when i win the world ends

when i win the world ends by bavitz is, like the other bavitz works i’ve read, fantastic. it’s a real page turner. it’s accessible to the non-fan while deeply interrogating its source material, a very impressive balance to strike. (it helps that pokemon is the sort of thing most people have at least a passing familiarity with, whether they lived through the 90s boom and/or the more recent pokemon go craze.)

like. the pokemon setting is kind of weird, right? all of society tilts around the sport of animal combat. it’s not uncommon for children to leave home to travel the world, gathering, training, and fighting with these creatures. no matter where you go in the world, there’s always some kind of group bent on taking over the world or causing the apocalypse or something in that vein. there’s universal healthcare for pets. these are not novel observations by any means, which makes it all the harder to take the pokemon setting seriously.

when i win manages to make it work. part of this is by leaning into the absurdity. at one point a gholdengo is sent out holding an air balloon, and i remember the text presenting this as a silly image, this huge animal is held aloft by a tiny balloon. far more often than that, though, it fleshes out the world, fills in the cracks, turns an abstracted idea-of-a-world into something real and breathing. in when i win, some pokemon evolved to be fairy type in order to be more useful in the meta. bavitz took an out-of-universe mechanical tweak and made it diegetic, gave it weight. that’s brilliant.

when i win got me invested in the politics of the pokemon league.

and on top of all that, the characters are incredible. the canon pokemon characters are taken to interesting places, and the new cast is really, really good. cely and toril and their interactions have a warm place in my heart. (as does rotomphone. it’s always nice to see yourself in fiction.)

if you have any interest in pokemon, esports, sports, or the so-called end of history, you should read when i win.