After more than 25 years, the Pokémon anime is making some big changes. Perpetual 10-year-old protagonist Ash Ketchum is headed off with Pikachu to make room for new stars, sparking a wave of nostalgic sadness among multiple generations of fans. But just as heartbreaking has been the farewell to the long-time villains of the show—and, for many parts of the internet, a set of beloved queer icons.
In the Pokémon games, Team Rocket is an evil organization dedicated to exploiting Pokémon. But in the anime, it’s usually only a trio of bumbling, loveable field agents, scheming up ways to separate Pikachu and Ash. Jessie, James, and Meowth appear in the second-ever episode, and they’ve been a fixture of every season since.
Despite being nominally the show’s main antagonists, the group has long been popular with viewers. For starters, they’re more comic relief than villains. Their incompetence means they never really pose a threat to Pikachu; instead, the whole affair is played for laughs, thanks to their constant failures.
And although they work for an evil organization, the trio is not really shown to be bad people. As early as Episode 14, Jessie, James, and Meowth are shown briefly taking Ash and Pikachu’s side, as Pikachu tries to defeat gym leader Lt. Surge. At first, the trio is disappointed that Pikachu is struggling and wondering if he’s worth stealing at all. But they quickly find themselves caught up in the drama of whether or not Pikachu will be forced to evolve into Raichu against his will in order to win. The group ends up supporting Ash and Pikachu at the Gym, and at the end of the episode, James realizes: “Drat! We wasted this episode cheering the good guys!” Since then, they pretty regularly end up supportive of, or at least not actively hostile toward, Ash and the other heroes.
They also each have a sympathetic backstory, with the show fleshing out their backstories and motivations over the years. None of them is particularly ideologically invested in Team Rocket; instead, they each fell into a life of crime and ended up sticking together, because of their lack of alternative options as well as their growing friendship.
As the first generation of Pokémon anime fans grew up, Team Rocket became more and more of a cultural touchstone. Suddenly, the struggling twenty-somethings who couldn’t quite find their place in the world or succeed at their ambitions felt more relatable than the plucky, eternally optimistic kid protagonists. A sub-fandom of the larger Pokémon fanbase sprang up, dedicated to the trio. And where there’s fandom, there’s always going to be queer interpretations of the text—of which there are plenty around Team Rocket.
But in Team Rocket’s case, the readings had a pretty solid foundation in canon. Perhaps the most obvious example was James’ repeated crossdressing. The trio often appeared in disguise, and these often involved James wearing clothes that are traditionally considered feminine. Often he and Jessie both appeared in skirts or dresses, but other times, they both subverted traditionally gendered expectations. In one scene, for example, they disguised themselves as a couple on their way to their wedding ceremony. Jessie wore a tuxedo, while James was the bride in the white dress.
In another notable episode, “Beauty and the Beach,” Jessie and James (as well as Ash’s friend Misty) appear in bikinis, with James apparently using “inflatable breasts” to get the effect. (You might not remember this from your childhood experience of the show—the episode was originally banned during the show’s U.S. run, but was later released with the scene omitted.)
There are subtler implications of their queerness, too. All three of the villains’ backstories show them as misfits and outcasts, something that’s easy for LGBTQ+ fans to latch onto. But the story of James’ childhood in particular can also easily be read as an allegory for growing up gay. An early episode depicted him as running away from home to avoid an arranged marriage with a woman. This was ostensibly because she was mean and overbearing, but then, that didn’t stop him from getting close to the domineering Jessie. Later, in Pokémon the Movie 2000, Jessie says that “getting involved with the opposite sex” is “only asking for trouble.” James replies that that’s “the kind of trouble I stay out of.”
The canonical evidence for Jessie being a member of the LGBTQ+ community may be thinner on the ground, but her subtler rejection of gender roles and proximity to James (queer people stick together, after all) have often led fans to assume that both of Team Rocket’s human members belonged to the community. And though that means that Meowth is sometimes cast as the token straight friend, it’s also crucial to note that the talking cat Pokémon was voiced for much of the show’s run by a groundbreaking intersex and trans voice actress, Maddie Blaustein.
Of course, the elements of Team Rocket that verge on canonical queerness probably weren’t intended to be particularly positive. James’ fluid gender presentation was seemingly a major part of the comic relief of the series, rather than a meaningful attempt at representation. It also leans close to tropes around effeminate, gay, or trans feminine villains, a trend which grew out of the Hays Code in 1934, a US standard for media that forbade positive portrayals of homosexuality until the late 1960s. Instead, bad guys would portray a subtextually implied LGBTQ+ identity This is known as queer coding, which became a way to make them appear more untrustworthy or even threatening. Due to its common use for decades, queer coding continues to be an overused trope.
But Pokémon mostly managed to sidestep this trope-filled storytelling in all but the broadest terms. James’ multifaceted, often sympathetic portrayal helped queer fans latch onto him. In the media landscape of the ’90s, James’ queer-coded presentation was perhaps better than expected; as internet fandom grew and successive generations of kids became teens and adults, more and more people were able to put their spin on their childhood faves in a considered, authentic way.
Twitter users have claimed them. Queer publications have celebrated them. And although Jessie and James are often shipped together (and even depicted as married and with a child on the way in one unlocalized manga volume), it’s commonly accepted among fans that both are bisexual or similar. There’s no consensus, however—it’s more of a general acceptance that Team Rocket could be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual. They’ve even been cosplayed by drag artists, echoing back to those early boundary-pushing James moments.
But that only makes it sadder that they’ve potentially bowed out of the series, alongside Ash, Pikachu, and friends. Their adoption as queer icons isn’t something that can be easily replicated. At the very least, it would need another long collaboration, with kids growing up on the series building their own fanworks on its foundations. But it’s simply unlikely that a new Pokémon show in the 2020s would introduce a flamboyant, crossdressing bad guy to set that spark in motion.
Team Rocket’s adoption by the LGBTQ+ community may have been a one-off that we never see again. But as we bid them farewell, there is at least once solace: We’ll always have the memories—and the fanfiction.
