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pokemontvtime · 3 months

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Charmander and Trauma (S1E11)

As Ash proceeds on his Pokemon journey, he ends up picking up a lot of new Pokemon friends.

Few are as iconic, though, as his Charmander, who will eventually evolve into Ash's disobedient Charizard.

It's that disobedience that I really want to delve into today, though.

Ash acquires Charmander after finding it abandoned on a rock. Charmander's trainer, Damian, has told it that he will return to pick it up later, even though he has no intentions of doing so.

Charmander is shown to be an exceedingly loyal Pokemon, who continues to wait and hope that Damian will return even when its life is endangered by doing so. Ash, Misty, and Brock venture out in the middle of a fierce storm to rescue Charmander, knowing that if its flame were to go out it would die.

While a night in the Pokemon center brings it back to tip top shape, it is shown to still feel obligated to wait on Damian to return, still having faith that the trainer it cares for will show it the same care in return.

After a confrontation with Team Rocket, Charmander saves Pikachu, and seems to begin to accept that Damian may not be coming back. It seems to consider traveling with Ash and his friends instead, who have so far shown it kindness.

But just when Charmander begins to consider its new reality without Damian, Damian himself shows up and tries to convince Charmander to return with him instead.

Charmander is torn between its old loyalty and the kindness it has experienced with Ash.

When questioned, Damian admits to Charmander that he had not intended to return, and is glad that its period of abandonment has 'strengthened it up,' so that he didn't have to go through the trouble of training it himself.

This, as well as the support of its new friends, seems to seal Charmander's decision, and it refuses to rejoin Damian, sending him packing (with the help of Ash's Pikachu), and joins Ash on his continuing journey.

While this makes for a very heartwarming episode, and a wonderful backstory for the little Charmander, the end of the episode seems to suggest that most of that story won't be returned to, as it's treated very much like an "adventure of the week."

While Damian himself won't return in future episodes, nor will overt references tying it all up, I think you can point to a lot of Charmander's experiences here and understand how it leads narratively into Ash's disobedient Charizard.

Charmander went through a pretty intense trauma, with abandonment and a near-death experience. It was also told pretty explicitly by a trainer it had once trusted that its only useful was based in its power.

In the episode "March of the Exeggutor Squad," (S1E43), Charmander evolves after an intense fight to prevent the extermination of a herd of Exeggutor. Ash's other Pokemon all failed to disrupt the herd, who were subjected to a Hypnosis attack and began marching toward a town center.

It's shown that only Charmander's flames are able to snap them out of their trance, and the weight of the entire situation falls on Charmander. If it fails, a bomb that was planted will go off, and kill the Exeggutor.

Charmander is able to pull of the feat, and the experience triggers its evolution into Charmeleon.

However, right away Charmeleon doesn't seem to show the same characteristics of Charmander, who'd been to this point an obedient, loyal, and generally sweet Pokemon.

In the following episode, "The Problem With Paras," (S1E44), Charmeleon is asked to battle Paras, but to "take it easy" and let Paras have a free win in order to gain battling confidence.

Charmeleon disregards all these orders and tries to battle all-out.

This continues to be a problem, as two episodes later in "Attack of the Prehistoric Pokemon," (S1E46), Charmeleon again refused to obey orders, taking a snooze rather than attempting to battle the attacking fossil Pokemon.

Only an attack by Aerodactyl caused Charmeleon to take an interest in the battle. It evolved into Charizard, seemingly in pure frustration at being unable to follow the flying Aerodactyl.

But Charizard didn't obey Ash either, with its primary goal being to attack the Aerodactyl.

Interestingly, though, Charizard is shown to still care, at least in some form, about Ash. In the resolution to the plot, Jigglypuff sings all the people and Pokemon to sleep, including Aerodactyl. Charizard stays awake just long enough to catch Ash mid-air, and make a safe landing on the ground. Somewhere under that exterior of disobedience, Charizard still cares!

