This Pokemon/Pikachu stuff is serious business.

Read some of THIS

Excerpt:

This is not to say, however, that poke-speak is inert or without function. To return to the idea that “Language is made not to be believed, but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience,” again provides insights into the relationship between trainer and pokémon, but this time, reveals a different relationship altogether. By creating a language that consists entirely in repetition and recombination, poke-speak takes on the characteristics of the musical refrain, described in A Thousand Plateaus as follows: “Instead, what needs to be shown is that a musician requires a first type of refrain, a territorial assemblage refrain, in order to transform it from within, deterritorialize it, producing a refrain of a second type as the final end of music: the cosmic refrain of a sound machine” (349). By establishing poke-speak as a language of eternal (or only) refrain, each new iteration of the same old thing recontextualizes it, thereby engaging in a process of perpetual deterritorialization. To clarify, Poke-speak is untranslatable in the sense that there is really only one word (the creature’s own name), but this untranslatability, through use, becomes only-translatability as the entire lexicon is bound within the language system of the single word. One word means all things and meaning can only be derived from context; meaning is constructed through refrain. “Thus the sign has already attained a high degree of relative deterritorialization; it is thought of as a symbol in constant referral from sign to sign” (D+G 112). It is a language that is always new and always old. It is a language that can only be understood through a constant strategy of translation, or movement from signifying sign to signifier.1 The language of the pokémon thus commands, but not in the ordinary sense. The language itself compels obedience to its logic of constant deterritorialization.