User:Evang/Porkytheory/

Video games have truly become an art form, and a series that proves this more than any other video games could is the Earthbound series (also known as the Mother series in Japan). A major antagonist throughout the second and third games of the series is Pokey Minch, a 10-year-old boy whose alliance with villainous aliens and time traveling antics lead to him becoming the ruler of the Earth and aging past the point where humans normally die, effectively becoming a 10,000-year-old man with a 10-year-old brain--truly what one would call a manchild. He creates a dystopia based around himself and ruled by himself, and is effectively trapped in his own little world, both figuratively, and, at the game's climax, literally. His character serves to exemplify the folly of living in one's own past.

Sound familiar?

I believe that Pokey Minch is very similar to our own Christian Weston Chandler. Let us start with their character traits. Pokey Minch is an immature 10-year-old. He suffered from abusive parents--in the original Japanese version of Earthbound, when Aloysius Minch, Pokey's father, takes him upstairs to scold him for running off late at night to see a meteor, he is quite audibly beating him. This is changed to a silly-sounding yelling effect in the English version. This can be seen as a parallel to the "abusive babysitter" that supposedly caused Christian Weston Chandler so much trouble as a child. Pokey is self-centered and egotistical, and very childish--and even as he ages, he is still essentially a child, much like Christian Chandler--there has been little, if any, emotional or mental growth in either of them as they aged. Pokey has the excuse of his aging coming from time travel abuse and not the normal passing of time, however.

Picky, Pokey's brother, is much like Cole Smithey. He suffered the same abuse Chris-chan did, but goes on to be normal and successful. Picky Minch has just as much of a reason to become a vile, detestable person like his older brother, but doesn't. Picky is outright neglected by everyone in the story. Pokey departs with his father to Fourside to help manipulate the events towards the favor of Giygas, the main villain of the game. His mother is apparently absent for the entire game after the beginning, and afterwards it is revealed that she has spent all that time away from Picky with a man named "Mr. Pirkle", and it's highly implied that she has been cheating on her husband with him (as much as a game rated KA for Kids to Adults could imply, anyway). This greatly mirrors Cole Smithey's relationship with Barbara and Bob, due to the way Barbara raised him--Cole and Picky both saw neglect due to their mothers' "loose" nature.

So what does this mean for Giygas? Giygas represents Chris-chan's autism. Christian could have been a normal boy--a selfish and coddled one, but a normal boy, if he had just been raised the right way. Pokey and Christian were both raised poorly by theit parents and were rapidly led astray by a sort of "excuse" for all their problems they could latch onto. Pokey had Giygas for his reason for doing all sorts of evil things. Chris-chan had autism to blame for his lack of a boyfriend, for his stress, for his lack of friends, for his social problems...Giygas's infamous dialogue could be seen as a parallel to the state of mind Christian Weston Chandler has. He "feels happy" and "good" because of his autism, as he has it to blame his problems on, but it "hurts" at the same time, as he knows deep down inside that things could have been different for him.

The events of Earthbound are sort of a parallel to Chris-chan's high school life. He screwed with people, was screwed BY people, and in the end it was all his autism's fault. But now, as an adult, he longs for those days. Ness and company symbolize the people Chris-chan considered bullies in his high school days. Chris-chan hated them, much like Pokey hated Ness and his friends, but in an odd way, they both miss their antagonists. The bullies of high school might not even have been "bullies"--in the end, they might have just been trying to help Chris-chan out. And now, he can never return to the days of high school, and he longs for every aspect of them to return--even the negative ones. Pokey Minch misses Ness, even in spite of the animosity between them. In a weird way, the antagonistic relationships displayed here were almost sort of a game to Christian and Pokey.

As hateful as his parents were, Christian misses when they were active and able to aide him in regular day-to-day activities. His especially misses when his mother was not so obese. We can see this maternal attachment in Pokey Minch as we move onto Mother 3, where he has created a restaurant staffed by robots built to look exactly like his mother. The robots even remark that "all the workers in this restaurant are pretty girls", which is quite frankly anything but the truth. His mother, however, is much nicer than he remembers. This mimics Chris-chan's portrayal of her in his comics and in his mind--a sweet, loving, beautiful mother who tells him he's handsome.

Indeed, things are portrayed quite differently in the worlds Pokey and Christian both created for themselves--New Pork City and CWCville, respectively. In these worlds they've created for themselves, they are heroes, and their otherwise detestable actions are glorified and made into stories with them as the heroes. Pokey's Earthbound movie that we can see in the movie theater is called "Porky's Quest", implying that Ness and friends would be the villains of the story, not him. Chris-chan would probably be seen as the bad guy in most of his situations, be it his rivalry with Mary Lee Walsh, his fight against the Jerkops and Manajerks...Christian portrays himself as a hero stopping all those vile villains, but in reality he was the bad guy in those situations.

