Lavender Town facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Lavender Town |
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Lavender Town as it appears in Pokémon Red and Blue
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| Other name(s) | Home Of Spirits |
| Genre | Japanese role-playing game |
| Type | Village |
| First appearance | Pokémon Red and Blue |
| Last appearance | Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!/Let's Go, Eevee! |
Lavender Town (Japanese: シオンタウン, Hepburn: Shion Taun, Shion Town) is a fictional village in the Pokémon Red and Blue video games. Stylized as a haunted location, Lavender Town is home to the Pokemon Tower, a burial ground for Pokemon.
In the games
Lavender Town is a village that can be visited in Pokémon Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, and sequels Gold, Silver, Crystal and the remakes thereof. A departure from the typical joyous tone of Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, it is home to the "Pokémon Tower", a graveyard filled with mourning trainers and hundreds of tombstones for deceased Pokémon. There the player character can come across ghost-type Pokémon. The tower is the only place where they're available for capture. During the story of Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, the player will utilise the item Silph Scope to deal with the ghost-type Pokémons. It is implied that the village is haunted by the spirit of dead Pokémon, in particular a Marowak, murdered by Team Rocket, searching for its orphaned-Cubone. This story is expanded on in the remake Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!/Let's Go, Eevee! Lavender Town is the player's first encounter with the concept of Pokémon dying. It's one of a few towns not to feature a gym.
The Pokémon Tower was replaced by the "Kanto Radio Tower" in Pokémon Gold and Silver. Lavender Town is also home to the "Name Rater", which allows players to change the nickname of their Pokémon, and a care home for abandoned Pokémon.
The Pokémon Tower appears in the first season of the Pokémon anime series, when its main characters search for ghost-type Pokémon for a difficult gym battle. Lavender Town also appears in the Pokémon Adventures and The Electric Tale of Pikachu manga series. In the former, it is explicitly home to the graves of many Pokémon.
The Pokémon Tower is also the main setting of second episode in Pokémon Origins, in which the story of the orphaned Cubone is shown.
Music
The chiptune background music of Lavender Town in Pokémon Red, Blue, Green and Yellow versions has garnered much interest due to some listeners finding it unsettling. Listing it as the second-most scary video game track in 2012, Brittany Vincent of Bloody Disgusting stated that Lavender Town's "deceptively calm ... tune ranks highly on most gamers' lists of terrifying childhood memories." Lavender Town's music, composed by Junichi Masuda, is deliberately atonal and combines sharp chiptune sounds with "a cavalcade of jarring chords" to create an eerie atmosphere. Shubhankar Parijat of GamingBolt included the song on their list of creepy soundtracks in non-horror games. Jay Hathaway of Gawker stated that leaving the music on loop may cause a "vague sense of dread". Kevin Knezevic of GameSpot called it "one of the area's most unforgettable features".
In Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal versions (and in their remakes Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver), the Lavender Town theme music was recomposed to a happier tone as, per the game's storyline, the Pokémon Tower was demolished and replaced with the Kanto Radio Tower. On YouTube many remixes of the theme have been made. It was re-recorded for the 2017, 2019, and 2020 Pokémon Go Halloween event.
Fan theories and stories
Blue's Raticate
The player character can battle their rival, Blue, in the Pokémon Tower. Fans of the series have noted that Blue's Raticate, a Pokémon he uses for every battle up to that point,or from the fight on S. S. Anne does not appear in this fight or subsequent confrontations, and that Blue begins his confrontation with the player by exclaiming: "Your Pokémon don't look dead! I can at least make them faint!" This led fans to speculate that Blue's Pokémon had died in a previous battle and that Blue came to the Pokémon Tower to bury and mourn his Raticate.
See also
In Spanish: Pueblo Lavanda para niños
