213: Shuckle

Now HERE is an interesting friend. For the longest time, Shuckle was a Pokemon shrouded in mystery. At first it simply looks like a funny little turtle creature, but the closer you inspect the thing, the more skewed things get. Chief of which being its odd typing: Bug and Rock. Really? You'd call THIS thing an insect? And you'd think that's the only kind of odd thing about it, but then it's classified as a "Mold Pokemon", which only makes things seem even weirder.

THEN the thing comes in a weird little shell with a bunch of holes in it. It would turn out calling it a "Mold" Pokemon was actually a mistranslation, and that it was actually known as a "fermentation" Pokemon. This shell is apparently what it uses to ferment berry juices as food stores, which is yet another odd aspect to its entire "thing." A noodly, amoeba-like turtle with a funny face that is apparently somehow a bug, but also has a little shell that acts as a cauldron for berry juices???? What even ARE you, Shuckle?!?!? This is a question many a-fan pondered for about two decades.

For a while, I took Shuckle's meteorite-like shell to mean Shuckle was some sort of reference to how sometimes crude living matter can exist on meteorites, or at the very least the compounds that create life. Thus, Shuckle was a funny little alien thing pooling out from a meteoroid rock and thus, that was that. Maybe Shuckle was a freshly evolved organism just coming out of the meteorite that it landed on Earth with. It wasn't a 100% solid explanation, but I liked the sound of that as an idea.

But then... the Gold beta leak happened.

And THIS is apparently what Shuckle was going to look like at some point. A cartoonishly sad snake poking its head out of a bottle of some kind...? It apparently wasn't always a bug type, which we suppose isn't a shocker, just looking at it. It looks even less like a bug than it already did. But what it DID still have was its whole fermenting-berries thing. Which begins to clue in on Shuckle's surprisingly dark true nature. We're far from someone who realized this ourselves, but it turns out Shuckle's true identity is...

SNAKE WINE???? A practice most well known across East Asia is allowing venomous snakes to ferment in alcohol. And we mean the ENTIRE snake, as you can see. But it's all there. A snake-shaped creature fermenting in a bottle of liquid. It's suddenly become so obvious what Shuckle was meant to BE. It probably goes without saying, the means through which this wine is made can often be cruel to the snake, which is likely why they saw to tone Shuckle the hell down. This easily has to be one of the darkest origins for a Pokemon out there, so the finalized design for Shuckle kept the concepts like a noodly creature in a shell that ferments juices, but changed it just enough to be divorced from the concept of snake wine so that it apparently takes a leak to get people to start making the connection at all.

And honestly, this is something we wish Pokemon did a little more often. Not the basis-on-something-dark-and-ethically-questionable part, but the part where a design starts on something tangible but gets changed to be so far divided from the original thing it was based on that it stops being instantly recognizable as any one thing in particular. Changing Shuckle to be less obviously based on snake wine was definitely a good call, but Shuckle's a really good example of how memorable a design can be IN SPITE of not being very visibly an elephant or some other creature that already exists on our planet. Shuckle's such a fun design that is nearly wholly original and fantastical.

So thanks, Gold beta leak! Thanks for teaching us something. Even if we may never look at Shuckle the same way again.