You know, the manga is downright creepy. Or well, the impression from someone who hasn't read it. All the same, the image I've got of it is quite spooky.
In there I can see a Mawiles luring in trainers to eat them and their squad of pokemon, for the protagonist to almost fall for it too.
The manga is very much adult-oriented, to my understanding. I don't know much about it either, beyond that at some point the three legendary birds apparently get fused together, but if anything, I would expect this fic to be significantly
less bloody than some of the manga's plots.
Yep, that's what I thought - you could honestly name basically any random object, and there's a good chance someone out there has made a fakemon based on it. Call it a new rule of the internet, maybe. ^^;
...on that same topic, I'm rather enjoying how the discussion has largely turned to what is essentially creating/speculating on a Mawile evo by way of collective decision.
Makes me tempted to draw some of the ideas being thrown out - I probably even would, if not for the fact that doing so would really cut into the progress of the next chapter (and everything else I'm trying to work on).
Maybe Fate? fat Fae and ate?
"Fate" is too simple I think, and hard to find a good way to spell that isn't just the normal word - but that does make me think of a different name. If I do eventually have a Mawile evolution appear in this story, and wanted to go
real dark with how it was obtained... well, "Faetred" might work pretty well.
Ho-oh, literally just Ho-oh. As seen in the connection between it and the legendary beast trio.
Ho-oh is a Phoenix, yes, and it DOES supposedly have the mystical power to resurrect the dead (and create life, assuming the Beast trio wasn't a one off thing)... but to my knowledge, that's not its actual
purpose. Its title is "Guardian of the Skies", and there's no indication its resurrection ability is supposed to be more than a rare miracle type of thing. Even then, reincarnation != resurrection, so that's not quite what I was getting at.
I think the point there is that a Mega Mawile is no longer in need of ambush tactics. It's now The Big Fish; it can afford for its prey to understand just how screwed they are, because they're still screwed either way.
I would imagine this is the case, yes. Mega Mawile is no longer an ambush predator, it is a Teeth Machine that wrecks everything put in front of/behind it. Deception is no longer even remotely the goal.
It's also because Mega-Evolution isn't actually 'Evolution' by the Pokemon definition; Mega-Evolution is basically pumping a Pokemon full of magic steroids and causing it to get hueg and go on a power trip, normal Pokemon Evolution is an actual metamorphosis to a different stage of the Pokemon's life-cycle.
Actually, having watched some of the XY anime since the last time this was mentioned, I
may have been wrong about this? It's claimed there that the power from mega evolution actually comes from inside of the Pokemon in question rather than the mega stones themselves, which I didn't see mentioned anywhere when I looked up the subject before. That said, I'm not going to state absolutely that I was wrong, because even Professor Sycamore in the anime doesn't know all that much about mega evolution (despite the fact that it's his area of specialty, and mega evolution has been around for a REALLY long time according to Korrina and her grandfather), and I feel like my earlier interpretation still tracks a lot better, especially given just how much mega evolution seems to
hurt in the anime. Like, a fair number of the Pokemon that use it let out some real guttural screams in the process - it's actually kind of startling. Both this and the "reversion" of mega evolution are explained in the anime as potentially occurring because the power the Pokemon has unleashed simply isn't sustainable for prolonged periods of time, but combined with the way several Pokemon tend to go outright berserk upon mega evolving, I feel like it makes a lot more sense if the "power they can't handle" is coming from an outside source - like, say, the fraction of a legendary's power that created and is contained within the mega stone, which has now been
absorbed into the Pokemon's body.
...if they didn't want people to come to this conclusion, they sure made it shockingly easy to arrive at anyways.
Alternatively, you could enhance the quality of the lure somehow. Puppy dog eyes, maybe? Or you could just outright cheat with hypnotic eyes.
Natural puppy dog eyes strikes me as more fitting for a prevo for Mawile, but hypnotic eyes could certainly work. Would probably require leaning into the more mystical aspect of youkai to pull it off in the design though.
...also, that avatar is absolutely horrifying. Very appropriate for a discussion about something playing cute for its other goals, but horrifying nonetheless.
