I talked a lot last year about how the "main" artwork (faux sugimori style) for Pokemon had gotten miserably stiff and boring - many of them just exactly the lifeless idle poses from the game - but a new book apparently just revealed the alternate internal art of every current Pokemon, what fans call the "dream world art" that they use on a lot of stickers and coloring books. This is the first time the public has seen this art for the last couple hundred new Pokemon.
These tend to have their own original poses and god WHAT a fucking improvement
Toxtricity's "main" illustrations were even fairly decent but the alternate art STILL shows off what they should have been:
It was sent to me as a mediafire link that was apparently already shared on 4chan anyway so you might as well grab it for yourself while it's still up:
*doctor places stethoscope on my chest* “Good news and bad news: here’s the good news, I can hear it chanting it’s own name, so diagnosis is easy. The bad news is… you’ve got tuberculosa.”
I joke around a lot about how I would pay So Much Money for a Pokemon: Eevee Version where the entire selling point is finally giving us an eeveelution for all 18 types and also some dual-types.
And then I saw this:
And I am no longer joking.
With 171 potential combinations, it is entirely feasible to make a Pokemon game centered around Eevee.
Why? Because Eevee deserves it. And because we have had an egregious dearth of new Eeevee content since Sylveon dropped.
Here’s my pitch:
The region you live in is an island where Eevee basically became the endemic dominant organism. (If Gamefreak really wants to fuck around and find out, they could play around with real-life evolutionary theory concepts. They’ve used recent games to teach kids about stuff like environmentalism and conservation and energy/power production, so why not?)
The Pokemon Professor in the game will be a distant relative of, idk, Professor Rowan or Professor Sycamore, who decided that studying Pokemon evolution is too broad and decided to focus on what really matters: Eevee and Eevee-Associated Phenomena.
The player is tasked with filling out the Eeveedex.
The gym leaders still specialize in particular types, but they still only use Eeveelutions, of course. A fire-type leader can have Flareon as their signature ‘mon, sure, but for the rest of their team it’ll be dual fire types. Which might actually add to the difficulty level, especially if you get some weird type combos like fire/grass, because then you can’t just walk in and annihilate their entire team with a single not-overleveled water type unless it’s got some appropriate moves.
The Elite Four follows the same trend but with trickier type combos. The Champion has a six-Pokemon team full of the most seemingly contradictory type combos, like fire/water and normal/ghost. And lots of unexpected movesets, like the absolute badass that is Cynthia.
In the post-game Professor Oak will show up to give you the National Dex and you can have access to other ‘mons, as a treat, but until then? You get Eevee and its various -eons. It’s Eevee’s time to shine, which means Eevee and -eons only.
(I might make one (1) exception. There can be That One Fisherman with an entire team of Magikarp, if Gamefreak insists on carrying on that trope. Or he could just have a team of six Vaporeon that only know Splash. I’m willing to compromise.)
I went back through and noticed something. All of the pokemon, except for the child, have ditto’s face. Every time. I didn’t notice it at first, but then the end reveal, and it has been that way all along, I just didn’t notice. MY TEARS.
The next set of VOCALOID for the Pokemon and Vocaloid collaboration, Project Voltage has been revealed! This time we have Miku and KAITO as 【Water-type】 Trainers! Art by iXima!
Also yes they did wear sunscreen. Just not in the way most people think of it today. But people in extremely sunny areas have been wearing light fabric but long sleeved and full pants, or smearing mud on their skin for millennia.
Yes, your ancestors had more ozone layer, and yes, your ancestors did have skin cancer, but ALSO they did wear "sunscreen" just not the kind in a bottle from Walmart.
some 18th and 19th century beauty/home apothecary guides recommend wearing cold cream (sometimes set with powder) when you go outside to prevent sunburn
some 18th and 19th cold cream and powder recipes contained zinc oxide, to give a white makeup effect due to the racist/classist belief that Pale Skin Was Better
Also: Hats. Every society and time period I'm familiar with prior to the mid 20th century really leaned into wearing something on your head outdoors, which does help keep sun, wind, rain, snow, dust, etc. off your scalp (and potentially face/neck/shoulders).
There was at least one very long and fiddly labour strike in ancient Egypt where the workers refused to build a pyramid until conditions improved, and among their demands was a demand for more "cosmetics" to be supplied to the workers. Egyptian 'cosmetics' were, of course, used as sunscreen.