Other things are glorified in their own little worlds--aside from the aformentioned aspect of their mothers, the two glorify themselves as heroes in their heads, and in their cities. Both are the leaders of their grand metropolises, completely uncontested. Pokey's statue calls him the "smartest, bravest and toughest chubster of all time", while Chris-chan is portrayed as a broad-shouldered hero and a beloved mayor. While real people exist in both of their worlds (Pokey brings in the citizens of Tazmily Village, Chris-chan draws his family and "friends" as citizens of CWCville) and both receive praise from these real people, both end up creating fake people to serve as citizens to make their fake worlds feel populated. After leaving the New Pork sewers the city becomes populated with fake people who drone simple two-word sentences repeatedly. Likewise, Christian's various loving citizens made for CWCville's stories have personalities that could be described in two words.

Both cities are truly testaments to their past histories, regardless of whether or not either of their pasts are worth noting. CWCville has fake replicas of people he may not have talked to in years, items he's lost, many installations dedicated to his history, and New Pork City is the same, with the famous "memory hall" dedicated to various objects from Earthbound. Porky, like Chris-chan, even manages to drag a few people along for the ride with him, unwillingly--Dr. Andonuts and the Sanchez Brothers. Dr. Andonuts, much like Megan, does not want to be a part of the fake world these manchildren have created, but is dragged along anyway. The Sanchez Brothers and their friend Tomas Jefferson serve to show that Porky simply just wants people who were from his time period, even if he doesn't even know them! This is much like the various people from Chris-chan's high school years that he barely knew whom he inserts into his comics simply for the sake of having things from a time period he looks upon fondly.

Both have confused sexuality in a way. Pokey has a harem room with many boyfriend-free girls in bikinis fanning the very seat he normally sits in, even when he's not there...but also keeps nearby a robotic male centaur with enormous lips designed to kiss people to give them oxygen. Perhaps Pokey's elderly state requires oxygen to be forced into his body, but either way the implications suggest he has homosexual curiosity, as sex was likely never quite explained to him right given that he left his parents at age 10-12. This mimics Christian Weston Chandler's sexual behavior--he goes to every extent to prove he is STRAIGHT, but there's still those inkling homosexual curiosities he has. Given that he didn't learn to masturbate until he was 16, sex wasn't ever explained to him, either, I assume.

But simply being the rulers of their own little world was not enough for Pokey and Christian. Both decided to create perverse bastardizations of beloved beings. The Sonichus are, in a way, much like Pokey's chimeras. They combine two perfectly fine things and make them into twisted, disgusting monsters who serve to enforce the ways of their creators. Sonichu and the chimeras have both turned their creators into murderers--Pokey's chimeras are responsible for the death of Claus and Hinawa, and Sonichu is responsible for the death of Ryan Cash. Neither feel much remorse for the deaths they have caused.

These deaths were an inevitable downfall for both. Lucas's brother and mother passing away motivated him to destroy the little personal world Pokey Minch created for himself. Likewise, Clyde Cash's brother dying motivated him to destroy Chris-chan's world. Lucas and Clyde were both successful and unsuccessful in doing so. While Lucas managed to take down Pokey's empire and take a moral victory, Pokey still lives--unable to harm anyone anymore, but he still lives, and he even taunts Lucas for it. Pokey Minch never truly learns his lesson, or receive full retribution. In a way, when he is trapped in the Absolutely Safe Capsule, he is able to get exactly what he wants, and seal himself into a world of his own with only a tiny window outside.

Clyde did exactly that to Christian Weston Chandler--the man has no life anymore outside of his little CWCville, he has tasted success and the things he truly desired now thanks to Clyde's manipulation, only to find they were fake or have them backfire. But it's okay...they can still be his girlfriends in CWCville. In CWCville, everyone loves him. Chris-chan's room is his Absolutely Safe Capsule, where no one can harm him. The only tiny window out to the world he has left is his PSEye, and all he can do is stick his tongue out at people from it. People cannot harm him anymore. They will certainly try, but he is "Absolutely Safe". But he'll never realize the error of his ways, all the people he's wronged. He will just keep living in CWCville, where everyone loves him.

Other comparisons include their rooms being strewn with toys everywhere, their smell, their denial/acceptance with obesity, the way they need their antagonists and look at life as just a sick, twisted game...but I think the comparisons write themselves at this point.