Trash Pokémon deserve love, too

I like the trash Pokémon. Not the dippy grinning ice cream cone or the Bread Dog. I mean the actual trash Pokémon, the ones made of sludge and refuse and municipal negligence. They fascinated me when I first encountered them and were a big reason why Pokémon captured my imagination.

Most Pokémon fall neatly into the animal, vegetable, or mineral category. A small subset doesn’t, the weird humanoid-ish critters like Mewtwo and the Hitmon family of… whatever they are. Then there’s a smaller group of inanimate objects like Klefki and Magnemite and an even smaller set that’s none of those at all. These (gender indeterminate) guys:

A glimpse at the Pokedex entries shows just how different they are from their peers. Like Trubbish in Pokémon White: “The combination of garbage bags and industrial waste caused the chemical reaction that created this Pokémon.” And Grimer in Pokémon Yellow: “Made of hardened sludge. It smells too putrid to touch. Even weeds won’t grow in its path.” Even Koffing, who was just a ball of gas for years before the Pokémon Alpha Sapphire Pokedex said yeah humans did this one too: “Koffing embodies toxic substances. It mixes the toxins with raw garbage to set off a chemical reaction that results in a terribly powerful poison gas. The higher the temperature, the more gas is concocted by this Pokémon.”

They’re what happen when natural forces mix with human-made elements, in other words. Usually bad elements. Then with a wave of some magic Pokémon wand, life is born. Eat your heart out, Victor Frankenstein. And there’s nothing else like them in all of Pokémon — not in the first generation, not in Scarlet and Violet. Not even in Legends Z-A, despite the fact that it takes place entirely in a crowded city.

This mystical in-between-ness captivated seven-year-old me when I first played Pokémon Blue in the late 1990s. The unusual blend of earthy and urban, fantasy and sci-fi was unlike anything I’d seen or read before. Sure, I realize now the concept wasn’t that uncommon in media at the time (hello, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind) but I was a kid! The only similar reference point I had was Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, and besides, its sentient poison cloud was clearly evil, not a weird evolutionary accident rooted in the natural world. I liked Pokémon for a lot of reasons at the time, but this imaginative take on biology was a big reason why it imprinted itself on my mind.

Game Freak might’ve moved on to food items and Stonehenge in recent years, leaving behind the sentient sludge and the unique force that gave them life. And my ardor for the series might’ve cooled as the decades wore on, too. But I’ll always have a special place in my heart for the trash Pokémon.