This is better, I needed
something to be enthusiastic about again
Like Wingull and Pelipper
these two are the owners of their very own unique art style – in this case
roughly what would have happened is Peanuts ever went sci-fi (you can see it
right? Charlie Brown and Linus having a chat while in the background Snoopy is
trying to stop Gulpin from innocently eating the whole scenery) but unlike
Wingull and Pellipper these two are ADORABE BLOBS THAT CAN EAT ANYTHING.
They’re so fucking weird and cute and cool – ok, apparently these little
splodges are nearly all stomach, they have tiny heats and tiny brains and
mouths that open incredibly wide - so wide that Gulpin can swallow something
it’s own size easily and Swalot can easily engulf a truck tire:
And they have stomach acid
that can eat through just about anything. With the adorableness and what the
fuckery up this high it’s impossible for me not to be mad on them. I prefer
Gulpin for completely for the reason that it’s cuter - when it opens
it’s moth it looks adorable rather than terrifying, which just makes the fact that
it IS terrifying and that it’s trying to eat you whole all the worse if you ask
me, like ghosts of children, or attractive Tory MPs. Swalot is far more
obviously unnerving – and sweats poison, no actually it can SPRAY its poisonous
sweat as a way of paralysing it’s intended victims, apparently – but it’s under
a layer of fancy as fuck. Look at it, with its aloof stance and its moustache,
it’s no surprise that Swalot wearing a top hat and monocle became a meme. It is
wearing a grandad sweater though, seriously you’re telling me you don’t look at
those triangles and see an uncool pull-over?
It’s something Doug would wear. Which I guess just makes Swalot a rich
old gentleman…who’s relaxing on the golf course! And can also eat you alive
after spraying you with toxic sweat.
God they’re just so fun and
inventive and weird and cute and creepy and YES! YES TO GULPIN AND SWALOT!
Because two Pikaclones
weren’t enough we have the admittedly very adorable Korechu, which even has
‘chu’ in the name, I think it looks like the little mouse that used to follow
Jerry around (his nephew?). Korechu was an event ‘mon for the DS remake of Hey,
You Pika…wait, hold on…
…What…?
….fuck off…
…What do you mean that was
a fucking hoax!?!
No wonder I couldn’t find
any decent art of this bloody thing!!
Fucking internet…
*shrugs* Poképiranhas and
Pokésharks are cool
Fictional piranhas are like
strawberry flavouring, all strawberry flavouring is easily identifiable as
‘strawberry’ but none of it tastes like actual strawberries, all cartoon
piranhas are identifiable as ‘piranha’ but not really like actual piranhas. Carvanah
is a fine cartoon piranha, it has a big ol’ underbite, angry eyes and it’s part
Dark type. That’s all I got.
Sharpedo is a little more
interesting, it’s clearly the descendant of Ikari from that demo I’m not
allowed to mention anymore:
They couldn’t get their
half-a-shark into Gen 2 but they got it in next time, now mixing it with a
torpedo instead in a way that far more organically blends the two things,
rather than just sticking an anchor on the arse of something. Sharpedo’s
actually pretty unique as cartoon sharks go you know, even though it doesn’t
look like it at first: it has no back half of course, it’s eyes are in it’s
gills (weird) and it has those two nice big serrated fins that look like knives,
it also doesn’t have complete rows of teeth, which I’ve never noticed until
just now. There aren’t many sharks like this around and that’s a good thing.
Mega Sharpedo feels like
it’s trying to hard to be badass, with it’s scars and it’s blades and being all
extra pointy an’ shit. It’s over-the-top in that Mega Evolution way that I
enjoy but it really wants to be cool and just ends up looking a bit silly. I
really like the flesh strands either side of its’ mouth though, it’s like
during its Mega Evolution its mouth gets too big for its skin and rips open
further Chelsea smile fashion.
I do like me some Wailmer,
it’s the perfect way to abstract a blue whale in a way that feels creative and
unique. That sentence is more complex than it was meant to be, I mean that by
making it a ball that looks like a whale it’s an unusual way to simplify a blue
whale down for a cartoon animal but one that feels completely fitting (even
though blue whales are long bastards) and it has a big adorable face that I
just wanna smoosh.
