More details are emerging about the big scary typhlosia debacle

I’m not sure why, but there’s been a surprising amount of interest in the Game Freak leak, which brought out all kinds of content, but none of it has been more intensely focused than a story about a Typhlosion where the Pokémon’s shape changes . into a human, marries a young girl and bears half a Pokémon child before her father kills him.

Now, with a little research from @Rotlas01, there are some new details and further context for what this strange story is and what it’s based on. Here are the highlights:

• The idea that the story was written by Yuu Nakatsui seems to have been muddled by the translation and such a person doesn’t seem to actually exist.
• The leaks, first posted on 4chan, have been machine translated, causing some things to be lost in the translation from the original Japanese.
• The story is based on Japanese folklore and tales of the Mujina, a badger that has the ability to shape-shift into humans to deceive real people. The story is about a Mujina, not necessarily the literal Pokémon Typhlosion, but that’s the basis of that character’s concept.
• This idea was further realized when Hisuian Typhlosion finally arrived as a ghost type, presumably to reflect that history.

• The idea of ​​the Mujina and the girl having a child and her being chased out of town is meant more as a metaphor about not being able to return to a past life after being touched by the spirit world.
• There is some discussion about the age of the girl which wouldn’t be extremely young but closer to a teenager (not that this makes the aspect of the story much better).
• The translation seemed to make the story about a sexual relationship, but the child seems to simply manifest overnight, as you might see in folklore/myth. Again, the child itself should be more of a metaphor.

The end result here is that Rotlas believed that a hasty translation resulted in ‘sensational’ reporting of the Typhlosion story, which was also told without the context of Japanese myth.

I’ve done my own research here and the Mujina’s transformation is often portrayed as a straight horror story, with the Mujina sometimes turning into creepy dancing children, or people with faces ‘smooth as eggs’. I haven’t been able to find another that mirrors this storyline that appeared in the leaks.

If you know anything about Pokémon lore, there it is a lot of creepy stories that actually officially appear in the games. I’m not shocked that another creepy one made the rounds here, even though it didn’t make it into the final cut. I’m not sure I believe everything Rotlas says here, but like many folklore stories, I don’t think it’s meant to be taken as literally as people do.

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