To Genwunners: Get with the Program!

While still on the topic of numbers, recently a Pokémon phenomenon was brought to my attention that involves the number "1". That would be "1" as in generation 1, from which the possibly strange word in the title of this post is derived. It has become a label of sorts for a certain group of people with a certain belief. To the people for which the word is relevant or becomes a label, I say it's time to leave it behind and get on with the times.

First, a little linguistic background. Etymologically and morphologically, the word "genwunner", as I've mentioned above, is derived from "generation 1". "Generation" is clipped to "gen", "1" is spelled phonetically, and these are then joined with the suffix "-er", which indicates the quality of a person. Thus the person is "of generation 1", but that's not the whole story. Connotatively, the word refers to people who know Pokémon from generation 1... and only generation 1. They disavow anything that comes after that. And therein lies the problem.

To me, these people are like people that live in a cave or in a hole: they are behind the times. Or, to put it another way - they are tantamount to the people that still believe the Earth is flat, which is a mistaken belief. As the world of science had expanded centuries ago, so too has the world of Pokémon expanded in its age of over two decades. It would be fallacious to cling to old beliefs that have been proven false, and both these examples are essentially that. Further, progress is only natural to be expected in both real and fictional realms, even if the result is very different from before; denying what is new is fundamentally also a denial of progress.

So to the so-called "genwunners", I urge you to "get with the program": see that the world of Pokémon has expanded beyond the original first generation and embrace this. It is only a disservice to think that the world of Pokémon is confined to that of the first generation and nothing else, when such a world only became bigger and richer with each passing generation, yet remaining one and the same. As an identifier, the generational number is only a number; as a unity, the world is all one.