Typhloisie
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 numerous files have been released, which unfortunately contain personal information about its employees. But it also features everything from unused concept art to scrapped in-universe lore, and one in particular has gone a bit viral. More than a little.
That would be a story about Typhlosion, the Gold/Silver starter evolution that I definitely picked growing up. I also chose Charizard for that. I love fire, what can I say. But now my memories may be…a little tainted.
Fans have discovered something of a lost story about Typhlosion, which…well, here’s a short excerpt:
“A long time ago, when the line between Pokémon and humans was unclear…”
Okay, no, I’ll stop right there. Yep, this is going where you think it’s going: a relationship between a human and Pokemon. That kind of relationship. But it’s…even stranger than you might think.
Typhlosia
A young girl is tricked into thinking he is human by a shape-shifting Bakufun (Typhlosion). In the end, she apparently has a child with her and is referred to as his wife. Her father eventually comes and kills the Bakfun and when she returns to the village she and her half-Pokémon child are teased by the men in the village who at one point cover it 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 looking 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 out.
The girl said, ‘Please stop. You’re going to kill my father. Please stop. Get yourself killed.’
“Goodbye. We will never meet again.”
Many forms of mythology, including Japanese mythology, involve animals turning into people or vice versa, to display some form of deception. Zeus, for example, did this a lot. Specifically, Typhlosion is believed to be based on the Mujina, the Japanese badger, where in folklore it is often depicted as a shape-shifting Yokai (demon/trickster/monster), so this is not the case. whole pulled out of nowhere. But putting something like this in Pokémon documents at Game Freak is something.
It is unclear why this story was created or why it is in these files. We have no idea who wrote it or if it would be anything close to a game (there are plenty of really dark stories about Pokémon, but none are this crazy). But the text took off online anyway and now no one will ever look at Typhlosion the same way again. I certainly won’t do that.
I’ve reached out to Game Freak for comment and will update if I hear back.
Update (15/10): I thought it would be interesting to find another story about the shape-shifting Mujina, which this creepy version of Typhlosion is based on. What follows is part of an adaptation of an ancient Japanese folkloric myth, The Faceless Woman (via Rikumo):
‘One evening at a late hour he was hurrying to the Kii-no-kuni-zaka when he saw a woman sitting all alone by the canal. She wept bitterly, her hands completely covering her face as she walked forward toward the canal. 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, beautifully 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 as he came to her, “O-jochu, don’t cry like that… Tell me what the problem is, and if there is any way to help you, I will I do that.”
Suddenly the girl turned around and let her sleeve fall from her hand. Where there should have been two eyes, a mouth and a nose, there was nothing but a featureless blank skin as smooth as an egg. She slowly began to run her hand over her face.
The man screamed and ran away.”
The idea of the ‘egg face’ is one that persisted in folklore, that the Mujina was able to shapeshift into a human form, but often with a featureless, smooth face. But it can also take other, more normal forms. The end of this story is that the man tries to tell someone else he meets about the woman, but that man’s face turns into an egg as well.
So it’s obviously different, but you can see similarities and how even the cadence of the storytelling is the same. Both are certainly creepy in their own way.
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