The Lavender Town Syndrome Creepypasta Lore (Pokémon Red and Blue)
Overview
General Description
Lavender Town is a village that can be visited in the video games Pokémon Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, and their sequels Gold, Silver, Crystal, and their respective remakes. In contrast to the typical joyous tone of the aforementioned games, Lavender Town is home to the Pokémon Tower, a graveyard filled with mourning trainers and hundreds of tombstones for deceased Pokémon. Within the tower, the player character may encounter the Ghost-type Pokémon Gastly and Haunter, which are exclusively available for capture in this location. In the story of Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow, the player must utilize the Silph Scope item to deal with the ghost-type Pokémon. It is suggested that the village is haunted by the spirits of dead Pokémon, particularly a Marowak that was murdered by the villainous Team Rocket and is now searching for its orphaned Cubone. This narrative is further developed in the remake Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!. Lavender Town serves as the player's first introduction to the concept of Pokémon dying and is one of the few towns in the Kanto region that does not feature a gym.
In Pokémon Gold and Silver, the Pokémon Tower was replaced by the "Kanto Radio Tower". 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 is featured in the episode "The Tower of Terror", the 23rd episode from the first season of the Pokémon anime series, in which Ash, Misty, and Brock search for Ghost-type Pokémon for their Gym battle against Sabrina. Lavender Town also appears in the Pokémon Adventures and The Electric Tale of Pikachu manga series.
Music Creation
The chiptune background music featured in Lavender Town in the Pokémon Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow versions has garnered significant interest due to its unsettling nature. Brittany Vincent of Bloody Disgusting listed it as the second-most frightening video game track in 2012, noting that the deceptively calm tune ranks highly on most gamers' lists of terrifying childhood memories. The 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, while Jay Hathaway of Gawker stated that leaving the music on repeat may cause a vague sense of dread. Kevin Knezevic of GameSpot called it one of the area's most unforgettable features.
In the Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal versions, as well as their remakes Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, the Lavender Town theme music was recomposed to a happier tone to reflect the game's storyline, which saw the Pokémon Tower demolished and replaced with the Kanto Radio Tower. Numerous remixes of the theme have been made available on YouTube. The music was re-recorded for the 2017, 2019, and 2020 Pokémon Go Halloween event.
Lavender Town Syndrome
During the early 2010s, an urban legend emerged claiming that hundreds of Japanese children had committed suicide in the 1990s due to the music. The legend suggested that high-pitched tones and binaural beats caused headaches and erratic behaviour that led to their deaths. This fabricated illness was dubbed "Lavender Town Syndrome" and the story went viral after a creepypasta version was spread on websites such as 4chan. Over time, various people added details to make the story more convincing, including photoshopped images of ghosts and Pokémon Unown spelling out the message "leave now" in spectrogram outputs of the Lavender Town music. Some versions of the legend claimed that the game's director, Satoshi Tajiri, wanted the tone to "annoy" children instead of causing harm, while others suggested that Nintendo was in collaboration with the Japanese government.
The Lavender Town Syndrome legend has been described as one of the creepiest and most infamous creepypastas in online fiction. Its appeal comes from corrupting an innocent symbol of childhood, and the theme tune is considered genuinely creepy. The suicides taking place in Japan added to the mystery, as fact-checking would require proficiency in Japanese. The fallout from the "Dennō Senshi Porygon" episode of the Pokémon anime series, which gave hundreds of Japanese viewers reactions similar to epilepsy symptoms and sent some into seizures, is believed to have provided a solid foundation for the Lavender Town myth. The story has been recognized as one of the best video game urban legends.
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