Pokemon typhlosion goes viral after Game Freak leak for the weirdest possible reason

This article was published on 10/14 and republished on 10/15.

I don’t even know where to start. Game Freak has been hacked and countless files have been released, which unfortunately include personal information about their employees. But it also includes everything from unused concept art and abandoned in-universe stories, and one in particular has gone a bit viral. More than a little.

It would be a story about Typhlosion, the initial Gold/Silver evolution that I definitely picked growing up. I also picked Charizard earlier. I like fire, what can I say. But now my memories might be… a little tainted.

Fans have discovered a sort of lost story about Typhlosion that…well, here’s a brief excerpt:

“A long time ago, when the boundary between Pokémon and humans was not clear…”

Okay, no, I’ll stop right there. Yes, this is going where you think it’s going, a relationship between a human and a Pokémon. This type of relationship. But it’s… even weirder than you might think.

A young girl is tricked by a shape-shifting Bakufun (Typhlosion) into thinking she is a human. Finally, it seems that she has a child with him and is called his wife. Her father eventually arrives and kills the Bakfun and when she returns to the village, she and her half-Pokémon son are taunted by the men of the village who at one point cover him with fur skins. Then they run into the woods and are never seen again. Here’s a particularly nightmarish passage from when the father goes to look for his daughter:

“You broke the branch. Your father will be here soon. Now I’m 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 make a fire where I was killed and let it burn. And I want you to sing this song until it burns.”

The girl said, “Please, father. You are going to kill my father. Please, father. Let me kill you.”

“Goodbye. We will never see each other again.”

Many forms of mythology, including Japanese mythology, have animals that transform into humans or vice versa in order to exhibit some form of deception. Zeus did it a lot, for example. Specifically, Typhlosion is supposed to be based on the Mujina, the Japanese badger, where in folklore it’s often depicted as a shape-shifting Yokai (demon/deception/monster), so that’s not it. completely out of the air But something like this being made into Pokemon docs at Game Freak is, uh, something.

It is not clear why this story was created or why it is in these files. We have no idea who wrote it or if they even came close to making it into a game (there are a lot of very dark Pokémon stories out there, though none of them are this crazy). But the text has taken off online anyway, and now no one will look at Typhlosion the same way again. I sure 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, which this creepy version of Typhlosion is based on. The following is part of an adaptation of an ancient Japanese folklore myth, The Faceless Woman (via Rikumo):

“One night, at a late hour, he was hastening up the Kii-no-kuni-zaka when he saw a woman crouching in the moat all alone. She was weeping bitterly, and her hands covered her face completely as she advanced towards the moat .Fearing that he was trying to drown, he stopped near her to offer his help. When he approached her, he saw that he was agile, well dressed and that his hair was arranged like a woman’s girl from good family

He was a kind man, and pity took hold of his heart. “O-jochu (girl),” he exclaimed, walking up to her, “O-jochu, don’t cry like that… Tell me what’s wrong, and if there’s any way I can help you, I I will.”

Suddenly the girl turned and dropped the sleeve from her hand. Where there should have been two eyes, a mouth and a nose, there was nothing but a featureless white of skin as soft as an egg. He started stroking his face with his hand slowly in front of him.

The man screamed and ran away.”

The idea of ​​the “egg face” persisted in folklore, that Mujina was able to shapeshift into human form, but often with a featureless, bland face. But it could also take other, more normal forms. The end of this story is that the man tries to tell someone what he finds about the woman, but that man’s face also turns into an egg.

So it’s obviously different, but you can see similarities and even the narrative cadence is the same. Both are creepy in their own ways, no doubt.

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