Pokémon World Myth Encyclopedia

[Persephone]

This is a collection of one-shot entries on Legendary and Mythical Pokemon. This story will only update on commission. Details on my discord.

As this thread replicates real world mythology and anthropology it would be difficult to provide a full list of content notices. Ritual suicide and sacrifice. as well as general body horror, are to be expected. I will not write about sexual assault and rape here. Not only is it traumatic to far too many people, but its importance in mythology is exaggerated already. Blame Ovid.

Well, on with the show!

 

[Persephone]

Landorus – Unova

Look! Look what the children of men have wrought upon the earth! The scars of sand and blood! Were they to perish for their folly it would be a fitting end. Yet, by my mercy, seeds shall grow in the sandy soil, watered by the blood of kings and heroes. You shall be given a new earth.

May this one be treated with more care.

-The Journey of Ohserase



Overview

Landorus was the primary fertility goddess in Unovan mythology and folklore. She was known as the Driver of Storms, Savior of Unova, Guardian of the Fields, and The Earth Incarnate. For centuries she was the most commonly worshipped goddess in the Unovan pantheon. Even today, long after the pantheon fell out of favor, she still retains a strong base of devoted worshippers.

Kingdom-era Unova was a strange mixture of indigenous peoples, Scandanavian colonists, and, later on, merchants and explorers sent from the Kingdom of Mali. Landorus was shaped from by this blend of different cultures earth god myths into a rather unique figure.

Appearance

Landorus is most often depicted as a humanoid figure with red, orange, or brown skin. A cloud or sandstorm usually obscures the legs. Before the Kingdom, the legs were usually depicted unobscured in art and idols. More often than not the legs ended in cat-like paws instead of proper feet. Sometimes the legs were coated in fur. The goddess usually has white hair. In more recent depictions landorus is almost always depicted with a scythe made of roots slung over the shoulder.

Before 500 A.D. landorus was usually depicted as male with white facial hair. This perception gradually began to shift until, by the time of the kingdom’s founding (1107 A.D.), landorus was almost exclusively known as a goddess. A brief resurgence in male depictions came after Africans arrived in the kingdom (c. 1350 A.D.) but this trend had died out by the seventeenth century.

Theria, The Panther, is usually depicted as a stout quadruped with reddish skin, a root-like tail, and a mane of white hair

In Unovan Mythology

Landorus was the eldest of the three storm gods. Her brothers, toranadus and thundurus, loved to play games. However, as weather gods their playfulness was extremely destructive. After one lacrosse match nearly destroyed the people under them, landorus became fed up. She began to chase her brothers across the sky so that they would never settle in one place for too long. She left fertile earth in her wake as an apology for her brothers’ behavior.

She is sometimes seen as a goddess of healing and medicine, in addition to fertility. In another myth a malevolent ghost poisoned the earth, air, and water of the world in order to punish the chieftain who ordered her execution. Landorus personally gathered and drank all the poison herself and became very sick. The phantom, horrified by the suffering of The Storm Driver, forfeited her own soul to heal the goddess. In another version of the story, Theria the Panther dies after ingesting the poison and is resurrected by The Starchild as Landorus, The Earth Incarnate and Driver of Storms.

The most famous work of literature devoted to Landorus is The Journey of Ohserase, codified into its most recognizable version in 1632 A.D. The story begins after The War of Kings, where two brothers split The Starchild in two and clashed until the entire Kingdom was a barren wasteland no longer worth fighting for.

Landorus appeared before a young child, Ohserase, and entrusted her with a task. She was to obtain a flask of blood from the kings and the surviving generals of both armies. The blood was to be mixed and one drop placed in every field in Unova. Only then could the region be restored.

Rather than assassinate the King of Ideals, Ohserase simply told him her story and showed him the ruined world outside his palace. The king became ashamed of what he had brought about and ordered his own execution by strangulation so no blood would be wasted. His generals and advisors followed suit.

The King of Truth refused to yield. In his rage he stabbed Ohserase for daring to suggest he should die. While his blade entered the girl’s body, she was unharmed. Instead, he keeled over from a stab wound that magically appeared in his chest. his blood was collected.

After a second conflict where the remaining forces of the late King of Ideals rounded up and killed the generals and heroes of the Army of Truth, the blood was collected and mixed. With the remaining nobles and priests watching a single drop was placed on a field.

Nothing happened.

The crowd became increasingly discontent. They even contemplating killing Ohserase for her part in the death of two monarchs. Just as the debate reached a fever pitch, landorus appeared. She scolded the masses for turning against her own priestess. She took the cask in her hands and shattered it. Only sand fell out. She then told the assembled leaders that the blood of warriors and kings would do nothing for the land’s prosperity. Revival could only come from gentle love and hard work. Landorus personally restored the fields of Unova before vanishing. The story ends by stating that landorus still waits in an old stone temple, holding out hope that she will never again have to heal a dying world.

Landorus is often depicted as goddess of rebirth and rebuilding. When disasters strike, she follows and attempts to make things whole. The disaster myth has long been central to her worship and perception, although the most popular version has varied with time. Before contact with Scandanavia, the most common myth of Theria the Panther revolved around the cat chasing their siblings across the earth.

Post-contact the story of the poisoned earth became more common. Anthropologists believe that there was a series of pandemics in the New World following the arrival of the first Old World colonists (c. 850 A.D.) and the diseases they brough with them. By the time that more extensive colonization efforts began, the indigenous population had mostly rebounded to its pre-pandemic level. This story was probably an attempt to explain the plagues.

The Journey of Ohserase did not become popular until well after The War of Kings (c. 1200 A.D.). There are no contemporary accounts of either king dying in the fashion described in the story. Indeed. there is substantial evidence that neither survived the war. The story’s popularity largely came about as the European and African population in Unova began to outnumber the natives in the area and as Iberian, Kalosian, and Galarian colonists established footholds in other parts of North America.

Around the same time as The Journey of Ohserase was put to the printing press for the first time, there was a revival in War of Kings stories among the indigenous inhabitants. The colonists, and especially the Europeans, were implicitly compared to selfish men who had torn a god and the world apart rather than make peace. In the period of Galarian rule, a governor tried to ban the book. In turn it only became more and more popular until the ban was rescinded. The incident fueled resentment among the Five Nations of the region and helped precipitate The War of Unovan Independence.

Worship

Landorus was a common household god. Worship was near-universal, especially in rural areas.

Unusually for her significance, Landorus had no grand temples in Unova. The people of Miros Island claim that Landorus herself sometimes stopped by their humble shrine. This belief was widespread enough that at least some pilgrims went to the island as far back as The War of Kings.

The Mississippians did build grand mounds honoring their gods. All of these temples were seen as also honoring The Panther in her role as patron of mound-building. Recent excavations in Cahokia and the Ohio River Valley have found credible evidence that some Unovans took pilgrimages to these sites.

Most worship of Landorus was done in the home. Small figurines of either Theria the Panther or Landorus the Incarnate (or both) were common in Landorus-worshipping households. Small offerings of grain were presented to the figurine before being burned or buried in her honor. The idol was kept in a place of prominence near the entry of the home. When people entered the building they would acknowledge the goddess’s presence.

The harvest festival was devoted to landorus. She also received offerings in the planting festival, alongside the two rain gods. In times of crisis, Unovan kings made pilgrimages to The Earth’s Scar and The True King’s Castle to present offerings. Keeping with the goddess’s words, no blood was offered. Instead the king would prostrate himself in the sand and beg, sometimes for days on end, for The Storm Driver’s help.

Origins

Landorus is a synthesis of different North American and African myths.

Her most direct inspiration is Theria the Panther. A big cat god was common in North American mythologies, especially in what is now the eastern portions of the United States and Canada. This god, referred to as Theria by the Turtle Island Nations, was almost always a storm god. The secondary attributes varied. Her role as a fertility goddess in the Five Nations is uncommon. She was the goddess of the hunt to the Huron. The Mississippians saw her as the goddess of mound-building and, by extension, civilization itself.

The Scandanavian gods were more human-shaped than those of most of the North American pantheons. The transition to Landorus as a human-shaped goddess probably stems from these influences. She also resembles a djinn common in stories of the desert nomads, such as those that frequented the trade cities of Mali. In one legend from the region, a djinn grew concerned over a massive war. In a bid to bring peace he challenged all the armies to battle him. They did so and were soundly defeated. After extensive coordination to design new weapons and strategies, the combined armies came back and overpowered the djinn. In the process their leadership had grown accustomed to dealing with common challenges together and the war was settled.

Landorus also draws inspirations from The Flayed One, a common figure in Mesoamerican pantheons. The Flayed One is the god of maize and fertility. He peeled off his own skin to help fertilize the earth. Landorus’ red or orange color may have been influenced by these stories. Mesoamerican idols dating centuries before the Kingdom’s founding have been discovered in Unova, showing that direction religious influences were possible.

Today

There is no proof that either Landorus or Theria exist.

Worship of The Guardian of the Fields remains common among the remaining members of The Five Nations. The Panther is still well-regarded among the moundbuilders, Huron, Cherokee and other nations of the eastern United States and southeastern Canada. Many white and black farmers still keep figurines of landorus in their homes for luck. Outside of these communities, belief in landorus and all polytheistic gods has declined in favor of The Church of Life and other monotheistic faiths.

The Oscar-nominated film The Storm Driver recently led to a revival of interest in landorus. The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change and nuclear fallout. A young woman seems to receive a prophetic vision while severely dehydrated. In it landorus tells her how to save Unova. The girl fails to get the leaders of post-apocalyptic Unova to come with her. She sets out to The True King’s Castle on her own to beg for more guidance. At the end of the film she dies alone in the radioactive sands near the castle. Then an old hermit with a cane made of roots emerges from the ruins and buries the body.

