RandomAccess64 asks:

I personally always liked the fan Pokémon concept of basing a poison/ice type after a cold, with a counterpart poison/fire type after a fever.

And Anonymous asks:

When I think Ice/Poison, my mind first goes to pollution. Some sort of frozen sludge monster, perhaps, or a rotting corpse trapped under a layer of permafrost, its putrescence leaking into the surrounding environment.

Some interesting ideas! The cold/fever one could definitely be played with in some neat ways… maybe as alternate forms of a single Pokémon, even? If it’s a disease-based Pokémon, it might need to spread illnesses in order to keep itself healthy, which could make training one a challenge. The rotting corpse might be pushing it for a Pokémon game – I don’t know if Game Freak would go for that one – but the sludge monster idea sort of makes me want to see a Polar Muk regional variant.

Anonymous asks:

Personally, I do see the Kalos Trio being based off of Norse Mythology, but more generalized, and not drawing inspiration from just the one myth. Like, eagles in general are associated with death in Norse mythology. Not just Hraesvelgr, but other beings such as the God of Death (who turns into an eagle), and the Blood Eagle ritual. (Also, Zygarde is more Jormungand than Nidhogg, with its other two forms likely being based off Fenrir and Hel.) Those are just my thoughts: you’re free to disagree.

Let the disagreement commence. [rolls up sleeves, cracks knuckles]

It is honestly baffling to me that this idea is so widely and unquestioningly accepted, because personally, I don’t think I’ve ever been less convinced by a Pokémon fan theory in my life. I don’t even understand why people look at Yveltal and think “eagle.” The “ruff” around its neck is almost certainly meant to make us think “vulture,” which is a much easier association with death. Stags can be associated with nature without having to bring Norse mythology into it; birds of prey or carrion birds can be associated with death without having to bring Norse mythology into it; insisting that Norse mythology has anything to do with these Pokémon makes the concept weaker and more confusing. Continue reading “Anonymous asks:” →

Anonymous asks:

Quick! Describe a concept for a Ice/Poison type Pokemon!

I feel like this has come up before… yeah, here we go.

I can come up with ideas, they’re just sort of hackneyed, and not really very elegant. The polar regions aren’t known for poisonous or venomous animals in the real world, so there’s not a lot of inspiration that obviously lends itself to Ice/Poison. You kind of wind up producing either a polar animal with venom slapped on it out of nowhere, or a venomous animal with ice powers slapped on it out of nowhere… hmm.

Okay, mild flash of inspiration, maybe something based on a glass frog, with hints of poison dart frog for good measure? See-through skin made of ice, poisonous glands… steps on Toxicroak’s toes a bit, but that’s all right if we make it weird enough… maybe the skin splinters when it’s injured, and the shards inflict poison? Maybe make it a stained-glass frog, with lots of bright colours? But then you’re drifting away from anything that justifies making it an Ice-type… I suppose this is a start, anyway.

AndrewQ asks:

Are Staryu and Starmie the only Pokemon that don’t have eyes, or any discernible kind of face? If so… why? (In-universe explanation and/or designers’ perspective explanation welcome)

They’re not quite the only ones. Regirock, Regice, Registeel and Regigigas don’t have faces, just arrangements of dots (possibly eyes or some other all-purpose sensory organ?). Those do look as though they should stand for faces, but you can sort of say the same thing about Staryu and Starmie’s cores. Roggenrola has a thing that sort of looks like it should be an eye, but if you actually read the Pokédex is more a sort of… huge forward-facing ear? And it’s not clear to me whether that counts as a face or not. A couple of the Ultra Beasts don’t really have faces as such, but perhaps we shouldn’t count them. A few others arguably have only parts of faces – like, Zubat kinda just has a big gaping mouth, and Magnemite and Sigilyph are just single eyes. It’s not clear to me how many faces Claydol should be counted as having – 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8 all seem like acceptable answers to me. I find it difficult to think of Unown or Beldum as having faces. Certainly Staryu and Starmie are unique amongst non-legendary Pokémon, and unique among Pokémon of the first two generations, in having no facial features at all. From the designers’ perspective, not giving something a face is a good way to make it seem alien and inscrutable, because humans express emotion through our faces and it’s hard for us to relate to something that doesn’t appear to have one. That’s clearly in line with the design goals for Staryu and Starmie (given their mysterious nature and connections to outer space), the legendary golems, and especially the Ultra Beasts.

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Anonymous asks:

Did you see the alleged starter leaks? They’re pretty clearly fake but still cute and whoever made them did a great job of copying Pokemon’s aesthetic.

I have now. I think maybe they feel so much like Pokémon because the pony is very reminiscent of Keldeo, the bear of Solosis, and the coral thing a little bit of Phantump, albeit with a palette swap. The type changes make it hard to put your finger on what feels familiar about them, though. Pretty clever (assuming, of course, that they are fake – and I see no reason to speculate otherwise).

Anonymous asks:

You know what, there’s kind of a missed opportunity with Diancie. Think about it, Diancie is, canonically, a mutated Carbink, yet Carbink is not related to how it’s obtained at all. I mean, how hard would it have been to have an event-distributed item that somehow evolves Carbink into Diancie? We have a Mythical Pokemon that hatches from an egg for pete’s sake, why not have a Mythological Pokemon that evolves from a regular Pokemon?

