When considering the past player characters from Pokemon games as a part of my ideas for paper topics I first began to look back to the beginning. That is, the days of Pocket Monsters: Red & Green. Red, the player character and protagonist of the games was the sole player character in these games. I had played Pokemon Yellow way back when far after its release, so I brushed up on my understanding of Red as a character with a walk through of Pokemon Blue by Leuroi on YouTube. 

What I found immediately interesting of course is that I had always known that there was no female trainer character option in the original games, but I never considered the impact this might have on female players. I asked a few of my female friends about their experience with the earliest games and if it bothered them at all playing as Red. Back then it didn’t bother most of them since they were so young, but today they said it is somewhat bothersome and agreed that it somewhat breaks the immersion when playing a game as a different gender than that of which you identify with. I had my introduction. Red would pave the way for the rest of my paper from that point forward in how immersion can be broken through player characters, and what these player characters specifically represented through their designs and “character”.

I wanted to quickly note something about my paper, as I will use a word I stole from Hollow Knight to describe most of the player characters. In my notes I use the word “vessel” to describe Red, as he is quite literally an empty being with no shown emotion, desire, or actual character beyond his physical traits, much like the main character of Hollow Knight. Red however is a vessel for the player of the Pokemon games he is within. Players use Red to interact with other characters, catch Pokemon and do many other things in the universe. When I played Pokemon Yellow, I was Red, and similarly as I’m playing Pokemon Black, I am Hilda. Though the characters might have their own designs preordained I put myself in the shoes of those characters and create a type of persona for them. I believe different people like to do this differently, in which they create personas for their characters that either directly mirror their own personalities or are completely different. For me, I like to pretend I’m a badass Pokemon trainer who wishes to conquer half of the planet sometimes. Other times I like to consider myself a hero with an ulterior motive, who’s powerful Pokemon cannot be stopped by the mere grunts of some stupid evil team. Hilda as a character I can relate to in different ways. Though her design isn’t exactly what I might look like, or I might wear I can still immerse myself for the most part in being her. Whereas if I were to play as Hilbert the disgusting piece of trash that he is, I would likely have difficulty staying immersed. It is with this thinking that I continued playing Pokemon Black and taking notes on how immersed I felt I was, while also considering the female characters within the game and how I might be less immersed if I were a girl playing as a guy, or vice versa. 

I actually restarted my Pokemon journey in Pokemon Black originally. To better understand what a female who prefers a more feminine look might experience in playing the early Pokemon games as Red I had begun my adventure again playing as Hilbert, my complete opposite and frankly one of the ugliest protagonists to exist. But, I’ll discuss that in more depth later on.