 

[Pen]

Not only is it traumatic to far too many people, but its importance in mythology is exaggerated already. Blame Ovid.

omg

Look! Look what the children of men have wrought upon the earth! The scars of sand and blood! Were they to perish for their folly it would be a fitting end. Yet, by my mercy, seeds shall grow in the sandy soil, watered by the blood of kings and heroes. You shall be given a new earth.

May this one be treated with more care.

-The Journey of Ohserase

YUS GOOD CONTENT. You nailed the epic tone with this excerpt.

After one lacrosse match nearly destroyed the people under them, landorus became fed up.

Lacrosse? That was so random and specific I sort of was taken out of the story. Why lacrosse?

In another myth a malevolent ghost poisoned the earth, air, and water of the world in order to punish the chieftain who ordered her execution. Landorus personally gathered and drank all the poison herself and became very sick. The phantom, horrified by the suffering of The Storm Driver, forfeited her own soul to heal the goddess. In another version of the story, Theria the Panther dies after ingesting the poison and is resurrected by The Starchild as Landorus, The Earth Incarnate and Driver of Storms.

Love this--both the alternate mythos and the way it was used to explain the shifting depiction of the god. Also really enjoy that touch of the concrete old myths insist on--Landorus gathering and drinking the poison herself.

where two brothers split The Starchild in two

The Starchild? 👀

Rather than assassinate the King of Ideals, Ohserase simply told him her story and showed him the ruined world outside his palace. The king became ashamed of what he had brought about and ordered his own execution by strangulation so no blood would be wasted. His generals and advisors followed suit.

Oooh, yes. Interesting that the King of Ideals comes off so much better in this, but culturally the Hero of Truth seems more emphasized?

. his blood was collected.

Typo, uncapitalized.

She took the cask in her hands and shattered it. Only sand fell out.

As I read this I wondered, what cask? The cask she collected the blood in? I think a reference to the cask in an earlier sentence would make this moment land better.

By the time that more extensive colonization efforts began, the indigenous population had mostly rebounded to its pre-pandemic level. This story was probably an attempt to explain the plagues.

Ah, not at all relevant to us.

Indeed. there is substantial evidence that neither survived the war.

Typo, period should be comma.

The colonists, and especially the Europeans, were implicitly compared to selfish men who had torn a god and the world apart rather than make peace. In the period of Galarian rule, a governor tried to ban the book. In turn it only became more and more popular until the ban was rescinded. The incident fueled resentment among the Five Nations of the region and helped precipitate The War of Unovan Independence.

Enjoying the way you've melded all of this history and mythos together.

Keeping with the goddess’s words, no blood was offered. Instead the king would prostrate himself in the sand and beg, sometimes for days on end, for The Storm Driver’s help.

Really like how the nature of Landorus informs what methods of worship are acceptable in her religion.

Before contact with Scandanavia, the most common myth of Theria the Panther revolved around the cat chasing their siblings across the earth.

Amazing mental image, adorable.

The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change and nuclear fallout. A young woman seems to receive a prophetic vision while severely dehydrated. In it landorus tells her how to save Unova. The girl fails to get the leaders of post-apocalyptic Unova to come with her. She sets out to The True King’s Castle on her own to beg for more guidance. At the end of the film she dies alone in the radioactive sands near the castle. Then an old hermit with a cane made of roots emerges from the ruins and buries the body.

Oooh, love this. I can practically imagine the NY Times style movie review for it.

On capitalization--since Landorus is a proper name, not a species name as you're using it here, I think it should be capitalized throughout.

This was excellent, Landorus is officially best Unovan deity. I love how you traced the development and portrayals of Landorus throughout time. The Epic of Ohserase is wonderful, wish I could read the whole thing.

 

[NebulaDreams]

Look! Look what the children of men have wrought upon the earth! The scars of sand and blood! Were they to perish for their folly it would be a fitting end. Yet, by my mercy, seeds shall grow in the sandy soil, watered by the blood of kings and heroes. You shall be given a new earth.

May this one be treated with more care.

-The Journey of Ohserase

Of course, we get to see the actual myth summarised later, but from the sounds of this excerpt, The Journey of Ohserase would be great in your style if written in full. This kind of reminds me of the end of Princess Mononoke in a way.

Landorus is most often depicted as a humanoid figure with red, orange, or brown skin. A cloud or sandstorm usually obscures the legs. Before the Kingdom, the legs were usually depicted unobscured in art and idols. More often than not the legs ended in cat-like paws instead of proper feet. Sometimes the legs were coated in fur. The goddess usually has white hair. In more recent depictions landorus is almost always depicted with a scythe made of roots slung over the shoulder.

Even if we don't get to see the full myth though, this encyclopedia format serves as a great way to analyse the fake history of said myths and how that changes form over time. I envy your worldbuilding skills in terms of stuff like this, especially with how you play about with myths changing meaning and appearance over time with how different cultures depict them.

Landorus was the eldest of the three storm gods. Her brothers, toranadus and thundurus, loved to play games. However, as weather gods their playfulness was extremely destructive. After one lacrosse match nearly destroyed the people under them, landorus became fed up.

Must've been one hell of a lacrosse game. I wonder how such a thing would play out for them to almost destroy cities. God forbid they play Mario Kart Wii, the blue shells would be enough to cause planetary destruction.

In the period of Galarian rule, a governor tried to ban the book. In turn it only became more and more popular until the ban was rescinded.

Ah, the Streisand Effect is a wonderful thing.

The Oscar-nominated film The Storm Driver recently led to a revival of interest in landorus. The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by climate change and nuclear fallout. A young woman seems to receive a prophetic vision while severely dehydrated. In it landorus tells her how to save Unova. The girl fails to get the leaders of post-apocalyptic Unova to come with her. She sets out to The True King’s Castle on her own to beg for more guidance. At the end of the film she dies alone in the radioactive sands near the castle. Then an old hermit with a cane made of roots emerges from the ruins and buries the body.

Oh my god, I can smell the Oscar Bait through the screen. Also makes me wonder what a Pokemon fic focusing on the film industry would look like, but that's wishful thinking on my part. I just find it funny that even in a fictional world like this, there's sentimental pap designed to jerk tears for awards season.

--

So in the vein of your Alola Dex entries, I don't have much critical to say, especially since this format works really well in your favour. I guess it's to your strength as a writer that you've presented such a tantalising image of the myth that I want to see the real thing now. I enjoyed all the bits of description about Landorus, their ties to the Pokedex entry, and how real cultures would respond to such a myth.

My only personal gripe is that for the most part, it doesn't read like a Pokemon fic, in that enough of it stands on its own that the names could be swapped out and not much would be changed. It doesn't feel like a specific commentary on the worldbuilding elements of Pokemon since the references to regions are mostly inconsequential. Aside from the mythological trio, no Pokemon or specific events from the canon lore are mentioned.

Still, it's not a problem with the story, just not what I was expecting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am interested to see more of what's in store for the World Myth Encyclopedia.

 

[kintsugi]

my thoughts on this are best summed up as "this was really fucking cool so I spent the better part of a day making fanart" but apparently that's not a legal review, so here are some lame words for a cool story i guess

Look! Look what the children of men have wrought upon the earth! The scars of sand and blood! Were they to perish for their folly it would be a fitting end. Yet, by my mercy, seeds shall grow in the sandy soil, watered by the blood of kings and heroes. You shall be given a new earth.

May this one be treated with more care.

really badass invocation here. excellent way to start

Before 500 A.D. landorus was usually depicted as male with white facial hair. This perception gradually began to shift until, by the time of the kingdom’s founding (1107 A.D.), landorus was almost exclusively known as a goddess.

I think the use of "before" here implies a very concrete before/after exactly 500 A.D., while in the next sentence earlier history is treated as a lot more nebulous/gradual shifts.

After one lacrosse match nearly destroyed the people under them, landorus became fed up. She began to chase her brothers across the sky so that they would never settle in one place for too long. She left fertile earth in her wake as an apology for her brothers’ behavior.

Not fully familiar with the mythology of lacrosse -- is this a reference? Seems like such a strange game for gods to play.

In another version of the story, Theria the Panther dies after ingesting the poison and is resurrected by The Starchild as Landorus, The Earth Incarnate and Driver of Storms.

badass god names are badass
You flip capitalizing l/Landorus across the story and I wasn't sure if there was a particular reason for it.

The king became ashamed of what he had brought about and ordered his own execution by strangulation so no blood would be wasted.

such a cool, myth-esque detail

magically appeared in his chest. his blood was collected.

dropped a capital here

After a second conflict where the remaining forces of the late King of Ideals rounded up and killed the generals and heroes of the Army of Truth, the blood was collected and mixed.

I guess it seems strange that they won here given that most of the court is gone and there's no natural successor? It's a myth so like, lol, doesn't really matter, but I did think it was weird.

She then told the assembled leaders that the blood of warriors and kings would do nothing for the land’s prosperity. Revival could only come from gentle love and hard work.

tbh I did not expect this moral from one of your stories but I like it

Indeed. there is substantial evidence

period instead of comma I think

The colonists, and especially the Europeans, were implicitly compared to selfish men who had torn a god and the world apart rather than make peace. In the period of Galarian rule, a governor tried to ban the book. In turn it only became more and more popular until the ban was rescinded. The incident fueled resentment among the Five Nations of the region and helped precipitate The War of Unovan Independence.

also very fun detail

Small offerings of grain were presented to the figurine before being burned or buried in her honor.

