you have these two ethereal blue snake-like dragons
and then some chunky stuffed-animal looking puff the magic dragon
i dont understand. what happened nintendo.
this has been around for years now but there’s so many people that haven’t seen it but the common theory is that there was a last minute decision to change around evolutionary lines without changing actual pokemon designs that much to match it better
like this:
colors and body styles line up much better here, although my personal belief is that dragonite was supposed to be a standalone legendary but he didn’t fit in with the legendary bird trio so he was cut to just be a powerful dragon type, and then the dratini/dragonaire line was handed over to him. that left gyarados without an evolutionary line though, so i think that’s when magikarp was added in to create a sort of amusing and surprising evolution for players that didn’t expect a powerful pokemon to come out of a useless one
I mean, gyarados is pretty clearly based on the koi dragon story about the koi fish that spent a hundred years trying to climb a waterfall while demons mocked it and raised the height of the falls until it finally reached the top and the gods rewarded it by transforming it into a dragon, so I doubt Magikarp -> Gyarados family is a mistake.
Dragonite’s line is based on Korean Dragons and Imugi! Imugi are lesser dragons that look like giant serpents and live in the ocean. If an Imugi can catch a Yeouiju (like a big bead, the kind that Dragonair has!) that falls from heaven, they can become a TRUE dragon like Dragonite.
I pulled this image from wikipedia’s article on Korean Dragons, note that the dragon is holding the big yeouiju.