I don’t need Wailmer to
evolve personally but I get why it does. Wailmer just doesn’t have that epic
feel to it that makes it acceptable as Pokémon’s only representation of a Blue
Whale. Blue Whales are fucking awe inspiringly massive things, I pretty much lived at London’s Natural History Museum
throughout every summer holiday of my childhood, a place famous for its blue
whale skeleton and life-size model and they’re just beyond massive. Wailord has
that sense of scale to it, Wailord feels epic in the way that Wailmer doesn’t,
but it just doesn’t have the same levels of personality. It can
impregnant tiny Pokémon with what is presumably the largest Poképenis though
(though whales have comparatively micro-penises compared to their size, they’re
so big their micro-penis would still destroy a Skitty with just it’s tip, I
learnt that from Q.I. of
course).
This was another set of
‘offenders’ when the game first debuted, again their radically different
(feeling) style (that’s not that radically different from Smeargle) and Numel’s
seemingly random colourization made me hate them on sight. However at some
point I realised the following: camels don’t look like they were designed by the
same person who designed the rest of the animal kingdom, camels are weird
fucking things, have a camel picture:
That is fucking odd. So
like with Gurotesu and Huntail the line not looking like it fits with Gen 1 and
2 is pretty appropriate, and unlike Gurotesu and Huntail real camels are also
goofy a.f. so this doofy Rugrats style is an even better fit. I still don’t get
why Numel is yellow though, I get the green, it represents grass on the hill
that is Numel’s back, which I’ve always interpreted as being based on a geyser btw
because geysers are basically the unevolved form of volcanos aren’t they? If
you could level a geyser (Water/Ground Type obviously) up to level 28 it would
evolve into a volcano (Fire/Ground type obviously). But why yellow? It makes
Numel look more like a balloon animal than a hill.
Stylistically Camerupt and
Mega Camerupt are straight out of Rocko’s Modern Life, those faces, they’re
Rocko’s Modern Life faces. It may as well have evolved from Sharky.
Conceptually however Camerupt is another of the Onyx/Cynaquil ‘so obvious how
could I not have thought of this’ group of elemental animals; a fire camel with
volcanos for humps! Of course! You might be expecting me to bitch about those
big blue ring markings on Camerupt’s side but… I don’t find them all that
bothersome, I think it’s just simply the shades of orange and blue, I must find
them complimentary to the point that the rings just sort of fade into the
overall design, I wouldn’t have put them on there, I’d be happy if they weren’t
there, but it wouldn’t affect the ‘mons ball score if they were gone.
Mega Camerupt becomes ‘a
mountain’ and what’s not to love? Camerupt was already a Bactrian camel
evolving from an Arabian camel, which was a great idea, but it becomes the
fuzziest Bactrian camel ever and grows a turtle shell with a sodding volcano
bursting out in the middle of it. Mega Camerupt is sweet. However, it has a
fucking ‘M’ in between it’s eyes? Is it supposed to be an M? For ‘mega
evolution’? If so, why are we throwing superhero design elements onto a camel?
Was there a camel superhero in Japan that was popular at the time? I don’t even
think Kinnikuman had a Camelman and that had a fucking Rubix Cube superhero.
Maybe Game Freak’s designer just got fed up with Rocko’s Modern Life and moved
on to Dial M for Monkey?
Torkoal was one of the
first ‘mons from this generation I took too, it’s never been one my favourites
(which I sadly think is a very common thing to hear about
Torkoal) but it’s such a nice idea - a Tortoise’s shell as an oven – with such
a lovely colour scheme – colours that work as rocky and clay but also work for
a tortoise or other very ‘dry’ animal – and such a lovely little face, turtles
and tortoises are more often than not given cute or pretty standard cartoon
faces (as we have seen with Squirtle and will see with Tortouga) and that’s
just fine but it’s nice to occasionally get a tortoise/turtle looking creature
that has that wise, weird, old look to it.
And of course, with it’s
weird face and random line across it’s head it sure does look like the tortoise
form the old Creature Comfort adverts dunnit?:
And it naturally produces
mushroom clouds.
And it’s the signature
Pokémon of Flannery, and I really rather fancy Flannery.
S’alright really innit?
It is strange that it isn’t
Ground/Fire or Rock/Fire though. Maybe because we had Numel and Camerupt in the
same game? But we got two Water/Ground and Water/Dark lines this gen…
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