I love that "burned or buried" is the option here -- clever non-traditional way to worship an earth god

After extensive coordination to design new weapons and strategies, the combined armies came back and overpowered the djinn. In the process their leadership had grown accustomed to dealing with common challenges together and the war was settled.

funny way to spell "everyone ran rocky helmet skarmory for five years"

Landorus also draws inspirations from The Flayed One, a common figure in Mesoamerican pantheons. The Flayed One is the god of maize and fertility. He peeled off his own skin to help fertilize the earth.

another excellent concept

A young woman seems to receive a prophetic vision while severely dehydrated. In it landorus tells her how to save Unova. The girl fails to get the leaders of post-apocalyptic Unova to come with her. She sets out to The True King’s Castle on her own to beg for more guidance. At the end of the film she dies alone in the radioactive sands near the castle. Then an old hermit with a cane made of roots emerges from the ruins and buries the body.

I chuckle at how laconically you retell this.

I love the idea for adex but with myths, I love that this tangentially has lots of good Unova lore, I love the way you describe the different depictions, etc. Really fun stuff. Look at my critical review ye mortals and despair.

 

[Persephone]

Diancie – Alola

“Hopoe wept before Hi’iaka, just as the goddess had wept before her. Pele looked on from her canoe, and she could contain her grief no longer. The earth-eating woman strode back up the shore and placed a hand on her sister’s shoulder. Flames roared in Hi’iaka’s heart, softening the stone and turning coarse rock to beautiful gemstone.”

-The Gods of Alola

Overview

Diancie were once viewed as a mere legend, albeit a peculiarly widespread one. The confirmation of corundum diancie in Europe and Africa has led to a reevaluation of the myths’ veracity. Peridot diancie have yet to be sighted, but they also have their share of legends.

In Alola, two peridot (or green) diancie were seen as servants or relatives of Pele. They were revered as patron gods of miners, jewelers, and metallurgists. Priestesses often appealed to them to intercede with Pele during large volcanic eruptions or other crises.

Appearance

European folklore for the corundum diancie mentions two forms: a greater and lesser. Only the lesser has been confirmed, but descriptions of the greater diancie or something like it are too widespread to dismiss. The two diancie of Alolan mythology roughly match up to these descriptions. The lesser diancie analogue is the goddess Hopoe, usually depicted as having a roughly humanoid head made of stone, hair made of peridot crystals, a thin waist, and a bottom half that looks like rough, grey rock. Some depictions show a peridot crystal poking through the rocky half, sometimes in a way that resembles a leg viewed through a slit in a dress.

Early depictions of Hopoe tended to be rougher, with legends describing the non-gemstone portions as unpleasant to look at. She had noticeably inhuman, and even inorganic, anatomy and little to no non-stone skin. Her clothing was a thick white robe that vaguely resembled a carbink’s fungal rim. Later depictions tended to depict Hopoe as mostly human, or even entirely human with rough skin, peridot jewelry, and green hair. Many artists of the Early Kingdom Era (1471-1778), most famously Yil’ks, depicted Hopoe as nude or wearing only a very thin robe or dress with little resemblance to a carbink’s rim.

Hi’iaka, the greater diancie, was traditionally described as having a head and arms that looked human from a distance, but were revealed as dark, smooth stone up close. Her hair was replaced by long, pure peridot. The bottom half of her body was either entirely hidden or fully replaced by a “dress” made up of dozens of giant peridot crystals. An elegant white robe completed her outfit. Unlike Hopoe, Hi’iaka’s depictions remained rather stable through the kingdom period, although a few later artists depicted her as having actual legs beneath the dress or downplayed her rocky appearance, especially when drawn with a more human-like Hopoe.

In Alolan Mythology

Almost all of Hi’iaka’s myths are tied to Hopoe. One of the better known is recorded in Gods of Alola, a written compilation of myths commissioned by the king in 1791.

In this version, Pele was presented with a stone egg by her mother before she was banished from her home island. At first Pele was very lonely. Then her sister hatched. The fire goddess was instantly fond of the newborn Hi’iaka and doted on her incessantly while they were on the seas.

Eventually the two came to shore on an inhabited island. Hi’iaka very quickly made a friend in a human girl named Hopoe. In the Gods of Alola version of the myth, Pele takes a human form to keep an eye on her sister and falls for the mortal man Lohi’au. Other tellings, before and after, say that Lohi’au and Hi’iaka fell in love, or that both goddesses did. As time wore on, Hi’iaka became rather different than she had been on the canoe. Her sister confronted her about this, and Hi’iaka rebuked the lava goddess and kissed Lohi’au in front of her.

Pele did not take this well; she summoned a wave of lava to destroy those who had corrupted her sister. Lohi’au died in the eruption, and Hopoe found herself in the disaster’s path. Hi’iaka intervened, pushing her friend back before being coated in lava herself. When it cooled, a rough statue of the goddess was all that remained. Pele’s rage dissipated upon seeing the deaths of her sister and lover. She silently walked back to her canoe in shame and prepared to wander the seas, as alone as she was when she was first banished.

But Hopoe’s sobs moved her again. She came back to shore and heated up the stone form of her sister, refining it into beautiful crystal and igniting a molten heart within. Hi’iaka was still too afraid of Pele’s wrath to go with the fire goddess, but knowing that her sister was alive and with a dear friend kept Pele going for the next arc of her travels.

The Gods of Alola does not specify if Hopoe was later turned into a diancie. Oral traditions predating the kingdom era tell that the sisters reunited decades after Hi'iaka's transformation. In these stories, Hopoe had grown either very old or was already dead and the healing and magic gods had either refused to help or were unable to do so. Therefore, in desperation, Hi'iaka sought out her sister. While unable to restore Hopoe to the way she was, Pele could at least turn her to stone and revive her as she had done with Hi’iaka. The transformation worked and the two friends were as inseparable in the centuries after as they had been in the years before.

Pele was never able to refuse a request from her sister out of a combination of love and guilt.

Worship

Hi’iaka was seldom worshipped in her own right. She was instead invoked as an interceder between humanity and the sometimes-wrathful Pele. Many of Pele’s priests were also members of the peridot order sworn to Hi’iaka. All members of the order were female. They wore peridot jewelry and plain white robes. The priestesses also swore off marriage. Instead of appealing to Pele to stop volcanoes from erupting, which was futile, they prayed for warnings in advance and restoration of life afterwards.

The temples to Hi’iaka tended to be relatively simple stone homes for her priestesses. An altar and hearth were used for worship. At least one carbink was kept in each temple as well. These carbink were kept well-polished and were treated as emissaries of Hi’iaka and Hopoe themselves. They were prone to wander into nearby communities where, with great deference, an elder would coax them back to the temple.

Origins

Peridot diancie also appear in Egyptian mythology, where the green diancie were gifts from the sky goddess to the earth god. The diancie regularly sent messages between the earth and sky, as well as between the pharaohs and the other gods. Peridot is common in meteorites. The Egyptian myth has fueled some speculation that peridot diancie might have an extraterrestrial origin.

As peridot diancie have never been documented, it is difficult to tell what aspects of the myths are based on truth and which were made wholesale. Anthropologists generally agreed that green diancie myths in the Pacific were a way of contextualizing the life-ending and life-giving powers of volcanic eruptions and, perhaps, to provide a measure of hope. It is possible that the myths are somewhat more literal and that diancie are actually brought to life by volcanic eruptions.

The Pacific diancie myths are unusual in that there are two diancie that socialize with each other, but not with carbink. Corundum diancie myths tend to describe greater diancie as either an evolved form of or an ancient progenitor of the lesser diancie.

Continental diancie myths tend to describe them as rulers of hidden underground kingdoms of carbink. There was no equivalent to this myth in Alola prior to contact with Europeans. This is perhaps explainable by the relative lack of mining in Pre-Kingdom and Early Kingdom Alola. Travel into the caves was rare for anyone but priests or royally approved expeditions. Peridot carbink are also relatively less abundant in Alola than corundum carbink are in Europe and Africa. Outside of mines, peridot carbink often congregate in the caldera of Ten Carat Hill and the bottom of Vast Poni Canyon. The Alolans probably did not think of carbink as a subterranean species.

Today

The Order of Hi’iaka was dissolved in 1823 as the kingdom began to modernize. Several priestesses refused to relinquish their positions and were arrested or killed. The order was briefly revived in the 1950s before being shut down after they attacked tourists, park rangers, and the military. One aspect of the Second Order of Hi’iaka remains in a prominent folktale: if rocks are stolen from Pele’s islands, she will dispatch her sister to retrieve them. Hi’iaka is seldom content to merely steal the rock back and will instead lay curses of increasing severity on the thief until they voluntarily return the stones. Wela National Park and Poni National Park and Preserve each receive rocks from hundreds of former tourists every year.

Gay rights activists in Alola have often used Hi’iaka and Hopoe as examples of lesbians or bisexuals in Alolan culture. Some Alolan elders and activists push back on this interpretation as imposing modern, Western views of sexuality onto ancient goddesses and priestesses. Others accept it.

There is also scholarly debate as to whether the Order of Hi’iaka was an early haven for lesbians. Scholars are divided on the matter. There are letters between individual priestesses that seem romantic, but the Order did formally ban sexual relationships of all kinds. The Second Order of Hi’iaka did have many lesbian members, including its founder.

Corundum diancie were first documented in 2013. The first specimen was captured two years later. Early research revealed that diancie are telepathic. They are also prone to powerful mood swings, going from exuberant to despondent in a matter of minutes. The one captive specimen, named West, was captured in Botswana before being purchased by Dr. Gregory Rhodes, a world-renowned geologist and patron of the sciences. (Full Disclosure: While Dr. Rhodes owns Wyndon press, he has no influence over the content of our publications.) In 2018, a radical leftist organization attempted to steal West after releasing doctored photos of a disheveled, cracked pokémon. Several of Galar's finest geologists have since inspected West and found no health problems. Dr. Rhodes is currently suing the terrorists for the besmirching of his character and the emotional distress he endured during the incident.

 

[kintsugi]

hello! I misread Rainfall's initial prize review request so here I am. You will be seeing more of me now that I have learned how to read. Also, these concepts are aesthetically sick af and I want to draw them at some point, when I am not busy rigging Zacian election.

