An Introduction to Team Rocket

At over seven hundred years old, Team Rocket is one of Kanto’s most venerable organizations and the most enduring crime syndicate in the world. It’s one of the largest, too, boasting over sixty thousand members in Kanto, another twenty-five thousand in Johto, and thousands more in scattered branches around the world. The gang grew up alongside Kanto’s famous Pokémon League, enabled by the same technologies and exploiting the growing interrelationship between pokémon and humans for its own ends. For all the power it wields today, the gang’s origins are humble.

Origin and Early History

Without the aid of the pokéball, which was invented after the discovery of apricorn technology in Johto around four hundred years ago, few pokémon could be tamed. Pokémon attack was a pressing concern for Kanto’s oldest settlements, and their inhabitants rarely had any pokémon of their own to turn back invaders. There was an urgent demand for people willing to risk their lives to drive away wild pokémon destroying crops, disrupting trade routes, or even attacking the cities themselves. At the same time, the frequent bursts of conflict that characterized Kanto’s late feudal period created a large class of battle-trained individuals who found themselves out of work as soon as the tides of the latest war receded. Team Rocket has its origins in these mercenaries, who often sought work exterminating problem pokémon when human enemies grew scarce.

The first mentions of “pokémon hunters” appear around the end of the Saffron-Vermillion war, when a surge in unemployed soldiers happened to coincide with one of the region’s most severe droughts in recorded history. Pokémon and humans were forced into conflict over scarce resources, ushering in a long, bloody period of interspecies warfare. Individual pokémon hunters banded together to increase their odds of survival and enable them to take on larger groups of wild pokémon. Informal agreements soon became structured alliances, and Kanto’s first pokémon-hunting gangs were formed.

While pokémon-hunting gangs had no particular connection with criminal activity, the mercenaries they absorbed had a bad reputation as troublemakers. Nonetheless, they commandeded a certain amount of respect for their willingness to risk their lives to turn back pokémon attack. The romanticized “noble gangster” archetype that appears so frequently in Kanto’s cultural history has its roots in these rough but stalwart hunters, rogues and blackguards who dedicated their fighting skills to defend civilization against encroaching monsters.

As Kanto’s settlements grew more interconnected and pokémon became less of a threat, hunting gangs expanded into more traditional criminal enterpries in order to survive. Team Rocket as we know it was founded around seven hundred years ago, but for over two centuries it was merely one of the larger of the region’s crime syndicates. Its activity was largely confined to the cities of southeastern Kanto until around three hundred years ago, when Ajax “the Mad Electabuzz” Fenwright’s ambitions of ruling the region led to a vicious years-long campaign of gang violence. Ultimately Team Rocket succeeded in wiping out or absorbing most of its competitors, cementing it as the major crime power in Kanto.

Even today, however, Team Rocket’s local divisions enjoy considerable autonomy, and some still go by their own identifiers more than the official team name. The gang’s Johto branch, which was only consolidated around a century ago, is notorious for its attempts to break free of the larger organization. All in all, though, the various gangs pay homage to the overarching organization, and inter-faction violence is rare, albeit brutal when it erupts.

The source of the name “Rocket” is apocryphal, although it may refer to the simple powder weapons favored by early pokémon hunters, which were cheap, easy to manufacture, and easy for a single person to operate. One of the more popular legends of how the name came to be refers to a group of hunters ambushed by a clan of pikachu in the depths of Viridian Forest. The wild pokémon rapidly overpowered the hunters, but the leader of the gang seized their last rocket and, rather than turning it against the pikachu, used it to incinerate a nearby beedrill hive. The infuriated bug-types poured out of the trees, attacking everything in sight, and the humans escaped while the pikachu were forced to turn against the beedrill in their own defense. The hunter’s plan is said to embody the ingenuity and unerhanded tactics Team Rocket values most, and which certainly characterize the group’s business practices today.

Activities

Team Rocket originally focused on pokémon extermination and specializes in pokémon-related rackets to this day. Even where the gang has spread its operations into more “traditional” criminal enterprises, including gambling, protections, and prostitution, it often does so with a pokémon-related bent, e.g. waste pokémon produced by Rocket breeding programs become prizes offered at its gaming halls.

