Have you heard of fan art called pokemon variations?
It’s like Gastrodon, Sawsbuck and Spinda, only it’s applied to every species. There’s a snowy noctowl and picasso and sphinx nosepass. Search for them and tell me which ones you like.
Mmm; I am familiar with them.
There’s sort of a few different species of this, I feel, which get lumped together even though they’re not quite doing the same thing – there’s the ones like you’re talking about, that do subtle geographical or climatic variations on a single Pokémon species, often based on different but related real world species, like these Umbreon ones or these Wailmer/Wailord ones which I’m quite fond of, or you’ll have one that’s imagined as a strain specially bred for contests so it’s prettier and more elegant, or one that’s bred for fighting so it’s bigger and spiker, like these Aggron forms. All the “Pokémon morphology” ones by Cat & Crown I particularly like because of the effort involved in giving them a sort of ‘backstory.’ And this is the sort of thing I wish Game Freak had the time to do for every Pokémon because, well, of course there would be breeds and subspecies like that. We even see that acknowledged in the anime in the Orange Islands, and of course a Meditite from up by Snowpoint City where it’s f#$%ing freezing all the time (for example) isn’t going to look like a Meditite from subtropical Hoenn.
But then there’s also a class that are envisioned as crossbreeds with other Pokémon, and I’m not sure how I feel about all these. Obviously there’s a lot of creativity that goes into them, and I’m quite fond of sets where they’re basically all still identifiable as forms of the basic Pokémon like these Chikorita or these Nidoran, where it makes sense that “okay, Pokémon are always of their mother’s species, but these ones have some mostly cosmetic attributes of their father’s species too,” and it’s kind of cool to imagine that maybe a Pokémon like this would have a particularly spectacular egg move in its arsenal. With a whole bunch, though, you get crossbreeds that not only stop being recognisable as forms of the Pokémon in question but involve breeding combinations that are actually impossible, like several of these Pidgeot. And at this point I think to myself “well, okay, love the creativity, but exactly what am I supposed to imagine I’m looking at? Why not just say ‘these are fusions’?” Probably I’m overthinking that, but overthinking things is literally what I do here, soooo…
Pokémaniacal 