This one is fun! It feels more ADex, less WME--the myth sections feel less focused on and there's more emphasis on the appearance and modern day sections. The origins section in this one also reads more as a study of carbink appearances throughout time, compared with the Lando section describing different incarnations of Theria in different places. Not a bad change! Just more your usual cup of tea than I'd expect, I think. Coupled with me being more familiar with the central myth than I was with the backgrounds for the Lando one (+ I think the closer similarities to the source material), it made for a different (but still enjoyable) read.

European folklore for the corundum diancie mentions two forms: a greater and lesser. Only the lesser has been confirmed, but descriptions of the greater diancie or something like it are too widespread to dismiss

I would maybe clarify this as "only the lesser has been confirmed to have a real-life counterpart" or something--at first it reads like only the lesser folklore has been confirmed, which it probably hasn't (or if it had, this encylopedia wouldn't take a stance on its veracity I imagine).

Early depictions of Hopoe tended to be rougher, with legends describing the non-gemstone portions as unpleasant to look at. She had noticeably inhuman, and even inorganic, anatomy and little to no non-stone skin. Her clothing was a thick white robe that vaguely resembled a carbink’s fungal rim.

siiiiick. One of the coolest things from the Lando entry was how you weren't focused on making them aesthetically pleasing to humans, and I thought that was neat from both a visualization perspective and also a nice avoidance of the gorgeous and murderous pantheons that are so common in western mythology (which again, makes sense; Pers does research; I get it).

In this version, Pele was presented with a stone egg by her mother before she was banished from her home island.

I found myself wanting more explanation here--why was she banished? In the Pele myth that I'm familiar with, it's because she created hotspots and her family feared that she would burn them all, which I always thought had sad bookends for when she does burn her family out of rage. But perhaps in the pokemon version it's different--a precursor that would become the island trials/trainer's journey? Or just go with the classics haha; it works for this story and you do run into the weird issue of taking a myth and only changing certain bits. But imo there's a focus on her banishment, her shame as she walks back to her canoe alone, that doesn't quite feel complete without knowing what she was exiled for.

She silently walked back to her canoe in shame and prepared to wander the seas, as alone as she was when she was first banished.

Speaking of, I do like this inclusion--it's not often that myths deal with gods feeling shame.

Pele was never able to refuse a request from her sister out of a combination of love and guilt.

Yeah that must be a real fun one at family reunions.

Instead of appealing to Pele to stop volcanoes from erupting, which was futile, they prayed for warnings in advance and restoration of life afterwards.

I'd initially read this as "fertile" and thought it was a neat take. "Futile" is interesting in its own right, though--this idea of praying to someone who won't listen to one thing, and offering a compromise to your gods instead.

They were prone to wander into nearby communities where, with great deference, an elder would coax them back to the temple.

This is the cutest fucking thing.

One aspect of the Second Order of Hi’iaka remains in a prominent folktale: if rocks are stolen from Pele’s islands, she will dispatch her sister to retrieve them. Hi’iaka is seldom content to merely steal the rock back and will instead lay curses of increasing severity on the thief until they voluntarily return the stones. Wela National Park and Poni National Park and Preserve each receive rocks from hundreds of former tourists every year.

I like how a lot is said with a little here.

The one captive specimen, named West, was captured in Botswana before being purchased by Dr. Gregory Rhodes, a world-renowned geologist and patron of the sciences. (Full Disclosure: While Dr. Rhodes owns Wyndon press, he has no influence over the content of our publications.)

hmmm, x to doubt

In 2018, a radical leftist organization attempted to steal West after releasing doctored photos of a disheveled, cracked pokémon. Several of Galar's finest geologists have since inspected West and found no health problems. Dr. Rhodes is currently suing the terrorists for the besmirching of his character and the emotional distress he endured during the incident.

It's always the gosh darn radical leftists.

 

[Persephone]

Darkrai – Sinnoh

You may kill my body. I care naught. Darkrai drove me. Darkrai will drive another and another after that. Someday we will be victorious and you will fall.

-Last words of Sachio Ueda

Overview

Darkrai, The Wicked One, Lord of The New Moon, is an ancient god, possibly dating back to 11,000 BCE. He began as a merciless monster lurking in the shadows. Over the millennia he became an antagonist to the gods themselves, and then a proper god in his own right. Darkrai continued to be a nightmare for the nobility and clergy even as a god through his temple’s affiliation with revolutionaries, heretics, and hedonists.

Appearance

Darkrai’s earliest depictions come from cave art. The Yume Cave Darkrai was an indistinct mass of shadow with blood dripping from its mouth. A wisp of smoke rose from its head. Other early artists slightly anthropomorphized Darkrai into having arms and a skirt. Most did not have legs.

Some later myths and art depicted Darkrai as a roughly human figure in a long dark cloak and black skirt. The wisp of smoke tended to be turned into white hair and the dripping blood was turned into either face paint or a scarf. Depictions of the more monstrous form remained alongside the humanshape one. Darkrai cultists, some Cresselia cultists, and the counterculture preferred the human Darkrai, while the ruling class preferred to commission images of Darkrai as a nightmare come to life.

The people of the Nomose Delta believed that Darkrai lived deep within the swamps. The Nomose Darkrai had long, thin legs like a wading bird. Some artists and storytellers borrowed this description and portrayed Darkrai and Cresselia as birds, the former wading through the sea of dreams while the latter swam on the surface. The bird Darkrai was never as popular in art and folklore as the humanoid and monstrous versions, but it persisted to modernity.

In Sinnohan Mythology

Darkrai was first seen as a monster of the underworld. It would put victims to sleep and then rip out their soul with its teeth. Young people who died of unknown causes in their sleep were said to be killed by Darkrai. The monster could be warded off by hanging a noctowl feather from the door of a home. It was believed that noctowl did not sleep, so even the hint of their presence would drive away the dream eater.

Darkrai became a proper god during the Classical Era of Japan. He became the counterpart of Creselia shortly after. In some stories, Darkrai was a fearsome god of death and despair who tormented humans for fun. It was only the constant effort of Cresselia that kept him at bay. In another Darkrai and Cresselia were both dream gods, but Cresselia could gracefully float on the surface of the dreamscape while Darkrai had to wade through it, digging his feet into the minds below.

In a more sympathetic portrayal, a king wracked by nightmares sent his daughter, Cresselia, to Darkrai’s island to appease the god. Darkrai was furious that the king not only believed that Darkrai accepted human sacrifices, but that he would offer one over bad dreams. Darkrai’s mere presence terrified the girl, so he took to leaving her alone. He still watched from the shadows to make sure she was alright. He even made a small home for her. He commanded edible plants to grow near her home and culled the poisonous ones. When she shivered on a cold winter night, he stole a blanket from the king’s bed. And when she grew lonely, Darkrai appeared to her as a human boy who had been cursed by the nightmare god. He could keep Cresselia company, but on the night of the new moon he would go into the heart of the grove and become a mindless beast. She must avoid him during this time.

Months passed. Cresselia obeyed, but she knew that the boy was eaten up by guilt and shame after every new moon. She resolved to keep him company during his crisis, as he had during hers. Cresselia secretly followed her companion as he went to the grove. There she saw him shed his mortal body and become a beast of shadow. She screamed. Darkrai finally noticed her and immediately fled into the dreamscape in shame. He stayed away for weeks, but eventually Cresselia came to accept that Darkrai had cared for her and that she greatly missed his presence.

She went to the heart of the island and begged Darkrai to return. He did, eventually, and explained everything. When lots were drawn and roles were assigned he became the god of dreams. He was not good at this job and unintentionally caused night terrors and earned the fear of humanity. As he became more and more hated, he became increasingly bitter and unable to make happy dreams Cresselia, in turn, told him why she had followed him to the grove. She said that the same desire held true: she wanted to comfort Darkrai however she could.

They became even closer and eventually married. Under the laws of the creator, the mortal wife of a god was allowed to ascend to godhood herself. Cresselia the goddess asked Arceus to be another goddess of dreams. Arceus granted the request. She proved better at bringing good dreams than her husband, and her company helped him learn to bring good dreams as well. Humans learned to welcome sleep rather than fear it, for even if Darkrai made them face their fears on one night they could be rewarded the next.

Later stories reinterpreted Darkrai’s role as the god of nightmares. He became the god of obsessive dreams. He would tempt an artist with a fleeting vision of a magnum opus, and then drive them to pursue it above all else for years. Others would be shown hard truths about the world. When they did, it would feel as if nothing else mattered and they would either become consumed by a drive to change society or to leave it entirely. Drug users were given glorious highs, but then would be destroyed as they pursued more. Some cynics also called him a god of love. Religious leaders warned against the single-minded zeal of those driven by Darkrai to misanthropy, addiction, and political violence. Revolutionaries and cultists alike were painted as the victims and disciples of The Wicked One.

Worship

For most of Japanese history, Darkrai was a being to ward off rather than a benevolent god to worship. Priests held up Darkrai as an evil spirit or enemy of Cresselia that the Lady of the Full Moon needed prayer and material sacrifice to defeat.

As Cresselia’s cult fell out of favor, the remaining sects began to soften their stance on Darkrai. The Lord of The New Moon was either a lover, friend, or rival to Cresselia. This helped counter the increasingly popular narrative of Cresselia as a heartless extremist. Pilgrims to Full Moon Isle would often stop at New Moon Isle as well, although there were no proper shrines. Worshippers would simply walk to the edge of the forest, bow, and then leave.

Darkrai did have cults of his own. His dark colors made him popular among counter-cultures in almost every age. Darkrai’s temples were often just places for the youth to gather and explore desires that the dominant political and religious structures condemned. They became havens of homosexuality, drug use, subversive art, foreign culture, and revolutionary philosophy. The leaders of these temples traditionally specialized in the care of ghost-types. Whenever the local king or emperor tried to shut down the temple, the ghosts would infiltrate and haunt their household until the fear of Darkrai led them to back off.

