The Torchic Family

Gen III's fire starter is the very first bird in starter pokemon history, and it's cute enough I suppose. It doesn't integrate fire in any meaningful way other than its color scheme, and I guess a kind of flame-like shape to its feathers.

When Torchic evolves, Combusken gives us an idea of what this line is going for; these are chicken pokemon, and interestingly, they have clawed arms instead of wings. Others have also pointed out that Combusken looks like something else, too, but we don't need to go there.

Torchic's final form, Blaziken, always had me a little split. I like the principle of Blaziken. A big, fiery, terrifying humanoid chicken with talon arms is a really neat idea. I just wish it looked anything like what that description brings to my mind. Far from a chicken monster, Blaziken just sort of looks like someone's fursuit of a hawk. It could have at least had a nice chickeny red comb on its head, which could have even been made of flame or something, yeah? Instead we get this awkward mardi gras costume with luxurious blonde hair.

So, if you ask me, Mega Blaziken improves pretty heavily on Blaziken just by having a head that looks two or three times more like a chicken, though it's not enough to turn my feelings completely around. This is still more like a later-season eagle Digimon.

As a few have pointed out, there might even be a specific chicken that inspired this thing, the shamo breed, created specifically for fighting and already unsettlingly humanoid:

...But this monstrosity looks so, SO much cooler than Blaziken does. If Blaziken even just had the disturbingly long, shaggy neck it'd earn another pokeball or two.

Ehhh.

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