Lady @Lady@cat.family

@egnor practically speaking? they wanted to give Mount Coronet a special magnetic field and have that trigger a new evolution in certain pokémon. the number of pokémon that would make sense for is pretty limited: the major pokémon involving magnetism in gens i-iii are magneton (which they made evolve into magnezone) and nosepass (which they made evolve into probopass)

the magnetic field was a cool enough concept i suppose, and the pokémon they chose to interact with it are the ones whose lore involved magnetism, which makes sense. starting from the problem of “what would magneton and nosepass’s next evolutions look like?”, i guess it isn’t too hard to see how they arrived at the designs they did. i’m not sure i like EITHER of them, though. in probopass's case, nosepass is a pun on “follow your nose” so making it More Nose makes sense. the hat is apparently a pukao: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pukao>. my guess is that the moustache is for visual balance because it would look weird with a large empty space beneath its nose.

in isolation all of those decisions are sensible but in combination i still look at it and am like… really? you chose to do this?? so my guess is that the underlying motivating factor which was missing was a kind of wholistic perspective instead of just plugging pieces together which did what they wanted them to do. idk though, we really know very little about the process which goes into a pokémon’s design so it’s hard to say whether i’m even right on the above, much less what other motivating factors could have been

(gen iv has a ton of added evolutions and many of them are weird and i think they were trying to lean into the cool and mysterious a little too hard instead of just designing pokémon which made sense within the ecology that they had constructed for them.)