The decline of Cresselia’s cult in favor of those of Arceus, Ho-oh, and Xerneas made Darkrai a less obvious rallying point for the counterculture. Instead Giratina and Yveltal cults came to occupy the niche that Darkrai temples had carved out.

Nomose always had a strange relationship with Darkrai. The people of the delta have long claimed that Darkrai lives deep in the swamps. On nights of heavy fog he will walk out and visit the cities. If a lone oracle is sent out into the fog, she can intercept Darkrai and talk with him. This will stop him from reaching the city and giving the resident’s nightmares. In exchange for the oracle’s company, Darkrai would give her insights into the future.

The nightmares and visions of Nomose likely have a more mundane explanation than a midnight rendezvous between an oracle and The Wicked One. Nearby swamps have areas where a mixture of psychoactive gasses leak from the ground. Multiple hallucinogenic plants can also be found within. Still, Nomose’s Darkrai cult has persisted to modernity. He is a respected messenger of the future and many tourists are drawn to Nomose Swamps National Park in the hopes of glimpsing the elusive Nightmare Lord.

Origins

The first appearance of Darkrai is a painting in Yume Cave dated to 11,000 BCE. Some scholars contend that this was simply a very amateurish painting of a honchkrow, possibly made by a child simply marking the walls with the multicolored clays found near the caves. There are other crude drawings on the walls such as a flattened togekiss and a mass of blue spikes with eyes in the middle. A Darkrai-like creature has also been found on cave walls in the Kurogane Valley. The Kurogane Darkrai lacks the red found in the Yume Darkrai. Forest fires are common in the valley, and the smoke inhalation deaths they cause often lead to the creation of gengar. Scholars have suggested that the Kurogane Darkrai is not a Darkrai at all, but simply a gengar.

The earliest stories of Darkrai the monster began to circulate in the Yayoi period. Again, these stories—a mass of dark mist appears in the night and terrifies humans—sound similar to gengar encounters. Some gengar even sneak into homes at night to feed on dreams. The more humanoid appearance of Darkrai as a tall figure in a cloak and skirt roughly matches that of mismagius, another ghost-type that feeds on the fear of humans.

As the kingdoms became larger and more sophisticated, they needed to codify their religions for the masses. This is where Darkrai, a creature of legend and fear, was elevated above its old status as a simple monster to become a worthy opponent for the gods. In turn, devotion to the state-sanctioned priests could keep the demon at bay. The more sympathetic portrayals of Darkrai tended to be made by writers critical of the state.

A playwright now known only as “Nara” wrote Darkrai and Cresselia as a criticism of the state, where the king was petty enough to sacrifice his daughter for a good night’s sleep. The priests who derived much of their power from their supposed ability to ward of monsters were mocked by the twist that a feared monster was no monster at all. Legend has it that the king was extremely displeased by the play and found a pretext for banishing Nara to Darkrai’s island as punishment. Supposedly Nara reacted with horror rather than joy, which the clergy used to discredit his play. Contemporary records simply show that Nara left the city shortly after the play debuted. The story of Nara’s renunciation of Darkrai is likely a fabrication made by the king’s descendants.

The association of Darkrai with madness began shortly after the codification of Darkrai as the god of nightmares. There are stories of a writer who saw a vision in a dream and then devoted his life to writing an epic poem. After years or decades of work he still was not finished. On his death bed he ordered his daughter to burn what he had written as it was still imperfect. The details change in every iteration and there is seldom a particular writer this story is attributed to. In the oldest known telling there was no mention of Darkrai, just a dream.

The connection seems to have been established after a republican revolt in the 13th Century. The nobles needed a reason why the peasants would attempt to overthrow them, and a court poet decided that it must have been the work of Darkrai twisting their dreams until they could no longer understand reality. This explanation served to explain away a great deal of criminal and otherwise unpleasant behaviors. In later centuries it became a useful tool for dissuading the citizens from using newly imported drugs.

Today

Darkrai still has some appeal in the counterculture. Some gay nightclubs still have an emblem of Darkrai on the door as a callback to the Wicked One’s old temples. New Moon Press is Japan’s largest publisher of horror stories. There have been attempts to revive the old temples of Darkrai as a pretext for criminal behavior, but the authorities close them down almost as soon as they open.

Mental health clinics have traditionally raised funds from the religious by claiming their patient’s obsessions are provoked by Darkrai. Communities of the mentally ill denounce these claims as carrying an unfair stigma.

Some political radicals have embraced their alleged connection to Darkrai to claim they were divinely inspired. Sachio Ueda, assassin of Japan’s crown princess, claimed as much during his public execution.

The professional trainer Takuto Nakamura claims that he had a vivid dream in which he won a tournament, only to be faced by a mirror image of himself using a Darkrai. He tried and failed to bring the mysterious opponent down. The dream ended when he lost. He claims that there was a black feather and a silver medal on his bed when he woke up.

Archaeologists attempting to dig for ruins on New Moon Island often report a feeling of being watched. Sometimes they are overcome by an unshakeable belief that something bad will imminently happen if they do not leave. Expeditions to the island tend to be short. Whether these reports are due to native ghost-types, superstitious paranoia, or the presence of Darkrai himself remains unclear.

Darkrai’s existence is not confirmed and there are plausible explanations for almost all of his supposed appearances. There are still just enough stories that serious scholars believe that Darkrai is out there lurking in the shadows. Whether he is a primeval monster or a misunderstood loner is anyone’s guess.

 

[Pen]

so apparently live dm reaction weren't GOOD ENOUGH for you ~~hypocrite~~

anyway

Love what you did with Darkrai here. As usual with your World Dex stuff, a big part of the enjoyment is in all the conflicting, competing interpretations and that sense of a patchwork that is so true to actual mythology. My favorite takes on Darkrai here were 1) the swamp birds theory (good birds! or maybe good hallucinogens!) 2) the state satire Eros and Psyche play version, which I totally wish existed so I could read it, and 3) the 'no actually it's just gengar, guys.' I like how Darkrai is associated with everything from goth kids writing their goth poetry to actual assassinations. And of course, the sense you end up with of how much of a cipher Darkrai is, to be projected onto. In that respect, I enjoyed your focus on depictions and early art. Darkrai's look -- a mass of shadow/smoke -- has a universal quality. There's always going to be shadows and darkness to read into what we will -- or to forget about, bc Yveltal is cooler, man.

You may kill my body. I care naught. Darkrai drove me. Darkrai will drive another and another after that. Someday we will be victorious and you will fall.

-Last words of Sachio Ueda

👏 good shit

Darkrai continued to be a nightmare for the nobility and clergy even as a god through his temple’s affiliation with revolutionaries, heretics, and hedonists.

I stumbled over this one. Maybe shift up a clause so it's, "Even as a god, Darkrai continued . . ."

The people of the Nomose Delta believed that Darkrai lived deep within the swamps. The Nomose Darkrai had long, thin legs like a wading bird. Some artists and storytellers borrowed this description and portrayed Darkrai and Cresselia as birds, the former wading through the sea of dreams while the latter swam on the surface.

DREAM BIRDS. I love them. Legs.

Young people who died of unknown causes in their sleep were said to be killed by Darkrai. The monster could be warded off by hanging a noctowl feather from the door of a home. It was believed that noctowl did not sleep, so even the hint of their presence would drive away the dream eater.

Ooh, this checks out so nicely for folk lore. Of course deaths during sleep are there own category and of course they are caused by a dream eater who can be warded off by a sleepless guardian.

In another Darkrai and Cresselia were both dream gods, but Cresselia could gracefully float on the surface of the dreamscape while Darkrai had to wade through it, digging his feet into the minds below.

Didn't really get this one. What's the functional difference?

He commanded edible plants to grow near her home and culled the poisonous ones. When she shivered on a cold winter night, he stole a blanket from the king’s bed.

Love these specific details. They really make his care for her concrete.

And when she grew lonely, Darkrai appeared to her as a human boy who had been cursed by the nightmare god. He could keep Cresselia company, but on the night of the new moon he would go into the heart of the grove and become a mindless beast. She must avoid him during this time.

Ah yes, excellent job making this into Eros and Psyche.

unable to make happy dreams Cresselia, in turn,

Missing period

He became the god of obsessive dreams. He would tempt an artist with a fleeting vision of a magnum opus, and then drive them to pursue it above all else for years.

who among us has not been driven mad by darkrai, really

The Lord of The New Moon was either a lover, friend, or rival to Cresselia. This helped counter the increasingly popular narrative of Cresselia as a heartless extremist.

Curious what was driving that narrative and what kind of extremist Cresselia was thought to be?

Pilgrims to Full Moon Isle would often stop at New Moon Isle as well, although there were no proper shrines. Worshippers would simply walk to the edge of the forest, bow, and then leave.

Love the simplicity of this ritual.

On nights of heavy fog he will walk out and visit the cities. If a lone oracle is sent out into the fog, she can intercept Darkrai and talk with him. This will stop him from reaching the city and giving the resident’s nightmares. In exchange for the oracle’s company, Darkrai would give her insights into the future.

Again, rings very true on a folk-lore logic level.

Multiple hallucinogenic plants can also be found within.

Lol, or that.

Forest fires are common in the valley, and the smoke inhalation deaths they cause often lead to the creation of gengar. Scholars have suggested that the Kurogane Darkrai is not a Darkrai at all, but simply a gengar.

Again, these stories—a mass of dark mist appears in the night and terrifies humans—sound similar to gengar encounters. Some gengar even sneak into homes at night to feed on dreams.

I really like this thoroughline of "akshually it's really just gengar." And I like how plausible it is.