Capturing rare and powerful pokémon has always been an important source of income for the gang. In the past, the primary goal was usually to collect bounties on dangerous pokémon threatening human settlements. Nobles sometimes contracted the team to provide exotic and/or dangerous pokémon for their collections, but specialty captures didn’t become a major profit center until the invention of apricorn balls allowed large numbers of pokémon to be kept and the demand for pokémon laborers skyrocketed. A machamp, for example, can clear land in a fraction of the time it would take a team of human laborers, but poor understanding of captive breeding made raising a machop to a machamp little easier than working with the fully-evolved species. Team Rocket’s experience in locating and subduing pokémon made it the organization best positioned to provide pokémon to the labor market. Although the team charged a substantial fee to acquire and “break in” a wild pokémon, the profit that could be made off its free labor was great enough that for a time Team Rocket could sustain itself almost entirely on semi-legitimate contracts to provide pokémon for Kanto’s entrepreneurs. As pokémon training as we know it began to emerge, a better understanding of pokémon and their care allowed people to acquire working pokémon through more humane means. Pokémon battling as a sport emerged, but a lack of regulations made it dangerous for participants and bystanders alike. A battle that got out of hand could devastate an entire street, and this, combined with the strong association between the sport and gambling, led it to be banned or heavily restricted in most communities. Team Rocket reaped huge profits by establishing underground battling rings, and as training became more widespread and formal leagues were established, these operations moved towards the extreme of dangerous and unregulated fighting. Today Team Rocket hosts the most vicious bloodsport in Kanto, with fights that pit pokémon against humans or mundane animals, exotic and dangerous terrain conditions, and unrestricted battles that can lead to severe injuries and even death.

The brutal side of pokémon training continues to bankroll the pokémon acquisition operations that were once the team’s mainstay. Even today many trainers believe that pokémon captured outside the League’s official route plan, so-called “deepwilds” pokémon, are stronger, hardier, more vicious, and all-around better suited to battle than the ones that wander into areas where legal capture is permitted. Team Rocket, of course, is the organization most trusted to acquire such pokémon for interested buyers. Forays into wild zones are extremely dangerous, and the price for pokémon captured on these expeditions concomitantly high. The specialized “taming” regimens the team offers for deepwilds pokémon, which are rarely tractable directly after capture, further increase the cost. The investigation of former champion Hyacinth found that she paid over sixty million credits for the deepwilds tyranitar that aided her in winning the championship title–and led to its subsequent revocation.

Despite the high rate of fatalities on deepwilds expeditions, competition to participate in them is reportedly fierce, perhaps because they harken back to the gang’s early days. Deepwilds specialists more than any other Rocket can consider themselves more than thugs and petty thieves. As has always been the case in their line of work, they survive by wits, daring, and strength alone, and they take their ability to survive the harsh odds of their chosen profession as proof of their superiority to their fellow gangsters. Team Rocket’s most profitable operations have little to do with training, however. Pokémon rights campaigns have gained strength over the years, and recent legislation restricts what pokémon can be captured and where, bans the slaughter of pokémon for food or industrial purposes, and institutes a variety of protections to preserve the rights of pokémon as sapient, autonomous beings. However, demand remains high for many pokémon-derived products, and Team Rocket is a primary supplier of most of them. The gang maintains poaching and breeding operations bent on producing traditional food species such as farfetch’d and tauros, but the majority of their profits come from industry. For example the potent anti-cancer agent Ditralzene is manufactured from ditto serum, which can’t be extracted without killing the donor. The extreme demand for the product means that most manufacturers don’t ask questions when a Rocket front company provides them with forged consent documents and corpses of ditto that died “of natural causes.” A recent industry survey found that nearly 40% of the ditto serum used in Ditralzene manufacturing is supplied by ethically questionable sources. Similar markets exist for a huge number of compounds that can’t be synthesized without the aid of a pokémon intermediate, such as the complex cocktail of enzymes found in swalot gastric fluid, a vital solvent in many industrial processes.

Perhaps Team Rocket’s most notorious racket, however, is the production of shiny pokémon. Unusual coloration in pokémon, which is usually accompanied by a faint sheen or sparkle, is caused by a somatic mutation during the formation of pre-epidermal cells in a developing embryo. The mutation is lethal if it appears earlier in the embryo’s lifetime, which means that shiny pokémon can’t be selectively bred or produced by conventional genetic engineering techniques. Further, it occurs at a rate of around one in every two thousand births, which makes it impractical for a traditional pokémon breeder to focus on producing shiny pokémon; most go their entire careers without having a single shiny born to one of their pokémon.

