Scarlet/Violet model gifs ripped by Twitter user

...Do you smell it? That smell... a kind of smelly smell... a smelly smell that smells... smelly...

1001: Wo-Chien

With that as our final new "normal" Pokemon of the generation, we're at last moving on to the Legendaries, starting with a Legendary quartet dubbed "The Treasures of Ruin". The backstory of the group being that they were once treasures from a faraway land brought to Paldea, a collection of wooden tablets, a sword, a vessel, and beads. A merchant sold these treasures to the king of Paldea, only for the king's greed to awaken the power that lurked within the treasures that then transformed themselves into Pokemon and are allegedly responsible for nearly bringing the region of Paldea to ruin before they were finally defeated and sealed away in four vaults hidden around the region. Sounds like the perfect creatures for some teenagers to come along and try to make their pets.

Wo-Chien itself is easily the coolest of the group! It's the wooden tablets, the grudge of which formed a body out of dead, decaying leaves into the shape of a snail. What?? We get a Legendary beast where I get to use THAT as a descriptor? Hell yeah!! Legendaries can be hit or miss with me. Some knock it out of the park, others feel like they fail to live up to the heightened expectation, and even rarer are they ever ESPECIALLY my thing. So imagine my surprise when a Legendary Pokemon gets to be something that feels like it would've been an obscure one-off Pokemon that only I along with like, 13 other people liked, let alone knew about. But here it is! As one of the big fellas of Gen 9!

Wo-Chien's body is indeed a shambling mass of what looks to be forest floor litter; dead leaves, twigs, and moss. The leaves cover up the most of its head, on top of the fuzzy "mossy" black body, topped with twigs or vines that make up its eye stalks, with Wo-Chien itself perpetually giving you the stink-eye. The same vines also extend out of its leafy beard for certain attacks! The rear end, rather than having a snail shell, ends with an exaggerated hump with the actual wooden tablets spiraling together to form something giving the suggestion of a conical shell!

It's just such a killer design with all the natural-but-decaying features it has making it look withered and weathered. One of the few "ancient" Pokemon that genuinely feels like an ancient beast. Not to mention how much that feels all the more appropriate for a Pokemon whose true identity is a cursed relic. The name "Wo-Chien" is a couple of Chinese words (in this case, meaning Snail-Bamboo Slips when translated literally), but a name like this, even when romanized, also feels appropriate for the thing, like an old cryptid from a foreign land.

This Pokemon just feels a lot more folklore-y than your typical Legendary, a lot of which achieve Legendary status by being The Ones That Look Cool On The Box. Wo-Chien is more like that B-lister mythology monster that you might've heard about on a horror-themed blog and nowhere else. Being objectively a little silly while still keeping the vibes rancid enough to be something that could lure people by emitting cries that sound like children lost in the woods before their prey steps on a pile of leaves that devours them. The twisted old fairy tale sort of beastie. Yes, I'm going to be the type that calls the shambling snail one of the coolest Legendaries in the whole series.