A playwright now known only as “Nara” wrote Darkrai and Cresselia as a criticism of the state, where the king was petty enough to sacrifice his daughter for a good night’s sleep. The priests who derived much of their power from their supposed ability to ward of monsters were mocked by the twist that a feared monster was no monster at all. Legend has it that the king was extremely displeased by the play and found a pretext for banishing Nara to Darkrai’s island as punishment.

👏 👏 very good shit.

Supposedly Nara reacted with horror rather than joy, which the clergy used to discredit his play.

Huh, sure that horror wasn't just at the fact he has to live alone on an island?

On his death bed he ordered his daughter to burn what he had written as it was still imperfect.

Presumably she did, and that's why the author's name is unknown/changes by story?

The nobles needed a reason why the peasants would attempt to overthrow them, and a court poet decided that it must have been the work of Darkrai twisting their dreams until they could no longer understand reality.

Oof. Amazing.

New Moon Press is Japan’s largest publisher of horror stories.

Nice!

There have been attempts to revive the old temples of Darkrai as a pretext for criminal behavior, but the authorities close them down almost as soon as they open.

Reviving the temples is a pretext for criminal behavior? What behavior exactly?

The professional trainer Takuto Nakamura claims that he had a vivid dream in which he won a tournament, only to be faced by a mirror image of himself using a Darkrai. He tried and failed to bring the mysterious opponent down. The dream ended when he lost. He claims that there was a black feather and a silver medal on his bed when he woke up.

Hah, I see your reference. Cool dream sequence.

Archaeologists attempting to dig for ruins on New Moon Island often report a feeling of being watched. Sometimes they are overcome by an unshakeable belief that something bad will imminently happen if they do not leave. Expeditions to the island tend to be short.

This would make such a fun oneshot. Well, I say fun.

This was excellent, thank you! A prize well worth writing 80k words in reviews and having no life for a month.

 

[Negrek]

You know I've got to show up for L E G! This is a fun one--Darkrai as a symbol of the counterculture isn't something I would have thought of before, but I think you do a good job of selling it here. I suppose, on balance, I might expect an even heavier emphasis on his associations with nightmare/hallucination and therefore drugs.

I enjoyed what I believe was Nara's story of Darkrai and Cresselia--the retelling in the "Sinnohan Mythology" section seems to match up with the description of the work in the "Origins" section. As always you do a good job of capturing the tone and logic of myths and fairy tales, with their blends of fantastic and mundane and use of metaphor. And the romance of sun and moon is of course a familiar story; fun to see a pokémon spin on it here. Plus, failboat "idk we drew straws and I got 'sleep,' I kinda suck at it tho" Darkrai is a delight. All that edge and he's just a mildly incompetent guy trying to bungle on through.

I'm curious about the relationship between Darkrai and Cresselia. It sounds like their legends arose independently, and then later Darkrai was positioned specifically as Cresselia's opposite number?

The origin of Darkrai in a cave painting that might actually have just been a poorly-rendered honchkrow or something was very cute. I can easily imagine the academic fistfights that have started over different interpretations of those images, heh.

He was not good at this job and unintentionally caused night terrors and earned the fear of humanity.

Love this image, haha.

There are other crude drawings on the walls such as a flattened togekiss and a mass of blue spikes with eyes in the middle.

I'm guessing these correspond to actual pokémon, but I'm blanking on which ones they might be, heh.

His dark colors made him popular among counter-cultures in almost every age.

This is cute, but I don't quite know that counter-cultures across the long arc of history are necessarily drawn to dark colors more often than you would expect. :P It is clear that Darkrai has the coolest temples, though.

There have been attempts to revive the old temples of Darkrai as a pretext for criminal behavior, but the authorities close them down almost as soon as they open.

omg, just let Team Rocket have fun

One wonders, of course, what Darkrai makes of humans' stories about him. If he even cares! (Or, you know, exists.) Does he find the edgy loner persona appealing or tiresome? What actually is his relationship to Cresselia, if any? For this kind of thing, it's always fun for me to imagine how the pokémon themselves would respond to what's being written about them. (Or about how their role in Pokémon mythology might be different! Maybe every ghost-type knows "Darkrai" is really just a hopped-up gengar with ambitions.)

All in all a great choice by Pen and a fun addition to the series!

 

[kintsugi]

L E G S

This one is really fun, possibly because I do enjoy edgy myths + the scholarly deconstruction of how edgy myths came to be, possibly because it's really fun to see the many ways that a single myth could be reimagined into multiple cultural symbols across generations and around the world, possibly because LEGS. Who can say, really.

I liked seeing all the different interpretations of dreams/nightmares and Darkrai's general role here--edgy countercultural symbol, lonely outcast, fomenting insurrection, a very large bird ... dreams are all vague and amorphous and it kind of fits that they'd get disseminated into a ton of different interpretations across the ages, so it was really fun to see all the different variations on the same theme. The Landorus entry felt more focused on one story/concept, and the Diancie one even more so, which I liked for different reasons--but here it's neat to see how things could sort of fit together from A to B and from B to C, but then zooming out there's such a nice variation between the beginning and end points that it really feels like the world is big and old.

Lotta fun. Excellent choice by Pen for picking best hair fren, and also lovely research and storytelling here.

some line-by-lines:

Spoiler

Darkrai, The Wicked One, Lord of The New Moon, is an ancient god, possibly dating back to 11,000 BCE.

"possibly" with a rough date feels redundant--maybe something like "with oldest known portrayals appearing to date back to 11,000 BCE"?

Most did not have legs.

boo.

The Nomose Darkrai had long, thin legs like a wading bird.

YES. shitpost aside I do love this image and it's a good reimagining for something that's basically hit meme status. The image of Darkrai needing to wade through the muck of sleep while Cresselia can float above it is very pretty too.

He could keep Cresselia company, but on the night of the new moon he would go into the heart of the grove and become a mindless beast. She must avoid him during this time.

I'm not sold on the phrasing of "she must avoid him"--partially because of personal dislike for present/past must ambiguity, but more because it's unclear what's forcing this action? In the context of the original myth it's probably just a rule Darkrai makes up, so maybe rephrase to: "He explained that he could keep Cresselia company [...] During this time, she would have to avoid him."

always fun seeing this myth pop up and I like how it's a happy(er) ending

When lots were drawn and roles were assigned he became the god of dreams. He was not good at this job and unintentionally caused night terrors and earned the fear of humanity. As he became more and more hated, he became increasingly bitter and unable to make happy dreams Cresselia, in turn, told him why she had followed him to the grove

I also like this image of godhood being assigned. It feels very whimsical and also lol he just doesn't like his job he's #relatable

Under the laws of the creator, the mortal wife of a god was allowed to ascend to godhood herself.

fic series on arcaean contract law when

(is it contract law? I do not know enough about deific rulesets or regular rulesets for this shitpost to go further)

Later stories reinterpreted Darkrai’s role as the god of nightmares. He became the god of obsessive dreams. He would tempt an artist with a fleeting vision of a magnum opus, and then drive them to pursue it above all else for years. Others would be shown hard truths about the world. When they did, it would feel as if nothing else mattered and they would either become consumed by a drive to change society or to leave it entirely. Drug users were given glorious highs, but then would be destroyed as they pursued more.

Monkey's paw dreams are a really cool interpretation of nightmares.

On nights of heavy fog he will walk out and visit the cities. If a lone oracle is sent out into the fog, she can intercept Darkrai and talk with him. This will stop him from reaching the city and giving the resident’s nightmares. In exchange for the oracle’s company, Darkrai would give her insights into the future.

hey excuse me you missed the part where the oracle yeets off into oblivion because the fic stops updating

A playwright now known only as “Nara” wrote Darkrai and Cresselia as a criticism of the state

I don't know if I'm supposed to feel called out here but I do!

The nobles needed a reason why the peasants would attempt to overthrow them, and a court poet decided that it must have been the work of Darkrai twisting their dreams until they could no longer understand reality.

wow and of course the most scathing commentary is just buried in a little sentence in the middle here, love to see it

 

[Persephone]

Yveltal (Kalos)

“Proud Yveltal roars and the world is consumed. All that remains is a cocoon of flames. Those who have fallen from Xerneas’s grace are doomed to burn forever within. But those who embrace the creator, who embrace life, for them there will be a new creation free from the pains of the old.”

-The Book of Death, 15:11-13

Overview

Yveltal is the primary antagonist of Xerneas and, according to the Church of Life, the embodiment of all that is evil. While she may have once been a more complicated goddess, many of those myths were lost or edited to be more in line with the Church of Life’s doctrine. Almost as old as the Church of Life are attempts to humanize Yveltal, either out of a fascination with the forbidden or a desire to criticize the church. There are still a handful of worshippers of Yveltal, but for the most part she remains as an antagonist – someone to be warded against than prayed to directly.

Appearance

Yveltal has long been associated with a Y-shaped rune. This was probably meant to signify a bird in flight rather than an actual body shape. Nevertheless, the church has run with it and portrayed Yveltal as being shaped like a y with two long wings and an equally long tail. A small head with a train of feathers is set between the wings. Yveltal has traditionally been depicted without legs to signify that Xerneas will not allow her to find rest on the earth.

Some artists have drawn Yveltal as being pure black. Others depict her as being without skin or feathers with blood oozing from her body with nothing to hold it back. Some artists mix the two or depict her as having black feathers on her back and red feathers on the front. It has become common to depict spindly black ‘fingers’ emerging from her wings and even tail. These symbolize her desire to drag everyone and everything into her cocoon.

Yveltal has also been depicted as a human woman. These depictions usually have black or red wings extending behind her to show who the artist is depicting. Sometimes Yveltal is drawn as deathly pale with deep black hair and eyes. Medieval artists often drew her as a living shadow of pure darkness. During the colonial era she was usually drawn as being of Amerindian or African descent instead of having literally black skin.

