspired by Bauhaus principles with or without realizing it. Perhaps they’ve been influenced by work that they don’t realize is also inspired by Bauhaus principles, or maybe they’ve been influenced by someone who themselves was influenced by the Bauhaus. As hexagons, we are touched by other hexagons, and in their infinitely tessellating manner, those hexagons are touched by others. The result is a mosaic of influences stretching so far that we can’t hope to see it in its entirety. N is innately connected to Blue, a character who N has never met, two characters living parallel lives that don’t need to directly converge to influence each other.

Design Doc also posits that good rivals “[make] you feel like you are fighting the protagonist of a parallel game.”⁶³ This can be said of Blue, since he himself is a regular Pokémon Trainer just like the player—and one who, in the original games, had no Trainer class just like the player. But this is also the same of N: the legendary Pokémon he obtains is the one the player should have gotten, if following the formulas of the series. The legendary Pokémon the player catches always matches the name of their game, but N is the one to get the dragon that matches the name of either Black or White. He also obtains said Pokémon at around the time the player would in traditional titles: after earning the seventh Badge and before getting the eighth.

N’s design also features a cap, an item almost always given to the player characters. Those who don’t have a cap always have some other form of headwear instead, even if their rivals don’t. Interestingly, N’s cap is almost exactly the same design as Red’s original cap. The major difference between them is that Red’s hat is, unsurprisingly, mostly red, and adorned with a pin. N’s cap is instead mostly black with no pin.

This isn’t a standard-issue cap, either. No other character has a hat like this, not even Red in his remake designs. The closest would be Ethan’s, which is still quite distinct. It’s strictly half black and yellow with a red Poké Ball design on the front. This is actually closer to Hilbert’s hat than N’s, potentially meant to parallel Ethan’s battle with Red atop Mt. Silver in generation two with Hilbert and N’s battle at the Unova Pokémon League.

As the “hero of Unova,” N is similarly a hero—one of the main characters—of Black and White, taking rival design cues from Blue, but visual design cues from the protagonist Red. N doesn’t entirely neglect Blue from his visual design, however: the eye-catching splashes of green in N’s hair and shoes stand out amidst his neutral blacks, whites, and beiges, making them the focus of his color scheme. Many of green’s symbolic meanings are easily attributed to N, including “magical powers”⁶⁴ such as speaking to Pokémon, and even the “perfection”⁶⁵ N seeks for Pokémon that Ghetsis, with his sickly shades of green, can never attain for himself. Perhaps most intriguingly is that, in alignment with the first generation’s games’ original names, Blue’s name in Japanese is Green.

But there is a key difference between Blue and N here—and thus, there is a key difference between Blue and Red, and that’s how Blue treats his Pokémon. Blue may have a putrid attitude, but he never displays qualities that would indicate that he thinks of Pokémon as mere tools. Fans generally consider that kind of mentality as edging on the extreme, and is reserved for the lowliest of villains and Silver. Blue is never written in a way that indicates that his nastiness towards the player seeps into the way he treats his Pokémon.

But it’s not actually a matter of blatant cruelty. Just like how Bianca’s father had good intentions for not letting her explore the world, players wouldn’t think they’re being cruel towards their Pokémon, but most of them do in fact treat their Pokémon like tools. This is most commonly seen when players capture a Pokémon for the sole purpose of having them learn and use HMs on the overworld. The common fan monicker for such team members is “HM Slave,” poor in taste but tragically accurate and self-aware of the disregard the player has for the Pokémon.

It’s not just designated HM users that are used as tools, though. After defeating a Grass Gym Leader, players may deposit a recently caught Fire-type Pokémon into the PC, only ever withdrawing it if they need to evolve it for a Pokédex entry. A long-term party member may be replaced without a second thought once the player catches a legendary Pokémon in hopes of having an easier time against the Elite Four. Or a legendary Pokémon may be snatched away from its long-time home to sit, waiting, until they get traded for a version-exclusive legendary later.

These Pokémon are deposited into a PC box, no different from money into a bank account, potential trade currency, where they stay, trapped. At least the room N grew up in had some toys for him to play with. Most players don’t even think to release these Pokémon back into the wild where they can at least get to see the light of day.

Boxes upon boxes across decades of games—some are so messy they’re beyond organization; others are neatly organized, a display case filled with living, breathing trophies. Blue catches Pokémon for his teams and for his Pokédex, filling his boxes with Pokémon he’s only ever told you about but has never actually shown you. He treats them as tools to make it to the end of the game and nothing more. We may not realize it at first, but Prof. Oak confirms it himself. “Do you understand why you lost?” he asks Blue as the curtain falls on his five seconds of fame as Kanto’s Champion. “You have forgotten to treat your Pokémon with trust and love!”

