Let's Talk About Pokemon - The Weedle Family

013: Weedle

Personally, I like Caterpie just a LITTLE bit more than Weedle here. I certainly see the appeal between its goofy beady eyes and big clown nose. It seems to be a pretty standard "grub" design. Which is fair, wasp larvae don't lend much to being creative. It's interesting and in a way amusing that they gave a normally harmless grub Pokemon a huge, obvious stinger right on top of its head. Kind of has the energy of a Mario enemy.

014: Kakuna

Now Kakuna is when this line gets interesting to me. It's got really cool shapes and segmenting, which feels a bit more inspired than Metapod. It's just as straight lifted from wasp pupa as Metapod is for a caterpillar's, but at least makes up a neat bit of menace. And "menace" is normally a word you wouldn't really use to describe cocoon Pokemon.

It had odd little arms in the first game. They were either a mistake or its been retconned, because I've not seen it in any other piece of Pokemon media. Just another of the original game's weird off-model things. But it was also cool that this wasp pupa had friggin mantis arms, once upon a time. Which again, would've made it funny that this line has a rather offensive pupae in it.

015: Beedrill

With the direction this line is going, yeah, I end up liking Beedrill more than Butterfree as well. It's actually more insectoid than most bug-types, opting to have the more spindly, somewhat segmented legs. As cool as it is, the stinger-arms look a little tacked on, and it seems like an easy fix would've been to make them a little thinner. In one part it looks like they're just little cones over the thing's real hands, like a kid sticking their arm in a Pringles can and calling it an arm-cannon. Another part makes them look a bit too heavy for the thing's skinny arms to be holding up. Just overall not looking like they mesh well with the creature they're attached to.

Beedrill looks way more like a wasp than a bee. I guess a name like Waspierce doesn't roll off the tongue as well as Beedrill does. It's skinnier and doesn't have any fuzz in sight. In which case I think making its abdomen a little more wasp-shaped would've helped it look better.

Also, like with Butterfree, it has slightly more realistic looking bug-eyes. Something I've grown to miss a little bit. Stylized bug eyes are fine too, though I think the series' overall change in tone has definitely favored making designs a bit easier to relate to, so a lot more modern Bug Pokemon get obvious pupils, just as they've backed down from more animalistic eyes in even mammalian designs.

Mega Beedrill

You'd think Beedrill would've simply not gotten a Mega Evolution with how hopelessly weak it is. ORAS to the rescue, though! And boy, what a Mega. Remember when I said Megas aught to take the defining features of a Pokemon and amplify them? This here is where that works in spades. Mega Beedrill gets stingers all over the place. And it even fixes my complaint about the abdomen in a pretty inventive way, being in a cool wasp hive shape. The eyes are also nicely shaped, I really dig how they wrap around the head like real wasp eyes!

It also does the big imposing stinger look better, with its shortened limbs. Its actual arms and legs being shorter makes the design feel more plausible. That's more or less what I mean when I point at a design not feeling "realistic" enough to me. It's not so much that I'm asking a design to be more realistic so much as I'm wanting the design to look more plausible. Of course something like Beedrill couldn't exist in real life. But if it can sell itself as something that plausibly could exist (Especially since Pokemon is fairly down to earth and nature-focused with its settings), then I can REALLY buy a fictional character.

Personal Score: 7/10

< Prev < | Archive | > Next >