If you were around for the reveal of Pokémon’s Generation 7, you’ll remember the controversy around Litten. When the design of the cat-like ‘mon first debuted, fans were ecstatic. We were finally about to get a Fire Starter on four legs! Never in the franchise’s history had there been a final-stage Fire Starter who remained a quadruped all throughout its evolutionary line, and with Litten, it only made sense that we were about to.
That was, until Litten stood up.
What had once been a grumpy, but oh-so-cute four-legged cat became Incineroar, what can only be described as a human wrestler with a propensity for flares and fursuits. Fans were heavily split into those who loved the design and those who were horrified at what Pokémon Starters had become.
I fell into the latter camp, incredibly disappointed with the final evos for the Alolan Starters. The final evos of the previous generation—Delphox, Chesnaught, and Greninja—had already bordered the line between the cool, monster-like designs of the franchise’s earlier concepts and the fursuit personas we’d eventually get in later ones. But the Kalos Starters had signaled a turning point that the following batch of Pocket Monsters fully capitalized on. And when Incineroar, Decidueye, and Primarina appeared in all their glory, it became glaringly obvious that the Pokémon’s creators were doubling down on a direction that geared more towards designing personality-first creatures that could fill character roles in the anime, and less of the franchise’s original art direction that imagined Pokémon as mostly filling the same role animals have in real life.
We’re now four generations ahead of the Alolan days, and we just got the official confirmation of the Gen. 10 starters: Browt, Pombon, and Gecqua. While some are already losing it in excitement over the new designs, quick to claim a tribe between the three, I just want to remind everyone to hold your Ponytas; we haven’t even seen the final designs, and you may end up hating them when we finally do.
From an adorable little Sobble turning into a weird gangly James Bond lizard to a lovable grass cat growing up to be a bipedal mask-wearing bandit, I’ve been bamboozled one too many times by cute Pokémon Starters. No, I don’t want to explore a new region with a fully grown adult human wearing a Pokémon costume running behind me. Give me a fire-breathing dragon or a giant land tortoise capable of reshaping the earth beneath their feet. I want power and simplicity in my animal-like companions, not the soccer skills Scorbunny sports or the zesty footwork of Quaquaval.
When you have a design like Blastoise, Samurott, or Sceptile—animalistic designs without human characteristics—you’re free to fill in the blanks of what the creature’s personality would be. In the anime, we’ve got lazy Charizards, athletic Charizards, and confident, but not cocky Charizards (though we get that, too). When you have a Pokémon designed with a specific trait in mind, though—like Cinderace, who’s modeled after an athletic soccer player with actual clothing—it’s harder to justify other personality types outside of what would make a sporty ball-kicker a, well, sporty ball-kicker.
A lot of you will probably admonish me for my deeply rooted hatred of these human designs, telling me my 30-year-old self needs to cool it over a literal kids’ game. And a lot of you would probably be right. But I grew up catching ‘mons and imagining them as companions on my team, each with their own personalities. It’s what made replaying the games again and again and again that much fun, so it’s rough seeing a franchise you grew up on no longer appeal to your vision for the game, what attracted you to it in the first place.
I don’t have much hope for Starter designs anymore, which is why I’m not picking a side from today’s trio. And if you’re like me, you shouldn’t either. What’s an innocent-looking Fire-type Pomeranian might grow up to be a macho dogman who could rival Joe Rogan in a lookalike contest. Hopefully not. But probably.
Weirdly enough, even though I might not have much hope, that won’t stop me from hoping anyway. I’ll still search up fanart imagining what our new little Angry Bird knockoff Browt will look like when he’s all grown up. I want to see where Pokémon fans’ brains go when they think of a badass fire dog that was once a little poofy ball of fur. Is that a bad thing to do? To hold out hope when history has proven you wrong time and time again?
Oh well. I’m probably setting myself up for another broken heart. So consider this your public reminder: don’t get too excited about the new Pokémon Starters until we see their final forms, unless you want to deal with another era of disappointment like me.