To the player, Prof. Oak says, “You understand that your victory was not just your own doing! The bond you share with your Pokémon is marvelous!” But how is it that Prof. Oak can say such a thing when he has no way to know how the player approached the game?

One of the biggest appeals of Pokémon is that you can play the games however you like. “Challenge runners,” with their near endless supply of “solo runs” and “Hardcore Friend-Enemy-Lover-Monotype-Duotype-Egg-Wonder-Shiny-locks,” may use their teammates like “tools” to get to the end of any and every game, but they still prove that any Pokémon can be usable under the right circumstances. In addition, the fact that they care enough about the games at all to find “new” ways to play them is a testament to the bond they share with both the series and their Pokémon. “Weak” Pokémon that most people wouldn’t even think to use on their team end up the stars of their own great underdog stories in challenge runs.

Fans who play Pokémon more “traditionally” or even “casually” are just as valid. Some fans may find it tragic that the games are designed in a way where some Pokémon are just weak, and thus made to be replaced with stronger Pokémon down the line. But the fact is that these fans also care—they value the bond between people and Pokémon to the point where they lament that their favorites aren’t as “viable” as others.

This is why the Pokémon series protagonists are always depicted as innately “good” and with a strong, “pure” bond with their Pokémon. By simply playing a Pokémon game, you are displaying a loving bond between yourself and your Pokémon. If you didn’t possess such a bond, if you didn’t like the games or the Pokémon themselves, you wouldn’t have played the game to begin with, or you would have set the game aside to never finish later.

This is also balanced by how there’s no practical way for the games to portray every single Pokémon as an individual with their own personalities and desires as they’re intended to be. More recent Pokémon games have attempted this in a highly limited way that comes with its own complications, since the games ideally won’t force the player to use any particular Pokémon. As one example, Lillie and “Nebby” the Cosmog spend most of Sun and Moon at each other’s side. When Cosmog evolves into the game’s mascot legendary, however, the game must give the player a way to catch it. And so Lillie offers the player to catch Nebby—and the game won’t progress until they do so—under the reasoning that she “can’t take [Nebby] on the adventures [it] want[s]” and “can’t give [Nebby] the fierce battles [it] want[s].” To the player she says, “I want you to face Nebby as only a Trainer can. And I want you to give it a ball to call home. I know this is what Nebby wants…”

But for all this talk about what Nebby “wants,” it’s the player’s “wants” that take precedence. If you don’t want to use a legendary Pokémon on your team for any reason, including out of concern for making the endgame “too easy,” or if you simply prefer keeping your prior team as-is, Nebby will never get to go on any “adventures” or partake in any “fierce battles.” It’s out of the bag and into the PC box, the former at least giving it the chance to pop out once in a while and give everyone a few laughs. There is no escaping a PC box, however, unless the player expressly wants it.

You can keep Nebby boxed away forever and still be considered a kind and loving hero by everyone in Alola, Lillie included. Even when Pokémon tries to depict its titular creatures as individuals, it’s their owners’ desires that always come first. And there is no way for the game to account for what each player “wants” when they play, or what they will do. The only thing the games can account for is that they will finish the game. If they don’t, they will never get the chance to catch Nebby, never get told by Prof. Oak that “The bond you share with your Pokémon is marvelous!”

But this is very different for the NPCs of the games, characters like Blue and N who are written in specific ways that the other characters are aware of and can respond to. Prof. Oak can say that Blue doesn’t treat his “Pokémon with trust and love” because that is how Blue behaves, even if it isn’t made entirely clear through the games’ writing. But this raises the question of “why” Blue was intended to treat his Pokémon like tools. Why wasn’t it enough for the player to just be the “stronger” Trainer by beating Blue in one final battle and leave it at that?

The simple answer is that this is the only way Red, Green, and Blue, rudimentary in gameplay and storytelling as they are, can attempt to convey the importance of friendship and trust between Trainers and Pokémon. “It’s you and me,” “You’re my best friend,” and “You teach me and I’ll teach you” aren’t concepts introduced by the anime to then make their way into the games later. These are core elements of Pokémon as more than just a franchise but as a concept. Thus, the first generation of games give a narrative reason to why the player is able to defeat Blue despite them being “equals.”