There is not a great deal of evidence as to what Yveltal was depicted as before the Church of Life came to power. The Church purged most records of Imperial and pre-Imperial theology, Yveltal included. The most prominent surviving poem describes her as “she of the bloody feathers.” This may have been meant as a metaphor or epithet rather than a literal description.

In Kalosian Mythology

The Church of Life’s main scripture, Decalibres, establishes the basics of Yveltal’s character and story. She appeared before all of creation to trick them into cursing Xerneas’s name. The pokémon readily did and it only took a few minutes to convince the first woman, Sel, to as well. Only the first man, Nau, held out. For this reason pokémon and women were put under the authority of men so that they may be led out of evil. Later on her name is occasionally used as a synonym of sin or death, especially in more poetic portions of the scripture.

She is only a prominent figure in the tenth book, The Book of Endings. There it is revealed that she made a bet with Xerneas. If the world was more sinful than good in ten thousand years, it would go to her. If it was more good than sinful, then Yveltal would be exiled from creation. At the end of the ten thousandth year Yveltal wins and begins to rain terrors down on the earth. Xerneas intervenes to keep His people safe. In rage Yveltal swallows the entirety of creation into a cocoon to seal it away from Xerneas’s light. Xerneas takes his followers away from the cocoon and makes a new creation that Yveltal may not enter, one that is perfect. There His followers will worship him forever in eternal bliss.

While not in the Decalibres, there is a prominent apocryphal legend regarding Yveltal. Around 1000 BCE, centuries before the Imperial Era, a prominent chieftain enthusiastically embraced the teachings of Xerneas. At least, until his beloved companion died. Furious at Xerneas for letting such a thing happen the chieftain turned to Yvetal. The death goddess offered to return the companion to life and let her live forever with the chieftain. In exchange she asked for the lives of one out of every ten people in his lands. He agreed and Yveltal took her bloody tithe. The chieftain’s companion immediately fled away in disgust. Years passed but neither aged. Neither could die. When the chieftain asked Yveltal why this was she responded that she was honoring the terms of their agreement: the two could live together forever. If they did not actually want to be together that was not her problem.

The florges tell a slightly different story. In their version there was a bloody war that wiped out most of Kalos’s population. As the two armies prepared for a final confrontation near the modern village of Cromlac’h, one army’s general employed an assassin to kill the enemy king. The assassin failed because the man’s floette took a blade for her friend. This proved to be the straw that broke the camerupt’s back. The king had seen too many friends die and his sanity was shattered. In despair he begged Yveltal to end the war by annihilating both armies. If there was no one left to fight at least the civilians could live in peace. Yveltal agreed and said she could free from death’s reach any two individuals, one in exchange for each army. The king chose himself and his floette. Yveltal kept her bargain, but the fairy fled from her former friend in disgust.

Yveltal is a force to be prayed against in The Church of Life. She is far more powerful than any individual person, but much, much weaker than Xerneas. Without The Lifegiver’s help humans would inevitably fall to wickedness and bring about their own destruction. But Xerneas gives humans the power to shrug off Yveltal’s temptations and walk a righteous path.

In the tales of the saints Yveltal often appears as a temptress that the holy figure holds out against. This temptation is often sexual in nature as she tries to get holy men and women to have sex outside the bounds of marriage. In at least one popular story, the tale of Saint Rosaline, she appears as another woman and tries to lure her into a homosexual tryst.

Later writers would write stories humanizing Yveltal. The most popular of these stories was the eleventh century epic The Damned Sword. In it Yveltal is depicted as the destroyer of the wicked. She fights a supernatural war against evil spirits set on harming humanity. But Yveltal grew jealous of the first two humans, the perfect creation of Xerneas. The Lifegiver would speak fondly of humanity for days on end without giving a word of thanks to Yveltal for her work. One day she approaches Sel and tempts her into offering a sacrifice to her instead of Xerneas. The latter is furious and humiliates Yveltal in front of all of creation for suggesting she should be worshipped over Him. Yveltal then resigns from the heavenly armies and lets plagues, temptation, and old age freely ravage humanity. Yveltal is too proud to defend humanity without worship of her own and Xerneas is too proud to allow it. All of mankind continues to suffer while the creator and destroyer sulk in opposite corners of the universe.

These stories were often thinly veiled criticisms of the church. Giving Yveltal a rational reason to rebel usually entailed making Xerneas look less than perfect. The writer could always deny he was trying to criticize Xerneas by claiming that the book was from the perspective of The Mother of Lies and should not be taken literally. This is where the concept of the imperfect narrator comes from.

Church-aligned writers would later try to exploit the popularity of these stories. The End of Grace, published in 1351, initially seems similar to The Damned Sword through its focus on Yveltal before the fall. However, it quickly becomes clear that Xerneas actually is perfect and Yveltal falls from grace because of her own sinful nature. These stories were invariably less popular than more straightforward fall stories.

Worship

Yveltal is traditionally seen as a being that the pious must pray for protection from. Most of her modern ‘worshippers’ are in secular society groups that launch lawsuits arguing that their ‘religion’ deserves the same government accommodations as those given to the Church of Life. Many governments decide to adopt secular rules rather than allow for public prayers to Yveltal.

Because Yveltal is often depicted in folklore as being able to petrify sinners the Church of Life does not usually make statues of holy figures. In Medieval Kalos nobles would often commission statues of rivals and prominently display them to suggest that they were impious. Most of the remaining statutes we have from the Medieval era are of reviled political leaders and prominent heretics.

In the Decalibres Yveltal is often associated with witchcraft. Modern witches have embraced her as a patron deity. These sects are divided on exactly which texts are ‘canon.’ The Damned Sword is occasionally treated as the true account of Yveltal divinely gifted to her prophet. Others rely on The Black Account, a sort of handbook for witches allegedly written in 13th Century Italy by a daughter of Yveltal. There are no historical records of the book before the transcript of a 17th Century witch trial. The oldest known copy of the book was published in 1781. This edition may have been intended as a satire making fun of both the Church and Lumiose’s growing population of self-identified witches. Some sects ditch both and use a more modern novel as the ‘true’ account of the death goddess.

Yveltal worship typically entails defying social norms, embracing womanhood, and the occasional sacrifice of a small mammal. The exact rituals vary from sect to sect.

There are no temples devoted to Yveltal. The closest is a graveyard to the south of Cromlac’h in Kalos. Massive stone pillars with Old Kalosian writing are arranged in rows. This is allegedly where Kalos’s king bargained with Yveltal for the life of his friend. A monument was later erected for the dead. The pillars themselves contain nothing but weathered names. The area is sometimes referred to as Yveltal’s Nest. Locals have long avoided the area. When they must visit, they do so without making a sound. If they do then Yveltal might notice them and reap their souls as well.

Origins

After the Imperium embraced monotheism they began to systematically eliminate accounts of other gods in their lands. Most records of these deities were destroyed. Those that remained were altered to depict the former god as a king, priest, or common pokémon. It can be hard to read imperial histories and distinguish genuine records of events from converted legends.

After the Imperium’s fall the Church of Life did the same to the imperial religion as the Imperium had done to so many local cults. Xerenas and Yveltal were probably altered to help ease followers of the imperial religion into the new faith. The former god of the Imperium was converted into a priest of Xerneas in the Decalibres. He was a dutiful priest of Xerneas in a fallen city. The imperial leaders had him killed, but Xerneas resurrected him in exchange for his piousness. There is some indication that in the original myths the imperial god personally met and defeated a death deity. This deity may have been replaced with the existing goddess Yveltal.

The Church’s missionaries ultimately reached farther than the Imperium’s armies. Most North European cultures of the time did not keep written records of their myths. Those that did exist were often burned by missionaries. As such it is difficult to say much about Yveltal’s pre-Church depictions with certainty, as the Kalosian records were burned by the Imperium and the records in the rest of Europe were burned by the Church.

It does not help that Yveltal was probably only spoken of in hushed tones and referenced by epithet rather than name. In the remote reaches of Scandanavia there are still those who practice a version of the traditional faith. They refuse to speak of the goddess of death, claiming it would invite terrible fortune to do so. There is a remaining Scandanavian poem that briefly describes a bird whose death heralds the end of the world. This is because her body is the world. Someday she will lay an egg and die. This is how our world will end. When the egg hatches the new bird will become a new world with its own peoples. Someday the new bird will die and lay an egg of her own.

One of the few Celtic gods that survived the Church and the Imperium is Deargbean, a ruthless warrior who takes a more active hand in reaping the dead than most psychopomps. She was often associated with corviknight and took the form of one in at least one legend. Whether this is an example of a proto-Yveltal or a separate goddess entirely is a subject of scholarly debate.

Recently scholars have begun to ask long-lived and intelligent pokémon about pre-imperial mythology and history as they may only be a few generations removed from the Imperium. The results from this method are of questionable value: most pokémon don’t pay much attention to human religious beliefs, and those that do rarely recount human stories in perfect detail to their children.

A study of aegislash, gardevoir, and florges pieced together a version of the early Kalosian views on Yveltal and Xerneas. The two may have once been seen as partners. Yveltal would kill the wicked and the old so that the righteous and young may take their place in the world. Everyone went to Yveltal’s realm upon death. There they would undergo a series of trials. The length and severity of these trials would depend on how righteous the person was in life. After finally reaching the end of their penance they would emerge from the trials as a liberated spirit. This was compared to a butterfree emerging from a metapod’s shell and is potentially where the idea of Yveltal living in a cocoon comes from. Allegedly priests and kings were seen as inherently perfect and were allowed to skip the trials entirely. They would then sit at the right hand of Yveltal and help choose which souls to reap.

