He will club you with his mother's skeleton, and it will be adorable.

104: Cubone

Cubone's a Pokemon more well known for its lore than its design, but its design ties into the lore quite nicely. It looks innocent enough, it's just another baby saurian, this time holding a femur and wearing a skull over its head like a helmet. It's like the most metal child I've ever laid eyes on. But then comes its Pokedex entries.

Cubone takes a turn for the dark, because that's its dead mother's skull that it's wearing. Which clearly only makes it even more metal. As heartbreaking a life cycle it is, there's a bit of lapse in logic. While the parents dying in the process of creating offspring is nothing new to animals, a backstory like this implies each pair only produces one child before they die. Unless there's just naked Cubone running around that are somehow never seen.

And it's also just. Clearly not the case in Gen 2-onwards. You can breed your Marowak as much as you'd like without worry of it passing away. That's just a bit where lore suspends itself for the sake of gameplay, though.

There is the theory that Cubone is a mutation of Kangaskhan, created when the mother dies. This theory is given legs by how one of the glitch Pokemon, the famous MissingNo. evolves into Kangaskhan. This seems to imply Kangaskhan was intended to have a pre-evolved form before it got cut in the final product.

Believe it or not, this theory gets a bit of a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” in Sun and Moon. In those games, wild Pokemon can sometimes call for help, often resulting in a Pokemon of the same species arriving to assist them in battle. In some cases, a Pokemon of a different species can appear. And one of those cases happens when Cubone calls for help, in which a Kangaskhan has a chance of appearing.

She has a bone to pick with you!

105: Marowak

At any rate, Cubone becomes quite the badass, Marowak. While the changes are mostly subtle, they are enough to be telling of Marowak's angrier personality. Though with the way its skull has outright changed shape, it might mean it has outgrown from wearing its mother's skull and now has a hard bony head of its own. Is that looking far too into things? Who knows.

I do think that's the one thing that makes me like Cubone just a wee bit more, being that its face is no longer obviously a "skull". The lack of circular eye holes for the sockets are especially missed for me. But the rest of Marowak is quite cool and there's no denying it has cool flavor to it even as a warrior-animal that'll beat you with a bit bone.