I can’t speak for Game Freak’s decision-making process, but that direction is obvious enough and uncomplicated enough that I am inclined to think they probably have some reason for not taking it – most likely because Diancie is portrayed (e.g. in the movie in which she stars) as a special Carbink, with powers to which other Carbink cannot aspire. You might liken it to the rarity of a perfect natural diamond – you can cut and polish diamonds to make them nicer, but ultimately there are some flaws and inclusions that will be impossible to remove, and Diancie needs to be a perfect diamond.

Anonymous asks:

Cruising Bogleech’s pokedex reviews, I learned about the swap of Butterfree’s and Venomoth’s designs (likely by mistake) in Gen I. While I doubt the change to be highly significant, I do wonder how this mistake influenced the franchise. After all, Butterfree is the most iconic Bug pokemon (outside possibly Scyther), one of the beloved first catch of many players, the model for many latter pokemon, and played a big part in the original anime. How much do you think this change affected things?

It’s sort of obligatory for me to point out first that we don’t know this is true; to my knowledge no-one at Game Freak has ever confirmed or denied it, and they probably never will. There’s enough evidence for it that it seems plausible to me, but there are some things we probably can’t ever know for sure – heck, maybe there was a switch, and they did it on purpose, precisely because they preferred the idea of the starting Bug-type ending up as a cute butterfly. But anyway. Assuming it’s true, well… I’m not sure changing two Pokémon affects the fate of the franchise all that much. Venomoth makes just as much sense as a precursor to Beautifly, Dustox, Vivillon, etc as Butterfree does, and Caterpie is going to be your beloved first catch no matter what it evolves into (maybe I’m just saying that because I like Venomoth anyway, but presumably I’m not the only one). Butterfree’s never really been a flagship publicity Pokémon, either. The exception is the anime, where Butterfree is important as Ash’s beloved first catch. I think the biggest difference is that I don’t know if I can imagine the episode Bye Bye Butterfree, when Ash’s Butterfree falls in love and leaves him to go and start a family, being written the same way with a Venomoth, because the emotional moments between Butterfree and Ash might not resonate with a Pokémon so… un-cute. But it’s not as though Venomoth is so thoroughly hideous or alien that it’s impossible to empathise with.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

I’ve seen the god set described as a “typhonian animal.” So, is Typhlosion named after Typhos?

Well, I’m not sure what Set has to do with it, but it seems plausible to me. Typhlosion’s name seems like it ought to come from “typhoon” and “explosion,” which makes some sense because typhoons are violent and destructive, like explosions and fire, but is also a weird choice given that typhoons are primarily calamities of wind and water, and don’t really fit with Typhlosion’s fire-related abilities. The monster Typhon (or Typhos, or Typhoeus, or Typhaon, or however you want to spell it) was also violent and destructive and also had wind and storm powers, but is more appropriate to a Fire-type because he’s buried under Mount Aetna and is the cause of the volcano’s eruptions. And hey, Typhlosion is one of only five Pokémon that can learn Eruption. Typhon is supposed to have had a hundred different bestial heads and voices, so I’m sure one of the bloody things resembles Typhlosion’s. What I’m slightly uncomfortable about is reaching to something from Greek mythology so early in Pokémon’s history, since Game Freak’s designers have explicitly said in the past that they don’t usually look to classical myth for design ideas. The long u-sound in the Japanese name, Bakufūn (or Bakphoon), also seems to point more strongly to “typhoon,” and this is the etymology offered by the Japanese Pokémon wiki. I suppose it could simply be a reference to both Typhon and typhoons. The etymologies are unrelated – typhoon derives from a Chinese word – but Pokémon wouldn’t be the first to notice the fortuitous similarity (Wikipedia cites a book that suggests the Chinese word ultimately comes from the Greek, via Arabic and Persian, but I am deeply sceptical).

Anonymous asks:

If you had to make a generic normal type rodent pokemon (like ratatta and zigzagoon) what kind of thing would you like to make? No cop outs like “I wouldn’t!” or ‘put ratatta in the game!”

I think you could make something interesting with a wombat Pokémon that evolves into one of the big extinct megafauna marsupials, like a diprotodon or a marsupial lion (Australia-inspired region…?). Not actually rodents, of course, but then, most of them aren’t taxonomically rodents (we’ve had mustelids, procyonids, lagomorphs and feliforms), so I’d say we’re probably in the clear on that score. Give ‘em biiiiig fμ¢&-off claws; wombats have nasty claws. I still think we need some additional twist on this to make it a properly fleshed-out Pokémon and not just a cartoon version of a real animal, but it’ll do for a start.

VikingBoyBilly asks:

What would you think of a grass/dragon line that starts as a wisteria, then evolves into a anthropomorphized snapdragon, and its final stage is a titan arum? I even came up with names: Mysteria, Dragunia, and Titatunia. It could be the first non-poison type to have stench as an ability. Grass type seal of approval?

Sounds reasonable to me; probably some good reasons to do over-the-top grotesqueness that might be fun, and lets you do a traditional support-oriented Grass-type with a twist. So sure.