Mega Malamar
Now we're seeing Megas for Pokemon I really care about. Malamar was already one of the coolest of the sixth generation, one of the coolest dark types and one of the coolest psychic types. Its tentacles always gave the impression of wild hair, and its mantle always looked a little like some sort of white coat with a "collar" and "buttons," but I hadn't really stopped to think about just how much it brings to mind a "mad doctor" persona until the Mega, which bundles up its hair-arms to resemble a bulging brain, glowing from inside with its psychic power. The shape of the mantle, meanwhile, is stretched out and exaggerated into a longer, thinner body that hovers above the ground, rather than standing on its fins, and I feel like it might also intentionally resemble an old fashioned ink pen, which also makes sense for an intellectual squid! The edge of the mantle, where it meets the head, now also flares into enormous "shoulder pads," and its two longer, thinner tentacles sprout from the undersides of these. The tips of the two tentacles, finally, are always tracing colorful energy lines in the air as they slowly rotate, to look even more like it's actively hypnotizing the opponent.
Mega Malamar is already brimming with psionic power, but it can boost its psychic reach even more by stabbing its own tentacle tips into the "brain!" The visual evokes a mad doctor injecting themselves with some sort of experimental serum, but it also brings to mind more "ink" imagery, if that isn't just me, like its tentacles are being "dipped" in mental energy to keep "writing" those hypnotic swirls in the air? I wonder if that might have been the artist's intention, but the dex entry writers took it differently? Its ability to manipulate minds is also said to be so powerful, it can "overwrite the personalities and memories" of other beings, which is something we already saw regular Malamar getting up to in the anime many years prior. For once, I think a Mega actually made me appreciate the base Pokemon even more, even considering that I already loved this one!
Mega Malamar is already brimming with psionic power, but it can boost its psychic reach even more by stabbing its own tentacle tips into the "brain!" The visual evokes a mad doctor injecting themselves with some sort of experimental serum, but it also brings to mind more "ink" imagery, if that isn't just me, like its tentacles are being "dipped" in mental energy to keep "writing" those hypnotic swirls in the air? I wonder if that might have been the artist's intention, but the dex entry writers took it differently? Its ability to manipulate minds is also said to be so powerful, it can "overwrite the personalities and memories" of other beings, which is something we already saw regular Malamar getting up to in the anime many years prior. For once, I think a Mega actually made me appreciate the base Pokemon even more, even considering that I already loved this one!
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