So there’s debate over what makes a pokémon a dragon type, or a fairy type, or even a normal type, but I’m wondering what GameFreak thinks constitutes a bug-type. At first it seems obvious, but there are anomalous outliers like anorith being bug while kabuto, krabby and corphish are not. Shuckle is a worm; I don’t think of a worm as being a bug. Skorupi loses it’s bug typing for Dark, and if a bug has a secondary typing and grows wings when it evolves, it won’t be a FLYING type.
Well, Shuckle’s not a worm; it’s labelled the “mould Pokémon” so I think it’s probably meant to be more like a slime mould, but that’s hardly a “bug” either. I’m not sure that I have a good answer for this one. I think probably their ideas of what “Bug-type” means are more aesthetic than biological. Crustaceans aren’t Bug-types because they more clearly “belong” in Water. Anorith not being Water is really odd, because the way Armaldo is portrayed, as one of the first living things to move onto land, seems like it should give a good reason for Anorith to change from Rock/Water to Rock/Bug when it evolves; I think they may have wanted to avoid Rock/Water for the second set of fossil Pokémon, though, since Kabuto and Omanyte had both been Rock/Water. So I suppose what it seems to be, to me, is “arthropods that don’t obviously belong somewhere else,” with one or two odd extras like Shuckle, who certainly doesn’t seem to belong elsewhere either… Grass, maybe?
Pokémaniacal 