Scarlet/Violet model gifs ripped by Twitter user adamsb0303!

CONTENT WARNING: Arachnophobia warning! There's pictures of ogre-faced spiders in here.

Pika's Epic Yarn

917: Tarountula

Instead of a bird, we immediately go into the region's basic Bug-type, Tarountula. And what a cutie spider! Spider representation has thankfully come a long way since lonely ol' Spinarak by now, but in terms of fairly basic spider designs, Tarountula is neat. It's a little arachnid of jumping spider-esque proportions all wrapped up in a ball of silk, rendered like a cartoon yarn ball. Neat!

It's just such a cute spider design too. It still has two actual eyes, but it nonetheless has more spots on its face to give the hint of several eyes. And I like how some curly strands here and there also give a slight babyish impression for the thing. And a lovely bonus? It has the correct number of legs!

Are you a triangle? Cause you're acute.

918: Spidops

Here we have one of our biggest wants in Pokemon finally represented: an ogre-faced spider! And it has a fairly solid design as well! Its exoskeletal hide looks like body armor or a bullet-proof vest, and its eyes set up like spy or night-vision goggles. Even having little angry-eyes to make it look like it's a pair of eyes peering through a pair of goggles. Combined with a fairly military-camo color scheme, it's a spy-ops spider!

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Ogre spiders are net-casting spiders, meaning they don't set up a traditional web trap, but rather they spin silk around their frontmost legs and ambush prey that wanders below them by flinging their net of sticky silk at them. Spidops largely does the same, having silk that comes from its arms that it makes nets of tripwire with, which is so clever! And if you missed the funny yarn ball look Tarountula had, Spidops still has an abdomen that looks like a spool! Equating trip-wire trap-setting with knitting is a bit funny.

(Image Source)

Ogre spiders also, as Spidop's night vision goggles may imply, have some of the best nocturnal vision in the whole animal kingdom. Practically too good, even, because their eyes are actually fatally sensitive to daylight, destroying the tissues that enable them to see and blind them until later that night when said tissue heals, allowing them to see again. And yes, this happens almost every single day-night cycle. Ogre spiders are just that metal.

And this is a rare case where we find the shiny noteworthy to comment on for the design, beyond just saying it looks neat. At first it seems like a pretty decent shiny, but you'll notice they went out of their way to turn its silk red. Now instead of trip wires, it's setting up "infrared lasers"!

The one problem with Spidops? It feels a bit like a middle-stage evo. That's not just us, right? It doesn't necessarily look unfinished, but it does feel like it should evolve one more time, into a taller, spindlier spider. Even its stats feel like they belong to a middle-evolution. Just 404 BST? Yeesh.

It's really cool to finally have more spider Pokemon in general, especially since this was previously such a criminally underrepresented animal. Bonus points for being a pretty banger ogre-faced spider design too! We're slowly inching closer to having enough spiders to make a full team of 'em. Y'know, assuming they all happen to exist in the same region. Hey, if Paldea's got all but one of the entire selection of moth Pokemon, it's not too far-fetched!