[...] Pokémon is a site where children “learn to learn” (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004, 30) to develop financialized subjecthood and a sense of agency germane to a world without guarantees where social values are bartered, where the individual is an isolated economic agent and where society is merely the sum of its people’s economic decisions. This learning is clearly not the intention of the Nintendo Corporation, but the brand works and takes such a hold of children’s imagination because they, on a deep existential level, recognize what Pokémon can offer them: it affirms a world they see all around them, from observing their parents’ increasingly episodic careers and financial woes to the sorts of narratives they witness on television and the media. Pokémon’s success stems from its resonance within and reproduction of the ethos of financialization.