*shrugs* I got nothing but
3 ball mehness for these so let’s make vagina jokes.
Cloyster looks like a
battle vagina, it was slightly less completely and obviously a cooch when you
couldn’t make out it’s perfectly round head and instead just saw eyes in the darkness,
then it was more of a haunted fanny-like object, but since it grew a clitoris
it couldn’t be more of a pussy if it had a Vulpix phobia.
Shellder doesn’t do much
for me at all, it’s the tongue I think, it’s supposed to represent this ‘arm’
thing that molluscs have which is cool and everything but it’s just always
(appropriately) stuck out to me and it never puts it away, that’s very rude
Shellder. Shellder might be less original without it but it’d definitely make a
better design as far as I’m concerned, maybe if they’d just made the tongue a
different colour, closer to purple to lose that ‘bollocks on a bulldog’ element
it has.
My, we are being groinal in
this one.
Still it’s better than the
original design, which was just a smaller Cloyster:
Note you can also see that
even this early on, the pair have their round black pearl/clit heads, you can
see the shine of it.
Labiaesque part aside, I do
quite like Cloyster’s shell though – it just looks so damn dangerous (while
still being adapted from the look of real shells). I’m surprised Cloyster didn’t get a Mega too, it’s a design that was crying out to be made even more
over-the-top.
Well they fucked that up
didn’t they? For the unknowing: Ghost Type was supposed to act as a foil for
Psychic Types, with Psychic being weak to Ghost, but the only line of Ghost
Types in Gen 1 were given the Poison Type too because they seemed to just throw
that type onto anything that looked remotely shifty and Poison is WEAK to
Psychic. This oversight is one of the main reasons that Psychic was so
overpowered in Generation 1 – there wasn’t anything to stop it! All the bugs
were too weak and the ghosts had a dry grass/flame relationship with the types
they were supposed to destroy.
Don’t think I’m holding
that against these three beautiful monsters, it’s just some trivia I felt like
sharing (Psychic has been balanced out and nerfed for years now) because I all
caps, multiple underlining ADORE the Gastly line. Ghost is my favourite type -
not just because I’m a massive Goth stereotype (though also because that) – I
have a long standing…some might say ‘obsession’ with death but we’ll call it a
fascination with death. Today I like to blame it me being a suicidal, I have
intrusive suicidal thoughts roughly once a day, it’s a side affect of my
clinical depression and I’m completely used to it but of course I’m going to
have a fascination with death if I have that going on in my brain I say. It’s
just for the tourists, I’ve been a morbid shithouse since long before I had a
mental illness. This fascination (NOT obsession) with death translates to a
fascination with ghosts of all kinds, I’m also a horror nut so I’m going to be
drawn to the spectral or ‘classic horror’ style ‘mons anyway but there’s also
the fact that through the franchise’s lifetime Ghost Types have been
exceptionally consistent and consistently good. It could be because they only
introduce a couple per generation so only the best get through – sort of like
how Legendaries are supposed to work but sadly don’t.
And they started off strong
design-wise, we have three different ghost archetypes filtered through the
Pokémon world, Ken Sugimori’s art and an exceptionally long development time
(both Gastly and Gengar were amongst the original 31 ‘mons). We have the
amorphous shape, the sheet ghost and the humanoid ghost and all of them have
just the perfect faces. Not the perfect facial expressions (though that too)
but the perfect faces, these are the ghostiest of ghosts.
Gastly is simplicity
itself, though I do miss the time when it was just gas and a face, the orb look
is nice (and way easier to draw) but there’s something much more creepy about
this disembodied face in a gas-like sea of dark – smiling at you – with vampire
fangs. Gengar suffers from not being as good as Haunter but (a bit like Rhydon
only cooler) is still a class little monster in it’s own right, it always looks
downright mischievous and…fuck this lets talk about the urban legend (of Zelda)
associated with it because it bugs me. No, Gengar is not Clefairy/Clefable’s
shadow. I know this because Gengar and Clefable were designed together and at
that point Clefable looked completely different while Gengar was basically the
same as it is today:
You can find these early
sprites easily nowadays, this rumour should have died. Gengar is clearly based
on a shadow (and does indeed imitate shadows in Pokémon lore) but it’s
connection to Clefairy is completely baseless, the final Clefairy design (and
Clefable) weren’t even designed by the same person.