This, however, reveals the hidden irony of Blue’s character: he is never really the player’s equal. The same “reason” he loses to the player at the Pokémon League is the same reason he loses to the player in every other battle: because he doesn’t love his Pokémon enough. Blue denies the player’s skill after each loss, but that isn’t proof that Blue is their equal—it’s an additional way to convey that Blue is rude. Blue may always be a few steps ahead of the player on their journeys, but the sun is always behind the player, illuminating their kindness while casting their shadow over Blue.

How, then, can the games justify the player always defeating their rival if the main narrative factor the player has in their favor is a “strong bond with their Pokémon?” Some games try to get around this by making the rivals intentionally much weaker than the player, such as in the cases of Wally and Hop. But for the positive points such rivals may have, Blue’s intention is to be the player’s equal. This is because there is an innate satisfaction when battling someone who is truly your equal—but Blue’s lack of love for his Pokémon undermines that. It also certainly doesn’t help to know that the character that serves as the foundation for the series’s “rival” archetype comes with such narrative discord built in.

Knowing that, can Pokémon possibly craft a story with a rival that is a true equal to the player if the rival must still lose for the game to continue or even conclude? How can a rival have a strong bond with their Pokémon, and be a Trainer skilled enough to be an equal to the player, but still be defeated each time? The first generation thoroughly lacks in meaningful narrative yet manages to contain such a blatant narrative conundrum—how can it be amended?

Black and White take on this task through N. He displays the aforementioned visual and character traits of the player character, making him much more believably the player’s equal. N also has an incredibly strong bond with his Pokémon—he just doesn’t realize it. Where Blue walks in the player’s shadow, N’s world is covered in shadow because he is trapped within his cave, with no way to see the true light outside. And as N stumbles through his cave, he has no way to see that there’s not only a powerful bond that exists between people and Pokémon, but that he possesses that bond just as much as the player does.

N, the rival and the villain, is written so that it makes perfect sense—and is inevitable—that he loses his battles to the player. But unlike the series’s “inherently weaker Trainer” rivals, N isn’t written as weaker than the player. He and the player are designed as two inseparable sides of the same coin. As a character who is closer to Black and White‘s protagonist than Blue is to Red, it’s only natural to consider N as the player’s true equal. And this point is crucial, because it is the people we consider our equals who we try to see eye to eye with.

We are each the main character of our own lives, which makes us supporting characters anywhere else. Being a supporting character is hardly a negative, though, as it’s through supporting each other that we leave our marks on the world, improving it one encounter at a time.

“In games, some of the best rivals not only serve as a foil for the main character but also a catalyst for self-improvement and character development,” according to Design Doc.⁶⁶ Although this quote comes from the same video that uses Blue as one of two “prime examples” of video game rivals, the statement is far more general in nature, since the player character in main series Pokémon games is a silent “self-insert” and has no character or development whatsoever. But a rivalry goes two ways: both characters have to be rivals with each other. And where there is no character development for Blue, there is for N. In Black and White, N serves as a foil for the main character, and the main character serves as a catalyst for N’s self-improvement and character development.

While Blue is the player’s equal in skill but not in compassion, N is the player’s equal in skill, and perhaps exceeding in compassion. He thinks all Trainers are like Blue, and as such, he thinks the relationship between people and Pokémon is a net negative for Pokémon. But at the very core of the franchise is the idea that the bond between people and Pokémon is special, and benefits both parties equally. Pokémon can bring out bad qualities in certain people, and that’s worth recognizing. But Pokémon mostly bring out people’s very positive qualities, such as kindness, leadership, and even justice when it comes time to protect them from harm—all qualities attributed to philosopher kings.

People also have a positive effect on Pokémon, helping them hone and harness their innate powers. While it seems that Pokémon, with their amazing, fantastical powers that people don’t possess, wouldn’t benefit from human influence, the reality is more akin to the influence people have over each other. We each have our own strengths and weaknesses—our own “powers”—and the people around us—friends, family, teachers, and more—help us hone and draw out our “abilities.” Even the first English anime opening attests to this. The lyric following “I will travel across the land, searching far and wide” is generally heard as “Each Pokémon, to understand the power that’s inside,” but that implies the singer is searching for Pokémon to learn about their power for their own benefit, to become a stronger Trainer. The actual lyric, however, is “Teach Pokémon to understand the power that’s inside,”⁶⁷ tying in with the line “You teach me and I’ll teach you.” It’s only when Pokémon are with a Trainer that they can reach their true potential. Even Pokémon that we tend to consider especially powerful on their own, such as legendary Pokémon, only ever use their attacks randomly in battle just like any other wild Pokémon. People and Pokémon truly bring out the best in each other, and when they mix, they don’t become “gray.” They remain distinctly person or Pokémon, and they continue to support each other in ways only they can, precisely because of their differences.

