It’s been quite a week for Pokemon fans, and especially those with a soft-spot for the beloved Johto region starter, Typhlosion. Following a huge leak at developer Game Freak, alleged short stories detailing everything from the origin of the Pokemon universe to strange folklore-style tales about human-Pokemon relationships surfaced online.
One of these stories was about Typhlosion, and to put it politely, it didn’t depict the Pokemon in a very flattering way. The alleged tale seemed to describe the Fire-type taking in a girl (who many assumed to be a child, since she wasn’t described as a woman) while disguised, and making her forget about her family, before becoming her husband and father to her child.
It was… a lot to take in, but according to one Twitter user, Roltas01 – with the help of three translators, LonFuneon, Loudkuyuki, and Dark_Kudoh – the text of this supposed tale was machine translated when it first surfaced. This apparently led to the shared English version being full of discrepancies, and missing context about the Japanese folklore that may have inspired it.
From this newly human-translated version, it’s claimed that the ‘girl’ in question was actually a young woman – her exact age still isn’t clear, but @Roltas01 suggests it’s “more in line with the age of ‘adult’ women displayed in folklore back then.” Furthermore, it’s suggested that the Typhlosion in the story is an allegory for a mythical creature, the shapeshifting yokai, Mujina, which would tie into the Pokemon disguising itself.
Roltas01 claims that certain aspects of the story – namely, the woman forgetting about her family, and the marriage – are examples of influences from Japanese folklore tropes. They also allege: “Giving birth to a monster and a human’s child is just a way to represent that the woman may never be human and go live with her folks ever again, since her blood is now related to the spiritual world and can’t go back. It’s a point of no return symbolized by the birth of new life.”
While it may come off as the Thyplosion actively hypnotizing and taking advantage of the young woman; people forgetting about their life after interacting with the yokai is just a recurring trope in Japanese folklore. You may find this in more media inspired by Meiji mithology pic.twitter.com/KYJdknsoWEOctober 16, 2024
Ultimately, it seems that it may all be a matter of perspective – Roltas01 points to Western folktales that “used to display very young women falling in love with older men,” and says “Typhlosion’s story isn’t any weirder than the original tale of Beauty and the Beast. It’s just the way folklore used to be.” Traditional tales like these are full of questionable things, so they’re not wrong there, but it’s still debatable whether that would ‘justify’ some of the events in the Typhlosion story. Symbolic or not, the woman did apparently have a child with the Pokemon.
Regardless of this new translation, though, it’s important to keep in mind that we should take the legitimacy of all these supposed stories with a pinch of salt, as the surge of leaks could have easily led to fake information being spread around without being questioned. On top of that, if it is real, this isn’t information that’s ever been officially distributed, so it’s contentious whether it could even be classed as ‘canon.’ For all we know, the lore could have been long since dismissed and forgotten about internally. At the end of the day, if Typhlosion was your favorite Pokemon, you definitely shouldn’t let all of this get in the way of that.
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