Hmm.  Faced with a weird evolutionary line in the first generation, my instinct is go to the hex numbers and see what patterns turn up (if anyone’s unfamiliar with what these are, they’re the numbers that represent the order in which Pokémon were originally programmed into Red and Blue, and probably the order in which they were created).  Of the three, Graveler comes first, followed by Golem ten places later.  Both are within the first 1/3 of the sequence, where there are relatively few intact evolutionary families – the only related Pokémon who appear close together this early are male Nidoran and Nidoking, female Nidoran and Nidoqueen, and Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee (who at this stage were ‘related’ but not by evolution).  Some of those designs may even predate the concept of Pokémon evolution, although that’s a very speculative suggestion.  Shortly after Golem, complete families start to occur more often.  Geodude turns up far later, among the final 30 designs, 10 of which didn’t even make it into Red and Blue.  It’s entirely possible, even likely, that Graveler and Golem were not originally conceived as related creatures, and were combined into a single lineage after the fact – something which may actually have happened at a relatively late stage of the games’ development, concurrently with Geodude’s introduction.

I’ll probably talk about this in my next entry, which is going to be on Froakie, Frogadier and Greninja, but thanks for pointing out the video to me!  I think I lean more towards your view of the matter, but I’ll have to meditate on it as I’m writing.

Hmm.  Not really, no, but if you asked me to pick one I think I’d go with the Legendary… er… DogCatBeastThings.  You know, Suicine, Entei and Raikou.  I enjoy the contrasting aesthetic goals at work in the three designs (beauty and grace vs. strength and stability vs. energy and dynamism), and their origin story hits my personal ‘sweet spot’ between “not enough legends to be legendary” and “wait, this actually breaks the universe,” while also having some very neat symbolism that purports to explain their powers (Raikou is the lightning that struck the Brass Tower, Entei is the fire that destroyed it, and Suicune is the rain that put it out).

Well, I’m normally lukewarm at best about this kind of speculation, but I do remember thinking when I first saw Carbink that it must  evolve, because it didn’t ‘look’ finished, and being rather surprised when it didn’t… so I don’t know.  I don’t think there’d be any precedent for a relationship like that between a common and a legendary Pokémon, but that doesn’t mean Diancie couldn’t be the first.  Maybe?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “not.”

Shedinja is weird, and there are a lot of Pokémon (or, at the very least, a lot of movesets) that will auto-lose to it, one-on-one.  On the other hand, anything that can harm Shedinja, at all, is game over.  It’s very all-or-nothing, and since it doesn’t look like Stealth Rock is going to stop being a thing any time soon, the burden is normally going to be on Shedinja’s trainer to keep things from tipping over to “nothing.”  The fact that Shedinja can be insta-killed by five different attack types certainly hurts it, but the fact that it can also be insta-killed by burns, poison, entry hazards, weather damage, Leech Seed, Rough Skin recoil, a variety of Tricked items, and anything with Mold Breaker is at least as big a problem (and none of those things are really unusual).  Ultimately, almost any Pokémon in the game can learn Toxic – and let’s not forget that Shedinja isn’t actually a top-tier offensive threat in its own right, either (it’s all but certain that, even with direct damage immunity, the vast majority of teams would have something to kill a Shedinja, so it can’t just rely on its invulnerability to wear everything down – it has limited time in play with which to contribute to the team, and Shedinja’s movepool isn’t great).  Don’t get me wrong, Shedinja would be a lot more powerful if it just had flat-out immunity to direct damage, but without having a playtest for it, I still think we’d be looking at “interesting” rather than “broken.”

Well, not really – I mean, Girafarig’s ‘thing’ is the independent head on its tail.  Giraffes (and vertebrates in general) don’t really work like that.  It’s almost more of a pushmi-pullyu sort of thing, which you can see more clearly in the original concept art from the beta of Gold and Silver.

I kinda wish they had made more of that in the anime; from memory the Girafarig feature episode basically portrayed it as a generic Psychic-type, which is a little sad, really.   A lot more could be made of the contrast between the more cerebral Psychic-type end and the rather bestial Normal-type end.

Come to think of it, Girafarig would be a really good candidate for Mega Evolution – tail becomes a great big chomping head, turns to Psychic/Dark, gains powerful physical attacks… maybe some sort of custom ability too.  Not sure exactly what, though.

Preliminary note: my ‘editor,’ Jim, wishes me to point out that although I believe Sigilyph are man-made, we don’t actually know – I’m not sure why else they might guard the sites of ancient cities, but then again, they’re immortal Psychic-types whose emotions, assuming they have them, we can’t readily understand. They could very well have complicated reasons of their own for the things they do, possibly related to being captured and trained in ancient times. With that little caveat out of the way, let’s talk about Sigilyph and Golurk.