N never has the chance to truly develop any of his Pokémon besides his legendary dragon because he releases them after each battle. Despite this, he progresses through his own journey at a faster pace than even the player, who has the luxury of keeping their Pokémon around and potentially giving them a level advantage over their opponents. N’s endless compassion for Pokémon gives him arguably the strongest bond with them of anyone, added to the fact that he can speak with them.

A “universal language,” like math is supposed to be, would undoubtedly make understanding each other much easier. But as Wamsted says, there is no “universal language” except for “the one we make by doing the hard work of communicating with each other.”⁶⁸ Knowing someone’s language doesn’t mean you can truly communicate with them. Communication requires listening and a good faith attempt to understand the other person. N’s love of Pokémon undoubtedly resulted in his own Pokémon reciprocating the feeling, meaning they most likely didn’t want to be released. Just like how the player’s Pokémon enjoy being by their side, N’s Pokémon don’t want to be separated from him, either. But despite hearing that, knowing that that’s how his Pokémon feel, N still releases them. He is so certain that Trainers are bad for Pokémon and Pokémon just don’t realize it, when it is actually N who doesn’t realize that Trainers and Pokémon belong together.

On the other hand, the player puts in “the hard work” of understanding their Pokémon by making it through the game. The player doesn’t need to be able to speak to or directly understand Pokémon to be compassionate towards them or to bring out the best of their innate abilities, just as we don’t need a true “universal language” to communicate with, understand, and respect each other.

In fact, if we all spoke the same language, things would be pretty boring. Words that exist only in one language, indicative of unique cultural values or objects that are unique to their area, would be lost. Our lack of a universal language stems from a lack of a universal experience, but as the player’s bond with their Pokémon shows, it’s our very differences that bring out the best in each other. Hexagons can tesselate infinitely, but you can’t make an interesting mosaic if all the hexagons are the exact same color. If we were all gray, as the supposedly “perfect” “original dragon” of Unova, the resulting mosaic would feature absolutely nothing of interest. It’s our differences—our shades of black, white, and any and all other colors—that not only make us beautiful, but allow us to make something even more beautiful, more perfect, when in collaboration with others.

A defining moment in most Pokémon games is when the player encounters, battles, and captures the game’s mascot legendary Pokémon. In Black and White, you defeat the Elite Four, watch the region’s Gym Leaders step in to defend you from the sages, and make your way to N’s Castle’s throne room—all while the stone housing the legendary dragon Pokémon lays completely still. After so many feats that most people in the Pokémon world couldn’t even dream of achieving, you still aren’t considered a “hero,” and thus you enter the throne room without even knowing that the legendary Pokémon looks like. Your dragon awakens only when N’s own dragon lands at his side.

We’ve already explored the myriad ways N portrays qualities of the player, or, thought of another way, the protagonist of a traditional Pokémon title. As the hero of Unova—and by all means, the hero of Black and White, complete with his own character arc that the traditional protagonist can never truly have—N obtains the game’s mascot legendary Pokémon without any help or input from the player. The player, on the other hand, requires N and his own dragon to obtain a legendary Pokémon of their own.

To understand Plato’s Forms, we must discern the shadows. As Bianca discovers, we learn who we are through comparison with others—and not competitive comparison, but through healthy and fair recognition of what is possible, narrowing down from there what you enjoy as well as what you’re capable of. N and the player are, similarly, defined by each other, just as we are all defined by the people around us. When two hexagons meet, one doesn’t just touch the other—they are each touched, affecting each other in inseparable connection.

In the Pokémon world, Pokémon battles are a form of communication and connection between not just people and their team of Pokémon, but people and the other people they battle. No Pokémon, however, means there will be no battles, and thus no connecting with each other.

Pokémon are also opportunities. Pokémon give you the possibility to travel the region, to meet new people, to learn new things, and to expand your horizons. This is why Alder insists that “traveling is wonderful.” The importance of opportunities is that it grants knowledge, and as the saying goes, “Knowledge is power,” power to change the world or to make your dreams into reality. If you remove Pokémon from people, you take away almost all their opportunities—and open the possibility that those who retain their Pokémon will have much more power than everyone else, which is incredibly dangerous. N’s posited solution to Pokémon misuse will actually make it that much easier for Pokémon to be misused, and for the good and kindhearted Trainers to no longer have a way to protect themselves or other Pokémon.

