Brute Bonnet
I can't say I expected Amoonguss to get a caveman times variant, or frankly ever really rear its head again, honestly! Now a grass/dark type, I do feel like it improves on its predecessor (descendant?) in a couple of nice ways; as much as I liked that little pinkish sucker mouth of the original, the jagged pink "beak" sort of mouth is kind of a cool look here, and I really like how the bottom of the mushroom stalk has four stumpy nub feet and a short tail. It's just a lot moe creaturey with that anatomy. HOWEVER, I still think the pokeball mushroom cap "arms" are too much on either version of this critter, which always should have just had a couple of wispy hands or tentacles, or something.
"Brute Bonnett," admittedly a very cool name, also adds a dangling, spiky greenish fringe around its main cap to camouflage it better, and its main art even has it poking one of the two pokeball hands outside of this "foliage." I get the idea, but now the hands clash even more with the overall silhouette, the green doesn't mesh will with the rest of its color scheme, and most importantly: WHY would this still look like a Pokeball at all?! Pokeballs canonically did not exist in their current form until the setting's modern period. We had an entire in-game feature and an entire Voltorb variant to address the fact that they used to be made out of wood, and that was when they were invented in not the paleozoic, that's for sure. The Pokeball pattern is already my least favorite thing about these mushrooms, even if it is their entire core angle, and as soon as we started seeing regional variants, I always wondered if we'd see a "pre-pokeball" Foonguss line, with naturalistic coloration!
If this Guss is such a "brute," in fact, couldn't that have been because it didn't have a "lure" yet? With the legs and the tail, it comes across as much more mobile than its modern descendant. This could have been a more active hunter-killer mushroom from before it became a more sedentary ambush predator!
The Pokedex doesn't tell us how old this one's supposed to be, but it does say it resembles a creature that was "dubiously" described in a paranormal magazine as a cross between a fungus and a "dinosaur," so...that's the ONLY reason for the tail and legs, isn't it? The extent of this concept is "a prehistoric amoonguss could be more like a dinosaur! Rarr!" It's a cute idea, I don't mind it in itself, but I'm genuinely used to this franchise having a little more consideration than that.
There is, it should be mentioned, a fan theory that the Paradox Pokemon didn't really arrive through a time portal. There's a whole plot line about a broken down time machine, yes, but some have posited that it's more of a "dream machine," bringing imaginary Pokemon to life. Given that they have so much in common with in-universe rumors and tall tales, even explicitly referred to here as "dubious," that proposal doesn't seem too far fetched, though some of the DLC content seems to hammer home that we're dealing with Temporal Displacement.
Overall, this thing is kind of a mess, and unfortunately so is the whole presentation of Paradox Pokemon, but neither are without their charms. It's cooler than the average Pokemon, it just could have used some work!
"Brute Bonnett," admittedly a very cool name, also adds a dangling, spiky greenish fringe around its main cap to camouflage it better, and its main art even has it poking one of the two pokeball hands outside of this "foliage." I get the idea, but now the hands clash even more with the overall silhouette, the green doesn't mesh will with the rest of its color scheme, and most importantly: WHY would this still look like a Pokeball at all?! Pokeballs canonically did not exist in their current form until the setting's modern period. We had an entire in-game feature and an entire Voltorb variant to address the fact that they used to be made out of wood, and that was when they were invented in not the paleozoic, that's for sure. The Pokeball pattern is already my least favorite thing about these mushrooms, even if it is their entire core angle, and as soon as we started seeing regional variants, I always wondered if we'd see a "pre-pokeball" Foonguss line, with naturalistic coloration!
If this Guss is such a "brute," in fact, couldn't that have been because it didn't have a "lure" yet? With the legs and the tail, it comes across as much more mobile than its modern descendant. This could have been a more active hunter-killer mushroom from before it became a more sedentary ambush predator!
The Pokedex doesn't tell us how old this one's supposed to be, but it does say it resembles a creature that was "dubiously" described in a paranormal magazine as a cross between a fungus and a "dinosaur," so...that's the ONLY reason for the tail and legs, isn't it? The extent of this concept is "a prehistoric amoonguss could be more like a dinosaur! Rarr!" It's a cute idea, I don't mind it in itself, but I'm genuinely used to this franchise having a little more consideration than that.
There is, it should be mentioned, a fan theory that the Paradox Pokemon didn't really arrive through a time portal. There's a whole plot line about a broken down time machine, yes, but some have posited that it's more of a "dream machine," bringing imaginary Pokemon to life. Given that they have so much in common with in-universe rumors and tall tales, even explicitly referred to here as "dubious," that proposal doesn't seem too far fetched, though some of the DLC content seems to hammer home that we're dealing with Temporal Displacement.
Overall, this thing is kind of a mess, and unfortunately so is the whole presentation of Paradox Pokemon, but neither are without their charms. It's cooler than the average Pokemon, it just could have used some work!
All Scarlet/Violet sprite animations ripped by adamsb0303!
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