I know it hasn’t been two weeks since I did my last Character Salute, but I couldn’t really wait to do this one. For this post I’ll be talking about one of the most unique gym leaders in the Pokemon franchise. Presenting the frightening psychic user, Sabrina.
As odd as this may sound, one my least favorite parts of the Pokemon anime, even back when it was good, were the gym battle episodes. I mean after the first few they’re all kind of the same. And it was even worse when they would drag it out. They would either cause some sort of delay, or Ash would lose and he would wind up going through some sort of intense training, which takes a whole episode or more to do. Why spend thirty plus minutes on something that could be done in a two minute montage to Eye of the Tiger (or I guess because it’s Pokemon, Eye of the Raikou)? But there are exceptions of course, and in the end I guess it depends on the gym leader, which brings us to Sabrina.
In addition to being a skilled user of Psychic Pokemon, Sabrina has psychic powers of her own. She inherited these psychic abilities from her father, but rather than manifesting during an embarrassing moment at the high school prom like in the movie Carrie, Sabrina’s powers awakened at a very young age. Her most notable abilities were telepathy, teleportation, psychokinesis, and perhaps her most frightening power of all, transmutation, which was used to either just shrink people or turn them into living dolls, which she did to her own mother. Sabrina became obsessed with increasing her power, and as they increased she began shutting off her emotions. In the end Sabrina became a cold and ruthless young woman obsessed with power, and her repressed emotions manifested into a separate personality, taking the physical form of a creepy little talking doll that always wanted to play.
Eventually Sabrina became the leader of the Saffron City Gym, which she also made into a place where other psychics could train their powers (and one could assume Sabrina also did this to form an army to one day take over the world). Had Sabrina met the Legendary Pokemon, Mewtwo, before meeting Ash, there most certainly would’ve been a battle, Saffron City probably would’ve become a smoldering crater, and there is a chance that the Pokemon world would’ve been plunged into a post-apocalyptic war. But thankfully Ash ran into Sabrina instead. Of course Ash’s first battle with Sabrina was a complete disaster, but things changed when he came back with a mischievous Haunter. In the end Haunter’s comedic antics made Sabrina laugh so hard that she could no longer suppress her emotions and her two warped personalities merged back into one. The terror had finally come to an end.
In the Games: Just as in the anime, Sabrina was the leader of the Saffron City Gym in Kanto. In Generation One, Sabrina was one of the hardest gym leaders to beat, mainly because there was no Dark-type back then. There were Ghost Pokemon of course, but only three. And they were also all Poison-types, so a Psychic attack could take them out in the blink of an eye. There weren’t a lot of good Bug-types back then either, so the best bet was to wing it.
Of course the last few times I played the Generation One games I just used Mew against Sabrina, and that usually worked out pretty well. I suppose Sabrina might be easier to beat in FireRed and LeafGreen since there actually are Dark-type moves, but I’m guessing it’s still a bit of a challenge. Sabrina appears again in Generation Two and their remakes, HeartGold and SoulSilver. Her character design went through a major change in HeartGold and SoulSilver, which I’m not at all happy about. Anyway, Sabrina also appears in Black 2 and White two as an actor for one of the Pokestar Studio films.
Missed Opportunity:The writers of the Pokemon have made a lot of mistakes over the years. I’ve repeatedly pointed out the three major ones, but there are also a lot of minor things they could’ve done that would’ve made great episodes. And one of those minor things is revisiting Sabrina. They could’ve had an episode that showed how Sabrina turned out after her original encounters with Ash. It would’ve been really cool to see how much Sabrina had changed, but as usual the writers screwed up.
I think that wraps it up for this post. I’m going to go ahead and do another one of these Character Salutes next week, but it’s going to be more of a special event type thing. So until then, stay tuned.