Haunter is still an
absolute favourite, and oddly the anime isn’t responsible – it helped but I’d
already been to Lavender Town and fallen in love with the ghosts by the time I saw
those episodes. Everything about Haunter’s look is just brilliant, it’s like
Slimer’s delinquent cousin, it’s classic cartoon ghost mixed with
jack-o-lanterns mixed with Rayman (!?!), scary enough to work as a ghost but
friendly and mischievous enough to work as a pet or partner in crime/battle. So
it’s no surprise that I liked it on sight. Of course then this happened:
That’s from the Pokémon: The Electric Tale of Pikachu manga, which was – for no real reason –
far more accessible to me during Generation 1 than the more popular and wildly
read/known Pokemon Adventures manga
(aka Pokémon Special manga, which is
shit hot). That is a giant, murderous, soul-eating Haunter and I first saw it
when I was a disaffected, death obsessed 14 year old coping with undiagnosed
clinical depression on top of being a teenager but the point of bringing this up (and the anime too actually) is just to further justify my love of
Haunter: Haunter is great in everything.
I’m really rubbish at
explaining why I like things sometimes aren’t I? Which begs the question ‘why
on earth I’m doing this?‘.
Oh yeah! Mega Gengar! They
made the right decision in making it look more like Haunter, though by
Generation 6 Haunter was, I think, firmly established as a fan favourite and
the preferred child of the three so that makes a lot of sense form a fan
pleasing point of view, and Game Freak have ben very keen to please nostalgic
fans and especially fans nostalgia for Generation 1 for a while now. But what I
honestly like about Mega Gengar so much is that is it such a pleasing set of
colours, a gorgeous purple gradient that pulsates and wibbles on the in-game
models, Mega Gengar is the nicest lava lamp alive.
As a concept for an
elemental animal Onyx had to be in Pokémon, a snake made of rocks was a must,
but it’s a concept executed with more than enough originality; not only are
these buggers huge but it has a face that’s all of it’s own, like no other
snake or rock snake around with an expression that’s…what…Bogleech called it’
stony’ (ha, pun) but that’s not quite right, it’s more ‘knowing’.
But Onyx really did need an
evolution, it’s high defence is useful around the time you usually get it
(mid-game) but Chansey (who’s not even made or rocks! Cheek) outclasses it, so
it needed a little something.
Game Freak’s idea of ‘a
little something’? make it a bigger METAL snake with the face psychopathic
murders have just they pull out the knife. There’s a lot of sense going on
here, steel comes from ore (or the ground) to having Rock or Ground Types evolve
into Steel Types is completely logical, ‘big metal snake’ is a cool concept and
Onyx not only needed the stat boosts that come from evolution but was already
pretty popular and memorable, making it a good choice to advertise for the new
typing. Mega Steelix is, of course, mental as well as a little messy and
unfocussed, a little ‘fan created’ if you will, but I rather like it – it’s so
hard that it sprouts diamonds and it’s face got even meaner. I’m not sure about
the shit floating around it’s head but it’s Japanese, and in Japan ‘having shit
floating around you’ equals ‘uber-powerful’ when it comes to character design.
I wasn’t the only one
disappointed that there was no crystalline Alolan Form for Onyx right?
I feel like I SHOULD like
Drowzee, it’s a tapir after all (well specifically it’s a Baku, a mythical
creature and even more specifically it’s a Pokémon that shares traits with our
world’s Baku and tapir but you get what I mean) and I like me some tapirs, but
I can’t ever get it up fro these two and never have been able to. My thoughts
on Drowzee are ‘it looks like an easier egg’ and ‘I really wouldn’t want within
20 foot me’ while my thoughts on Hypno are ‘ew’ and ‘I really wouldn’t want one
within 20 feet of any schools’.
I dunno, I can maybe drag a
few more words out of my malaise: Hypno is, like Alakazam, a showing of a rare
and strange talent of Ken Sugimori’s -the ability to make monsters that feel
like old men without being overt or too cliché. Alakazam was the wise old
master, Alakzam is the old boy down on the road on the sex offenders register
but both are also first and foremost animals/monsters, not drawings of old men
with a few animal-like or monster-like (or elemental) bits stuck on.
That’s all I can manage
OOOOH-OOH the Okey-Kokey!
OOOOH-OOH the Okey Kokey!
No, seriously, why does
Krabby go ‘kokeykokey’ in the anime and not say its name like just about every
other Pokemon? I can write of Arbok saying ‘charbok’ as some kind of speech
impediment, it’s fangs or tongue or something getting in the way but why did 4Kids
choose to have Krabby and Kingler gargle a terrible novelty hit? It’s so out of
left field, so incongruous simply by being so different with no explanation.
Yeah, if you haven’t
guessed I’m padding this out, there’s very little to say about Krabby other
than ‘it’s a neat, simple little carton crab that always looks like you’ve just
dropped an insult about it’s mother into a conversation about cars’ I like it’s expression and I like it’s design
for a crab. Kinger is a good example of an evolution that’s just ‘X but bigger’
done right, everything becomes more larger, more menacing, things like Krabby’s
‘horns’ become more numerous and it’s given its own ‘thing’ to differentiate it
from the stage before it, in this case Kingler’s HUGE claw. Wouldn’t Kingler
and Clawful be such good friends? And an even better fight to sit back and
enjoy?
Good crabs, in other words.
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