Thankfully, N gives the player the opportunity to try to stop him. He doesn’t ease up on his mission, but he never tries to convince the player that their efforts are futile the way Ghetsis does. N also doesn’t dismiss his observations of the player’s kindness with an “I’m not going to worry about it” like Cheren does when he first meets N. While N’s confidence in himself is certainly a factor as to why he invites the player to try to stop him, it’s also because of his inherent goodness, compassion, and sense of justice. He wants the person whose convictions are stronger to emerge victorious, because if there’s even a slight chance that he’s wrong, the loss will no doubt sting, but he’ll accept it if it’s truly for the benefit of Pokémon.

While Bianca may have had an easier time knowing it was possible to break free from her father’s control, N wasn’t entirely incapable of it himself. Starting from the train tracks in his room which were given to him by Ghetsis but taken apart by N’s own hand, N was subconsciously primed to break free of Ghetsis’s harmful influence, to reach out to someone who he could call an equal and a true friend—someone who cares for Pokémon just as much as he does.

N and the player are true equals, “Similar forces from opposite sides,” as Design Doc describes ideal video game rivals.⁶⁹ One fights for truth, the other for ideals, two sides of the same coin. They both love Pokémon, they simply interpret the core values of the series differently.

Truths and ideals can coexist just like different peoples’ different interpretations of the same story. But some interpretations may be founded on incorrectly remembered scenes or dialogues, just as some beliefs may not be built on facts. N’s goals were built on falsehoods, making them primed for correction, to work towards a version of N’s goal that doesn’t punish the many for the crimes of the few. This attempt at correction is the foundation of N’s character arc—a rival who is the player’s true equal—and the story of Black and White as a whole. And as a result, it is thanks to N that Ghetsis’s plan fails. Ghetsis labels N “a freak without a human heart,” but it’s N’s humanity—his heart—that gives him his compassion towards Pokémon and his desire for an equal.

Just as the heart, “Symbolically, … was the body’s sun, animating all,”⁷⁰ N’s heart moves him to reach for his equal, and illuminates his truths, ideals, dreams, and goodness from within. That equal, the player, defeats N in his castle because they were welcomed by N, an unplanned variable in Ghetsis’s equation that causes it to crumble, and for a wonderful friendship to rise in its place.

N is always the same person, but depending on your perspective, your interpretation of him may change. He is the black to Bianca’s white and the white to Cheren’s black. He’s also the morally gray to the player’s clearness. His ability to speak to Pokémon also makes him the gray between the people and Pokémon, the black and the white, that he initially wants to separate. In his official art and in the moments he’s shown speaking to the player up close in-game, N’s eyes are depicted as gray, coinciding with the blacks and whites in his shirts and hat.

“Black” and “blank,” a word associated with “white,” both share the same word root, coming from Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic words to do with “burning.” A fire emits white-hot embers and leaves behind blackened, charred ashes.⁷¹ And most of the observable universe is made up of plasma, even if things that are in the state of plasma can seem quite different from each other, such as Reshiram’s fire and Zekrom’s lightning. Our world is comprised of gray areas just as much as it is black and white: things that are distinctly different yet tied together by an underlying similarity. Hexagons all aligned, in every color imaginable. The way we perceive these colors may not be entirely accurate, especially since colors look different to the human eye when placed beside other colors, but that’s just one way we are affected by our surroundings, influenced by the world around us, defined and redefined by our bonds from our story’s prologue up until its final page.

As Black and White‘s story nears its inevitable closing, N opens his heart to the player. “I couldn’t believe there were Pokémon that liked people. Because, up until that moment, I’d never known a Pokémon like that,” he explains. “The longer my journey continued, the more unsure I became. All I kept meeting were Pokémon and people who communicated with one another and helped one another. That was why I needed to confirm my beliefs by battling with you. I wanted to confront you hero-to-hero. I needed that more than anything.”

Any walls that were left between you and N have completely lowered thanks to your combined efforts, just as N’s dragon broke down the castle wall to reach N and battle you. N stands before you, and behind him, the crumbling castle wall resembles the opening of a cave. It lets in a bright light, unlike the stormy darkness from when you encountered him at the top of Dragonspiral Tower.

“What I should do now,” he continues, “is something I’ll have to decide for myself.” N shall press onward to his own future, and just like Cheren and Bianca, he is the only one who can determine where that future will go. But also like Cheren and Bianca, it’s thanks to the people around him that he has some guidance over what that future can be. As N bids you farewell and departs on the back of his dragon, he finally steps out of the cave that had trapped him for so long. While N’s own efforts were a major factor in him reaching this point, it was also thanks to the player that he has finally achieved this phenomenal feat.

By ourselves, we are lost and undefined. Through connecting with others, we can find our own light.

Continue to the Closing