Pokémon as a franchise is generally quite keen on the idea that ancient civilisations may have had mysterious technology to rival our own, but based on very different principles – witness, for example, the Ultimate Weapon of X and Y, constructed by AZ circa 1000 BC. It’s not exactly a subtle piece of technology, and it doesn’t offer much in the way of a recommendation for the ancient Kalosians’ ability to built a computer or perform heart surgery, but it does speak to a tremendous capacity for energy manipulation. I would note that Pokémon very rarely uses the word ‘magic’ in describing a number of things for which many of us probably would, and I suspect this is because it takes the position that ‘magic’ is just science you don’t understand yet – often, the nitty-gritty of Pokémon powers, what their energy sources are, and exactly what they can do, alone or in combination. Golett and Golurk have bodies of fired and glazed ceramic – we know how that works. The difficulty is in the mysterious energy source that brings them to life and grants them their Ghost-type powers – and I think the fact that they are Ghost-types might be the key here. Spirits can possess physical objects, after all; that’s a staple belief of plenty of traditions. I suggest that the glowing inner light that animates Golett and Golurk is the soul of a dead Pokémon, called by a powerful Ghost-type like a Dusknoir or a Chandelure. This could have been seen as a way of giving new life to a recently deceased Pokémon partner. The human contribution is the impressive craftsmanship involved in designing ceramic moving parts, and whatever is involved in creating the seals that prevent Golett’s soul from being drawn back to wherever it is Pokémon go when they die.  Sigilyph could be something similar, but I’m not sure.  They take inspiration from Hopi Kachina/Katsina dolls (which are educational tools for teaching children about the rituals involved in gaining the favour of nature spirits) and the mysterious Nazca lines (whose purpose is unknown but could be related to ritual – archaeologist-speak for “we have no idea“ – or irrigation).  Perhaps the Sigilyph were originally inanimate totems that gradually took on a semblance of life, and eventually actual thoughts and feelings (mimicking those of the spirits the people worshipped), as a result of the beliefs of the people who made them?

Now, what do these Pokémon think of training? I think it’s a mistake to assume Sigilyph and Golurk are emotionless; they are inscrutable, yes, but that’s something else entirely. The games describe them as possessing the full range of personality traits we see in all other Pokémon, so although they’re clearly very different, have weird goals and priorities, and probably take a lot longer than most Pokémon for a typical trainer to understand, they aren’t necessarily incapable of caring about things or forming opinions. They almost certainly recognise that their original masters are long dead, and may be aware that their last orders are no longer particularly relevant (unless their orders were to wait for something – maybe those patrolling Sigilyph are guarding against something specific that was foreseen by their masters, something powerful and troubling enough to warrant setting up eternal guardians against it…). On the other hand, most of the things that would motivate other wild Pokémon, like finding food and mates, don’t really apply to them. Left to their own devices, they may have trouble thinking of anything better to do.  It’s possible that they spend long stretches of time sleeping. They’re also immortal, or at least long-lived enough that a human lifetime is quite brief in comparison, meaning that their goals are probably very long-term. If the next pressing event in your calendar is a planetary alignment in 2092 when you’ll be able to re-enact a major festival of your dead civilisation, adopting a Pokémon trainer and spending 15 years advancing his or her career might seem like a pleasant diversion.

Well, it nicely explains how Cubone and Marowak are able to exist as a species.  If all Cubone wear their mothers’ skulls, then we’re looking at a maximum of one child per coupling, which is not sustainable; even if we relax that limitation to allow them to wear their fathers’ skulls, it’s difficult to see how they can maintain their population.  They must come from somewhere, and the orphan Kangaskhan argument makes as much sense as anything.  It makes a great deal of sense that, for a species which is all about motherhood, losing one’s mother would be an extremely traumatic event, so I kind of like the idea that they have this specific cultural response to it: orphans become outcasts and devote themselves to battle and self-reliance, in contrast to the herd- and family-focused lifestyle of Kangaskhan.

You still need to reconcile their gender ratios, of course – all Kangaskhan are female, while 50% of all Cubone are male.  I think it might be stretching it just a bit to suggest that all Kangaskhan who have male children die.  Of course, there are species in the real world capable of changing sex in response to unusual stress, so it’s conceivable that about 50% of infant female Kangaskhan react in a similar way to becoming orphans (this may be easier to accept if you buy into my insanity about what Pokémon gender actually means).

Marowak, I think, are the ones who really get it.  They understand grief and loss on a level that goes far beyond what most humans ever experience, and they kinda buy into it, in a way; they think that you can only ever become truly strong by overcoming the pain of loss, and that the most important thing to fight for is the memory of your ancestors.  As a result, although they can and do have children of their own, they also sometimes adopt orphaned Kangaskhan and raise them to share the same beliefs.  This, of course, makes the Lavender Town sequence with the orphaned Cubone and the mother Marowak that much worse, because it’s possible that the Marowak was a ‘mother’ by virtue of adopting a bunch of Cubone whose birth mothers had died too.

Well, if it were me, I’d say that any Mega form of Arceus would be quite powerful enough without needing a super-ability (not all Mega Pokémon get new abilities, mind – Abomasnow, for instance, keeps Snow Warning, even though it is of no use to him after he first switches in).  Not that that’s likely to sway anyone at Game Freak.

Death is too good for Kricketune and his moustache.