Let's Talk About Pokemon - The Caterpie Family

010 - Caterpie

To populate the earlygame foresty area, we have a couple bug lines, one of which being Caterpie! And what a cutie! It maybe doesn't do anything conceptually outrageous, it's a caterpillar with so few bells and whistles to it, that it is almost essentially a cartoon Asian Swallowtail, with its green body and red osmeterium, an inflatable defensive organ that it uses to make its snake mimicry more convincing by resembling a snake's tongue. Its main fantastical feature, really, is that the Swallowtail's eyespots are Caterpie's real eyes.

This line is a fine example of how the Pokemon series tends to handle Bug-type Pokemon. See, I love insects, but at the same time, human brains are engineer to be repulsed by them, but they're not very popular, sadly. As such, Pokemon usually tones down a Bug type's insectoid features; instead of having many legs, Caterpie simply has four little nubs, and its features only get more simplified as it evolves.

011 - Metapod

The Caterpie line is also essentially an introduction to the concept of evolution and how it works in Pokemon. It's CALLED "evolution", but that's only because it sounds cool. It's actually more like real-life metamorphosis, which is a WAY cooler word than "evolution", but I guess rolls off the tongue a lot less. Point is, Pokemon drastically and suddenly change in shape the same way a caterpillar changes into a pupae, and then a butterfly.

Metapod in particular is charming for what it is, a big, green croissant with an adorably sleepy expression. Pokemon will continue to mess with what counts as a "cocoon" Pokemon, but here Metapod is more or less. JUST a pupae, except it's still fully conscious (while its innards are a soup being re-arranged into a butterfly,) so it's capable of doing a Harden when you ask it to.

012 - Butterfree

Butterfree is when Bug-to-Pokemon simplification become really apparent. Butterfree has a purple, blobby body divided between just two body segments, a head and a thorax, with very simplified limbs, and also only two pairs of them. Plus, rather than include all the complicated bits like mouth parts, it opts for a little muzzle with fangs. Doesn't even go for a proboscis, like real butterflies have!

I do think that's certainly one weakness of Pokemon's style of simplifying insects, is that sometimes the coolest features of said animals get eroded away; you will very commonly see Bug-type Pokemon with only four limbs instead of six (let alone eight, in the case of arachnoid Pokemon). But for a simple butterfly Pokemon, Buttefree is fine. I enjoy that its wing pattern is both simple but still detailed, a bit like how real butterflies with a single, solid color for wings look.

Personal Score: 6/10

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