Article Pokémon Historia #03: The Clone Ascendant

Guess whose birthday it is today! Mine? No. Here's a hint: today's birthday celebrant is one of the coolest individuals many of us have ever met, someone who has admittedly had a difficult hand dealt in life and has risen from hardship to become one of the most memorable and noteworthy individuals most of us know. Me, again? No, why do you keep thinking I'm talking about myself? I'm speaking about none other than the Genetic Pokémon: Mewtwo! On this day in history (go watch Pokémon Origins episode 4 or visit the Cinnabar Mansion if you don't believe me), in the year 1999 (circa), Mewtwo entered our world, brought into being as an experiment in cloning, and rose from scientific plaything to a powerful demigod and sculptor of his own destiny.

Here's to you, Mewtwo: in your first year, you helped teach us that our origin doesn't matter as much as our destination, and what we choose to do with life matters more than the conditions thrust upon us. May we continue to learn from you in the years to come.

Now, as undeniably awesome as Mewtwo is, his mere existence is something of an anomaly. It's not only that he's a synthetic Pokémon, created with help of human technology. After all, those are quite common, unless you suspect that species like Magnemite and Castform and Klinklang really came to exist without human intervention. To illustrate my point, let's look at Mewtwo's fellow super-powered peers: the only other Pokémon that are as quantifiably powerful as him are primordial deities of the land, sea, and sky; or are rulers of time and space; or ancient representations of the sun and moon; or embody the very essence of life and death. These are Mewtwo's equals: forces of nature who have lived since before recorded history. And here's Mewtwo among their ranks, a mere 17-year-old in their ancient pantheon. Speaking of this god-like pantheon, if we're not including Mega-Evolutions, then the only Pokémon who is actually more powerful than Mewtwo is Arceus, the definitive Poké-god. And if we are counting Mega-Evolutions? Well, in that case, Mewtwo is stronger than Poké-god! Mega-Mewtwo's Base Stat Total exceeds Arceus' by a whole sixty points, most of which is concentrated in a colossal offensive stat! Just let that sink in a little bit. This one Pokémon is more powerful than the creator of the universe. I can imagine Mewtwo's biologists now, quoting Robert Oppenheimer after an atomic bomb observation: "We knew the world would not be the same... I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita;... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."" And that just might be what they did: made something more powerful than the creator of worlds, so it follows that anything else might well be the destroyer of worlds.

On a separate note, not only is there the matter of the ethics involved in mankind creating something more powerful than the prime creator itself, but also the ethics of cloning and live experimentation, largely for two reasons: the sometimes unpredictable genetic differences between the gene donor and the clone (differences which are lethal more much often than not), and because the organism born from cloning can so easily be prevented from living a free life by being written off as nothing more than a science experiment. And when you think about it, these two aspects of biological ethics are the exact reasons Mewtwo followed a dark path through much of his origin in the first Pokémon Movie. On one hand, he was subject to an unpredictable genetic difference compared to his donor (Mew) in that his bio-psychology made him entirely incapable of feeling compassion, leading him to become a ruthless beast, insistent upon the fact that humans and Pokémon can never be friends. The other part of his situation was that he was born from a test tube into a laboratory. In his first interaction with a human, the lead researcher of his project, Mewtwo was told that his successful birth and consciousness were not the end of his experiment, but rather the beginning, that he would live his life pushing the limits of psychic power for his human masters. That was what broke Mewtwo psychologically: the thought that his life would be confined to a laboratory as a test subject, and that is why he broke free and took the first steps toward evil actions, out of the pain and confusion that surrounded him. (Go ahead and watch the first ten minutes of your VHS copy of Mewtwo Strikes Back. I already did, and I know you want to as well!)

I'm sorry, it may seem that I'm portraying Mewtwo in a bad light, as if he's some sort of a modern eldritch horror whose entire biography is that he was born an unnatural corruption of a kindred spirit and who uses that corruption to become the mightiest being the world has ever known, on par with if not exceeding mythic forces of nature. Admittedly, there is a truth in the core of that statement, but it only helps to highlight Mewtwo's message. Yes, he was born as a test subject, a modified clone that some would call an abomination, but he made it clear to us that it does not matter. To quote Mewtwo himself "The circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are." And so I ask you to take Mewtwo's advice. None of us is perfect, we each have our hardships and our flaws. That does not, however, preclude us from achieving greatness. The prelude of your story was written for you, but you are the primary shaper of your own destiny. Go forth and determine who you are.