Ash would continue to try and coax Charizard into obeying in future battles, but it would seldom work out. Charizard only seemed to show interest in fighting other Pokemon it percieved as strong, and rarely followed Ash's orders when it did so.

Charizard's disobedience ultimately cost Ash his spot at the Indigo League, where Charizard's refusal to battle saw Charizard disqualified, and Ash out of the tournament.

It wouldn't be until Ash's journeys in the Orange Islands that this attitude changed. In the episode "Charizard Chills," (S2E25), Ash battled with a trainer named Tad, who used a Poliwrath.

Charizard attempted to brute force its way through the battle, disregarding Ash's commands and only using its fire. This went very badly for Charizard, who took a bad hit and ended up frozen in ice by an ice attack.

The Pokemon Charizard was fighting, Poliwrath, was very significant, though I didn't realize this myself until I was doing my own reading on the topic.

Apparently, in the original Japanese broadcast of Charmander's appearance (S1E11), Damian's reason for abandoning Charmander is specifically that it was unable to beat a Poliwag in a battle. Thus, the choice of Poliwrath here is likely a nod to this original piece of lore.

Tad leaves, scolding Ash that he should train his Pokemon better, and Ash frantically works to free Charizard, and spends the entire night sitting up with it. Ash's friends help him to build a fire and bring him blankets, and Ash stays up, rubbing Charizard to try and help warm it up.

Charizard at one point begins to panic, lashing out at Ash's attempts to help, but is too weak to actually put up a fight. Ash doesn't let these attempts deter him, and he continues all through the night, talking soothingly to Charizard. He admits, at one point, that he hasn't always done a good job as a trainer, but doubles down that he wants to continue trying to get better.

Charizard, though Ash doesn't know, can hear Ash's words, and though there isn't a spoken monologue here, it is implied that Charizard takes Ash's words and earnest care to heart, and re-examines how it has been treating Ash up till now.

After this incident, Charizard obeys Ash (though it is still shown to have a sometimes-rebellious spirit), and becomes one of the strongest members of his team.

It's easy to come away from the character development with a pretty surface-level thinking, that Ash finally earned Charizard's trust, and was able to begin using it in battles. This would not be wrong at all, and is definitely a piece of the story that the show is telling.

It's also easy to write off, only a slightly deeper note, that the show was attempting to incorporate mechanics from the video games. In the Pokemon games, if a Pokemon is too high a level (usually determined by the number of badges you've earned), it will refuse to obey you. Charizard may have been simply a way for the show to demonstrate what that looks like in the universe of the show. And I definitely think that is a piece of it as well!

However, I think that Charizard's disobedience also makes sense through the lens of a Pokemon steeped in trauma, who is trying to cope with both the trauma and the continued expectations placed upon it.

Charmander moved quickly past the abandonment by its previous trainer, possibly without really processing that, and trying to take on faith that the same thing wouldn't happen again. It then was shown to become one of Ash's most powerful battlers, possibly reinforcing that its value came from its battle prowess. It also then possibly had its trust further eroded when asked to "take a dive" against Paras.

It's not until the past trauma crops back up in "Charizard Chills," (S2E25) that Charizard processes a lot of this, and is reassured that Ash won't abandon it just because it loses a battle, and that it doesn't have to rely purely on itself. A crucial part of its growth is learning that it can trust Ash to have its back, no matter what, and it's important that Ash demonstrates that he always will! In this way, you could look at Charizard's refusal to battle as a test of boundaries.

I love the entire character arc that Charizard goes through under Ash's care. When I started my rewatch, I got curious if there were any fan theories, or further explanations for Charizard's behavior, and reading different perspectives, and seeing the episodes for myself, really got me passionate about what the series had to say about Charmander's trauma.

I was honestly shocked at the depth there was to be found! I could talk about Pokemon all day, and I think there's still aspects that I didn't cover here, but this hopefully gives an overview of a lot of the plot, and some of the underlying meanings.

Posts for another day, though!

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