this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Pokemon "being evil" is a classic. I remember that some time ago there was a moral panic around Huggy Wuggy too
Our school banned pokemon cards. Probably a good move cause we were totally gambling with them or beating each other up over them
This is the actual reason why they were banned. I think people have conflated this with the satanic panic about them due to misremembering over the last few decades.
School districts around the world were not broadly publishing rules banning pokemon because the dude on The Prophecy Club said they were the devil. They were having problems with kids gambling, which immediately escalated to fighting and stealing each other's cards.
I was scamming cards left and right. No one at my school knew how the card game actually worked aside from me im pretty sure. People would just find their 2 best cards and take turns attacking each other with the atrongest attack. It was generally pretty easy to tell who would win in advance.
I remember when I was volunteering to finish high school at my Catholic school (required to graduate) and so we helped stuff boxes for kids at samaritans purse (operation Christmas child, send Xmas gifts to kids in the developing world) and one thing we had to remove from donations was anything pokemon related because the owner of the foundation believed it was satanic or something.
So yeah lots of people really thought a Japanese game about collecting monsters was like evil incarnate.
I thought this was a joke but when i googled huggy wuggy the first "people also ask:" AI response was this
Edit: sorry i cut off the top but it was "is huggy wuggy good for kids"
Yea in my country there was a whole moral panic around it. There were psychologists appearing on TV saying that this is DISTORTING children's behaviour because it's associating hugs with horror and fear.
When I was a kid there was this weirdo that was always way too affectionate to the point all my friends hated how he would go around hugging everyone. It was dismissed by all our parents as him just being friendly.
Now nobody to my knowledge got abused by him other than awkward hugs at public gatherings.
Then one day I read in the local paper he got caught smoking meth in his van with a couple high school girls and I was like fuck yall I fuckin knew he was a creep.
I never liked hugging for decades because of that sick pos.