You may associate Pokémon with Nintendo, but Pokémon games are mostly made by a developer called Game Freak. The company, which has been a part of some controversies in recent years revolving around the poor state of its games at release, was recently hacked and had its employees’ personal information leaked.
The Pokémon leaks saw the release of a series of several terabytes of stolen behind-the-scenes documents, revealing some unexpectedly horny and bizarre bits of Pokémon lore that were scrapped. There were tidbits on upcoming games like Pokémon Legends: Z-A, sprites for unreleased Pokémon, and details about upcoming Pokémon TV shows and movies.
Surely the tawdryest bit of information released revolves around the mythological folklore surrounding one of the individual Pokémon, Typhlosion, which was scrapped before it ever made it into a game.
Typhlosion made its debut back in 1999 with the release of Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver. The scrapped bit of Typhlosion lore harkens back to a tale from deep within Japanese mythology, about a folkloric character known as noppera-bō, a creature that can shape-shift.
In the unused backstory, a young girl from “a long time ago, when the boundary between Pokémon and humans was unclear” is tricked into believing that the shape-shifting Typhlosion is a human. She marries this Typhlosion, disguising itself as a human, has sex with it, and has a child with it, all before her father finds out about it and kills it.
Pokémon lore is no stranger to dark themes and general creepiness. Countless articles have been written about, say, Drifloon, a Pokemon that visually looks like a balloon but, instead of being filled with helium, is filled with the souls of humans it is ferrying to the afterlife. There’s lots of stuff like that. But having a Pokémon trick a human woman into having sex with it by making her believe it’s a human is maybe a bit much—thus explaining why that bit of lore did not see the light of day until it was hacked out of Game Freak’s servers.
All mythologies, not just Japanese mythology, are filled with stories like this. Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Hindu mythology. They’re all filled with murder, incest, vile trickery, the brutality of the gods, etc. Imitating all of that for the background lore of your cutesy children’s game characters isn’t exactly shocking, nor is it new. But people online overreacted to it anyway, as if Pokémon hasn’t always been this way since it started in 1996.
The post Leaked Pokémon Lore Includes Story of a Girl Who Has a Baby with a Pokémon appeared first on VICE.
The post Leaked Pokémon Lore Includes Story of a Girl Who Has a Baby with a Pokémon appeared first on VICE.