Team Rocket, on the other hand, has no qualms with establishing “shiny factories,” where thousands of pokémon are kept in close quarters and bred repeatedly to produce the maximum number of offspring in the minimum amount of time. The results of this process are often weak and sickly due to poor living conditions and, in some cases, mutagen treatments used to increase the number of shinies produced. These last are thought to be the culprits behind the higher rates of cancer, autoimmune disease, and birth defects observed in Rocket-bred shinies.

Despite their relatively poor quality, shiny pokémon produced by Team Rocket still command high enough prices to make mass-breeding setups profitable, even though hundreds if not thousands of “waste” offspring are produced for each shiny. Team Rocket has no trouble disposing of by-product pokémon, which are typically offered as prizes at Rocket-operated gambling halls, used to arm grunts, sold to pet stores, used as bait pokémon for training more battle-worthy specimens, or processed into food. Any leftovers are usually mass-released into the wild, often to devastating effect on the local ecosystem.

Magikarp is the preferred species for intensive shiny breeding, having short generation times, the ability to thrive even in crowded, dirty conditions, and inexpensive needs. In addition, bans on consuming magikarp have dramatically inflated prices, as “golden karp,” a traditional symbol good luck in Kanto and Johto, are a delicacy some people have found difficult to give up. The dish carries more cachét now than ever, and Team Rocket is the only group from which it can reliably be obtained. A magikarp-farming operation, which has low start-up costs and space requirements relative to most breeding programs, is often the first major investment for an up-and-coming Team Rocket branch. The result is neatly captured in reports from a recent party thrown for the highest-ranking officials of the Saffron Rockets. The centerpiece of the dinner was a huge tank containing over a dozen shiny magikarp from which select guests were invited to pick their dinner.

Team Rocket and the Community

Unlike many modern criminal organizations, Team Rocket has only a weak idealogical foundation; it exists primarily to make a profit. Nonetheless, the team does subscribe to one core belief: that pokémon exist to be exploited by humans. Indeed, many gang members claim that they are actively serving humanity by working to keep the monsters in check. The famous Rocket motto “Steal pokémon for profit, exploit pokémon for profit, all pokémon exist for the glory of Team Rocket” comes from a satirical comment made by a Rocket leader asked to summarize the group’s activities but has since been embraced as a fair statement of the gang’s core values.

This makes the gang attractive to some of Kanto’s more conservative citizens. Much of Team Rocket’s upper leadership is well-educated, and a fair number come from wealthy and powerful families. Administrative positions on the team offer anyone with skills in management, finance, or logistics the opportunity to make huge amounts of money with relatively little risk. For people frustrated with the government’s relatively progressive stance on pokémon rights, a job on the team may offer a rare opportunity to work for an organization that actively supports their beliefs.

However, Team Rocket draws most of its membership from the underprivileged, who are enticed to join with promises of stability, steady pay, and a community where their abilities will be recognized and appreciated. The organization is egalitarian to a fault, and many of its recruits come from Kanto’s minority and immigrant populations, who often have difficulty finding legitimate work. Most such individuals labor at the gang’s lowest levels, engaged in its most dangerous and physically demanding work, but particularly talented and ambitious individuals can and often do rise through the ranks to positions of high authority, achieving much greater wealth and prestige than would be available to them in the legitimate economy.

Team Rocket garners considerable goodwill by steping in to assist Kantoan communities in times of need, both after natural disasters, such as Mt. Cinnabar’s recent eruption, and in cases where pokémon threaten human settlements, as when Fuchsia’s largest scyther swarm laid siege to the city in protest of the Safari Zone’s expansion into their territory. The team is also notorious for carrying out revenge against pokémon communities it believes have committed a crime against humans. This is perhaps best exemplified by their slaughter of whole flocks of spearow near Route 4 after Arnold Gershtein, a young trainer from Pewter City, was found dead of a wild pokémon attack. Numerous other cases of human-pokémon conflict have been complicated by Rocket involvement, and pokémon groups frequently cede land, protection, and political power in response to threats or outright violence on the part of the gang. As a result, Team Rocket enjoys the tacit support of many non-gang citizens, especially those with a dim view of pokémon rights. In particular, many Kantoans are frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of recourse to pursue grievances against wild pokémon. Crimes committed by wild pokémon are consideed under the jurisdiction of their own communities, with investigations and punishments left to other wild pokémon. Many humans consider wild justice lax or inadequate, while Team Rocket’s brand of vigilantism at least promises that someone pays for a wild pokémon’s crimes. Others feel threatened by bans on traditional, but typically exploitative towards pokémon, customs, foods, and policies, and consider the gang a bastion of traditional values–unsavory, maybe, but in its way one of the few groups willing to stand firm against a rising tide of political correctness. Thus, while the government actively decries the group, and prime ministers often campaign on the promise to eliminate the team for good, in practice law enforcement often turns a blind eye towards Team Rocket’s activities. While major Rocket bases are kept scrupulously out of sight–by tradition literally underground–the higher ranks of Team Rocket have openly held offices in Saffron City for over a century. Police raids on Rocket bases are rare and have little effect on the gang’s operations. Rumors abound of deals cut between gangsters and the police, and even when there is a crackdown on a Rocket operation, the goods and people seized are rarely more than token. While many Team Rocket members regularly find themselves in prison, it’s notoriously difficult to keep them there, and the number of underground alliances forged when members of different local gangs share a cell suggest that incarceration may be more a valuable networking opportunity than anything else.

