culture
We Welcome Our Porcupine Overlord
Toronto's got a fever, and the only cure is more PACHI.
Meet your new ruler. Photo by David Timchuck from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
According to the more than 50,000 people who have signed the petition for his removal as closing ceremony headliner, Kanye West is antithetical to the spirit of the Pan Am Games. According to some of the top-ranked commenters, the divisive artist is “arrogant, disrespectful and overpaid,” a “jerk who acts like a spoiled toddler,” and his “persona is hardly representative of someone who embodies grace in the face of defeat, humility, empathy, fair play, etc.” Rightly or wrongly, these people feel the world’s third-largest multi-sport event deserve a less prickly, challenging spokesman. They deserve a representative whose persona is uncontaminated by human failings. A man whose rough edges have been sandpapered off.
Those who refuse to join #TeamYeezy need not fret. They have a Pan Am hero right in front of them, and he’s welcoming members to #TeamPACHI.
Who the hell is PACHI? This is the question that your humble correspondent asked when he first saw the smiling porcupine’s effigy atop a bus stop at Yonge and Dundas. “Meet PACHI!” said an accompanying sign, which explained that he was this year’s Pan Am mascot and encouraged us to tweet selfies at #HostCity. It’s also a question you may have asked if you’ve seen him at the many parades, community centres, and ribfests he’s visited in our fair province these past few months. You may have felt some of the same confusion as when you first saw those ubiquitous posters of Johnny Depp as Mortdecai, wondering why the marketing gods assumed you would so easily fall in love with this prepackaged icon.
In fact, PACHI has been supplied with an origin story. According to publicity, he grew up in a forest in the Niagara escarpment, but upon noticing light and noise from Toronto, the li’l guy headed east. He fit in immediately: by a remarkable coincidence, the colours of PACHI’s quills represent the qualities he shares with Pan Am—“green is youth, fuschia is passion, blue is collaboration, orange is determination and purple is creativity.” With his outgoing nature and love of exploring new places, “PACHI isn’t your typical porcupine.” PACHI also has a handle on modern identity politics: while “there are some prickly challenges in being accepted as a porcupine,” and while “PACHI, like other porcupines, has a visual impairment,” he has made Toronto his new home because “he noticed that everyone was diverse and unique like him.”
From another perspective, PACHI was birthed by a group of Grade 8 students from a school in Markham, who entered their design into the TORONTO 2015 Mascot Creation Challenge as part of their phys-ed class. However, like Poochie, the ill-fated third wheel of The Itchy and Scratchy Show, he seems as if he were created out of pie charts and focus groups by a team of marketing gurus. Like a Canadian cinematic blockbuster of the Passchendaele or Men with Brooms variety, PACHI feels like an attempt to create a facsimile of an American product (in this case, a loveable anthropomorphized animal).
What else do we know about PACHI? Well, we know that in 2013, he beat five other aggressively cheerful finalists in the Toronto Mascot Creation Challenge (triumphing over a smiling moose, a cheerful owl, a rad raccoon, and some other candidates we couldn’t easily identify). We know that he has just 41 quills, one for each of the Pan American countries participating (again, it’s very fortunate that he happened to discover this event). We know from his voluminous public appearances that he’s rockin’ a really tight bod.
And now that the Pan Am games are drawing to a close, we know that PACHI faces an identity crisis. After two years of burrowing* his way into our hearts, what will happen to PACHI when his entire raison d’etre ceases? We need not worry: if there’s one thing we know about PACHI, it’s that whatever the future holds, he will keep smiling. His face will never change from its gargoyle mask of happiness.
*(Do porcupines burrow? Please let us know in the comments.)