Typhloision
This article was published on 10/14 and republished on 10/15.
I uh, don’t even know where to start here. Game Freak has been hacked and countless files have been released, which unfortunately include some personal information about its employees. But it also includes everything from unused concept art and scrapped lore stories from the universe, and one in particular has gone a bit viral. More than a bit.
That would be a tale about Typhlosion, the Gold/Silver starter evolution which I definitely picked growing up. I also picked Charizard before that. I like fire, what can I say. But now my memories might be…tainted a bit.
Fans have discovered some sort of lost lore story about Typhlosion which…well, here’s a brief excerpt:
“A long time ago, when the boundary between Pokémon and humans was unclear…”
Okay nope I’m gonna stop right there. Yes, this is going where you think it’s going, a relationship between a human and Pokemon. That kind of relationship. But it’s…even weirder than you might think.
Typhlosion
A young girl is tricked by a shape-shifting Bakufun (Typhlosion) into thinking that he’s a human. Eventually, she apparently has a child with him and she’s called his wife. Her father eventually comes and kills the Bakfun and when she returns to the village she and her half-Pokémon child is teased by the men in the village who at one point cover it in fur skins. Then they run into the forest and are never seen again. Here’s a particularly nightmarish passage from when the father goes to find his daughter:
“You have broken the branch. Your father will be here soon. Now I am going to do something bad to your father. If you kill me, you can have my eyes, my voice, and my heart. Then I want you to build a fire where I was killed and let it burn. And I want you to sing this song until it burns out.”
The girl said, “Please stop. You’re going to kill my father. Please stop. Let yourself be killed.”
“Goodbye. We’ll never meet again.”
Many forms of mythology, including Japanese mythology, has animals transforming into humans or vice versa in order to exhibit some form of trickery. Zeus did this a lot, for example. Specifically, Typhlosion is supposed to be based of the Mujina, the Japanese Badger, where in folklore it is often depicted to be a shape-shifting Yokai (demon/trickster/monster) so this is not entirely pulled out of thin air. But something like this making it into Pokémon documents at Game Freak is uh, something.
It’s unclear why this story was made or why it’s in these files. We have no idea who wrote it or if it was anywhere close to making it into a game (there are plenty of really dark Pokémon lore stories, though none quite this crazy). But the text has taken off online all the same and now no one will ever look at Typhlosion the same way again. I certainly won’t.
I’ve reached out to Game Freak for comment and will update if I hear back.
Update (10/15): I thought it would be interesting to find another story about the shape-shifting Mujina, on which this creepy version of Typhlosion is based. What follows is part of an adaptation of an old Japanese folklore myth, The Faceless Woman (via Rikumo):
“One night at a late hour, he was hurrying up the Kii-no-kuni-zaka when he saw a woman crouching by the moat all alone. She was weeping bitterly and her hands covered her face completely as she heaved forward towards the moat. Fearing that she intended to drown herself, he stopped near her to offer his help. As he came closer he saw that she was lithe, handsomely dressed and that her hair was arranged like that of a young girl from a good family.
He was a kind man, and pity gripped his heart. “O-jochu (young girl),” he exclaimed, approaching her, “O-jochu, do not cry like that… Tell me what the trouble is, and if there be any way to help you, I shall do it.”
Suddenly, the girl turned around and dropped her sleeve from her hand. Where there should have been two eyes, a mouth and a nose, was nothing but a featureless blank of skin as smooth as an egg. She began stroking her face with her hand slowly before him.
The man screamed and ran away.”
The “egg face” idea is one that persisted in folklore, that the Mujina was able to shapeshift into human form, but often with a featureless, smooth face. But it could take other, more normal forms too. The end of this story is that the man tries to tell someone else he finds about the woman, but that man’s face then morphs into an egg too.
So, it’s obviously different but you can see similarities and how even the cadence of the storytelling is the same. Both are creepy in their own ways, certainly.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