Even so, Team Rocet’s greatest ally in Kanto is the way it’s become embedded in the region’s cultural milieu. Other regions consider Kanto’s relatively tolerant attitude towards the gang strange, even shameful–certainly it contributes to the view among pokémon rights acitivists that Kanto is the “most backwards” of major industrialized regions–but Team Rocket maintains enough goodwill within the community that its growth has faced little resistance. Even for Kantoans who disagree with the gang’s activities and beliefs, Team Rocket is simply a fact of life, as much a part of Kanto as its famous League. After seven hundred years, few Kantoans can even imagine an end to Team Rocket.

Future Prospects

Despite its generally conservative bent, Team Rocket is consistently at the forefront of advances in science and technology, especially technology related to pokémon. Innovations such as more powerful pokéballs and the networked storage system, as well as a better understanding of wild pokémon behavior and distribution, have only increased the team’s ability to obtain and exploit pokémon. An estimated 20% of the team’s yearly income is reinvested in pokémon tech firms, and rumors abound of underground research facilities established to carry out experiments unbounded by the ethical standards that govern most labs.

Improving the team’s technological resources was one of Rocket boss Giovanni’s top priorities, which ultimately led the gang to infiltrate a private technology firm investigating a recently-discovered Mew specimen. The product of that takeover was the culmination of Giovanni’s ambitions for expanding Team Rocket’s power: Mewtwo. The lab’s destruction and clone’s escape marked a turning point for the gang. The revelation that the gang was engineering superweapons in its spare time at last roused Kantoans who’d grown comfortable with the idea of Team Rocket as a group of thieves and hoodlums. A region-wide police investigation into the gang was opened, and unease began to build among Kanto’s citizens as it became clear just how powerful Team Rocket had become.

The unusually aggressive gang presence in Saffron City during the dispute over Silph’s master ball, which Team Rocket had indirectly commissioned, further eroded goodwill and may have contributed to Champion Red’s success in breaking the siege. Some cite this humiliation as the reason behind Giovanni’s resignation as Viridian City Gym Leader and his subsequent disappearance, but growing displeasure with his leadership within the team may have been the real impetus. One way or another, his sudden departure threw Team Rocket into disarray. The Johto branch made an attempt at establishing itself as an independent organization, but was ultimately rebuffed through the efforts of Champion Crystal. Reinforcements from Kanto have begun to consolidate the gang’s power in the region, but violence continues to rage between a number of splinter factions. In contrast, Team Rocket in Kanto was quick to stabilize under new leadership.

The team’s new boss faces the challenge of rebuilding from the disasters that marked the end of Giovanni’s tenure while reassuring the Kantoan populace that the team isn’t interested in world domination. Not much is known about Team Rocket’s new leader, but the speed with which she quashed unrest within the Kanto branch’s ranks suggests that she’s at least as ruthless and efficient as her predecessor. Her reign has seen a resurgence in the team’s conservative rhetoric, but actual information about the its activities remains scarce. Whether the new boss intends to continue Giovanni’s investments in high technology or return to the gang’s roots, one thing is for sure: a string of losses is nowhere near enough to unseat Kanto’s premier criminal organization. Team Rocket may need to spend some time licking its wounds, but it’s far from defeated, and as long as Kanto retains a supply of desperate, dangerous people looking to get ahead, the gang will endure.