There is no proof of Yveltal’s existence. It seems as if there was a mass death event approximately 3,000 years ago in Kalos. Whether this was the workings of ancient technology, Xerneas smiting the wicked, Yveltal killing two armies, or even a simple plague is disputed. Accounts of a bird of death throughout Europe could simply be due to some common death goddess myth that was borrowed and molded by different cultures. It is possible that these accounts are based on corviknight, dark-colored carrion eaters who are often seen with blood and entrails around them. These would be large black-and-red birds that frequently appeared on battlefields to eat the dead. Early man may have seen these powerful, intelligent beings as supernatural forces of death. Embellishments over the centuries could have turned a simple corvid into the enemy of all that is good.

Today

The trend of Yveltal rehabilitation died down over the centuries. It was brought back stronger than ever the next time the Church of Life was seriously challenged: The Enlightenment. Newly relaxed blasphemy laws allowed for ever more radical depictions of Xerneas and Yveltal. A prominent café in Lumiose was themed after Yveltal’s Cocoon. Y-shaped paintings and graffiti also became somewhat common as a means of pushing the envelope or flaunting defiance of the Church.

Yveltal was a prominent figure in the literature of the era. Some works were more about political views than religious ones. Feminist writers in particular grappled with the female embodiment of evil. Some proposed that Xerneas was the fertile creator. Yveltal, the spirit of avarice and greed, was most strongly tied to the world of men. The sexes of Xerneas and Yveltal should thus be flipped from their classical interpretations.

Other feminist writers embraced Yveltal rather than trying to dismiss her as not truly female. Yveltal’s corruption of the first woman and her own feminine nature had long been used by the Church against female empowerment. Elizabeth River’s Unto The End depicted Xerneas as an inventor obsessed with creating bold new innovations. The old models were of no interest to Him once He had come up with something better. Over time the old things would break down and begin to suffer as Xerneas no longer cared to maintain them. It was Yveltal who gently flew down from the heavens to pick up the beings neglected by Xerneas and make sure they received proper care. This interpretation embraced Yveltal’s femininity and praised Yveltal for having “the caring nature” of “the fairer sex.”

The most famous of the modern Yveltal-centric novels is Dr. Octavia Zeiger’s 1971 novel Our Mother who art in Hell. The story begins with the creation of humanity. The Lifegiver saw no value in being praised by beings too simplistic to understand what they were saying. He made two intelligent beings. He put one of his most trusted servants, Yveltal, in charge of their instruction for He had no desire to teach them Himself. Yveltal appeared before the humans and took on a motherly role, teaching them about their emotions and thoughts. As time went on she taught them music, art, and science. Xerneas was delighted by the art the humans made praising His glory. Eventually Yveltal taught Sel and Nau the one thing she had been forbidden from teaching them: choice and morality. After the lesson the woman, Sel, decided that she wanted to make art for herself rather than for Xereneas. The creator grew enraged and exiled them from his garden. He then created plagues and old age to break down humanity until they came back to Him to beg for mercy. If they were sufficiently grateful, He would grant some leniency. Yveltal, for her role in Sel’s defiance, was exiled to the darkest place in the universe. She saw that as humans died Xerneas would only grant entrance to His garden to those who would endlessly sing His praises. Those who would not were left outside as bodyless shades, unable to interact with anyone and anything. Yveltal rounded them up and invited them into her home. It was gloomy in her cocoon, but Yveltal did her best to share what comforts she had with the souls who ended up there. The author posits in the epilogue that this makes the cocoon a livelier and friendlier place than Xerneas’s “gorgeous garden of terrified sycophants.”

 

[Pen]

Death god fren! Well, not a fren if you're the Church of Life. As always, I love all the alternate mythos you give, especially here where there's the official religious text version and the "apocryphal" ones. Yveltal as Satan makes sense for the Christian spin you've given Xerneas in BT verse, but I liked how you dug into alternate ideas of Yveltal as more of a pagan bird death god, particularly the Scandenavian world egg story and how you integrated the corviknight. As with the gengar-darkrai theory last time, it's nice to see explanations for a legend grounded in non-mythic pokemon. I liked the two takes on the cocoon--one as fiery hell and the other as penance and rebirth. It was cool to get pokemon versions of the myths in this one--will we be seeing more of that in later entries? The most interesting myth to me was the story of the bet. Were you referencing anything specific with it? The only thing that came to mind for me was the bet between God and Satan in the book of Job. Your version is interesting because Xerneas loses, but that lose-state is what achieves the Christian-style rapture. Very fatalistic, Church of Life.

I enjoyed how seriously you took the 'Yveltal is literally the letter Y' thing. The bird in flight abstraction idea is really nice, and I love the religious propaganda spin on my Yveltal has no legs. In the same vein, I liked the very serious discussion of whether Yveltal actually goes around dripping blood.

The different feminist spins are fun, and the complexity of how they try to use Yveltal--including further entrenching gender roles--feels appropriately realistic.

For this reason pokémon and women were put under the authority of men so that they may be led out of evil.

🔥 🔥 🔥

This is where the concept of the imperfect narrator comes from.

Unreliable narrator? I found it a bit odd how definitively this is stated.

The author posits in the epilogue that this makes the cocoon a livelier and friendlier place than Xerneas’s “gorgeous garden of terrified sycophants.”

Here here!

 

[kintsugi]

Yveltal episode?? could this mean--

For this reason pokémon and women were put under the authority of men so that they may be led out of evil.

strap in we're getting SPICY

---

This one is really fun. I love Yveltal as a design but I always feel like Kalos lore is a little lacking, if only because there's so much depth you can get from cultural life/death deities and Gen VI sort of just decides not to. The different interpretations of reclaiming her as a feminist figure are neat, and it's fun to see the tie-ins to Gen/BT here. The two takes on AZ's story are really my favorite part of this chapter; with the first one with the bloody tithe I realized what was up when I got to the mass murder bit, and then the alternate version with the floette drove that home really nicely. In both cases I like how you pose Yveltal as extending what she thinks of as kindness--obviously in the first one it's more of a coy monkey's paw thing, but there's a degree of agency from her that's typically lacking in that myth that I think adds a neat spin to it, and makes sense to include in a dex entry about her myths (rather than myths about her).

I like the running trend of the desire to humanize Yveltal--it's a lot harder to anthropomorphize your gods when you're more or less convinced that at least some of them exist and your flora/fauna breaks the supernatural barrier on a daily basis. But maybe you still do because, like you say, it's fascinating to consider if evil were human- or church-shaped.

The imagery in the depiction section is really cool--mass of shadows, barely-concealed blood, bit of column A, bit of column B. Good shit all around.

“Proud Yveltal roars and the world is consumed. All that remains is a cocoon of flames. Those who have fallen from Xerneas’s grace are doomed to burn forever within. But those who embrace the creator, who embrace life, for them there will be a new creation free from the pains of the old.”

these intro lines continue to be straight fire

Yveltal has traditionally been depicted without legs to signify that Xerneas will not allow her to find rest on the earth.

this is really cool

Xerneas intervenes to keep His people safe.

Xerneas is a sore loser confirmed

Xerneas takes his followers

dropped caps on "his" here I think?

The assassin failed because the man’s floette took a blade for her friend.

"a" felt a bit weird here--maybe "the assassin failed because the man's floette took the blade meant for her friend"

The writer could always deny he was trying to criticize Xerneas by claiming that the book was from the perspective of The Mother of Lies and should not be taken literally. This is where the concept of the imperfect narrator comes from.

lmao

Because Yveltal is often depicted in folklore as being able to petrify sinners the Church of Life does not usually make statues of holy figures.

this was a cool bit of lore

When they must visit, they do so without making a sound. If they do then Yveltal might notice them and reap their souls as well.

on first read this looked like "if they do [visit without making a sound] then Yveltal might notice them" when I thik you mean the opposite.

Someday the new bird will die and lay an egg of her own.

chronologically I want this to read as "someday the new bird will lay an egg of her own and die."

The results from this method are of questionable value: most pokémon don’t pay much attention to human religious beliefs, and those that do rarely recount human stories in perfect detail to their children.

Eventually Yveltal taught Sel and Nau the one thing she had been forbidden from teaching them: choice and morality. After the lesson the woman, Sel, decided that she wanted to make art for herself rather than for Xereneas. The creator grew enraged and exiled them from his garden.

wow, Xerneas sure was jealous in that garden. one might even say envious.

Fun retelling of the Eden myth, although I'm curious how/if Zygarde factors into it. it is known that sneks are the better vessel for temptation.

 

[Persephone]

Yveltal episode?? could this mean--


strap in we're getting SPICY

LOL

This one is really fun. I love Yveltal as a design but I always feel like Kalos lore is a little lacking, if only because there's so much depth you can get from cultural life/death deities and Gen VI sort of just decides not to. The different interpretations of reclaiming her as a feminist figure are neat, and it's fun to see the tie-ins to Gen/BT here. The two takes on AZ's story are really my favorite part of this chapter; with the first one with the bloody tithe I realized what was up when I got to the mass murder bit, and then the alternate version with the floette drove that home really nicely. In both cases I like how you pose Yveltal as extending what she thinks of as kindness--obviously in the first one it's more of a coy monkey's paw thing, but there's a degree of agency from her that's typically lacking in that myth that I think adds a neat spin to it, and makes sense to include in a dex entry about her myths (rather than myths about her).

Yeah. One of the problems when drafting this was the relative lack of canon to go on. I expected more from a box legend to narrow things down a bit. I understand when a later gen mythical has little lore, but Yveltal seems awfully important to have next to nothing. Lack of Z version might've hurt, but I'm honestly not sure they would have expanded on her lol.

I like the running trend of the desire to humanize Yveltal--it's a lot harder to anthropomorphize your gods when you're more or less convinced that at least some of them exist and your flora/fauna breaks the supernatural barrier on a daily basis. But maybe you still do because, like you say, it's fascinating to consider if evil were human- or church-shaped.

This fic has... a few kinds of legendaries. Glorified cryptids, powerful beings that interact with humanity regularly, and embodiments of primordial forces that are maybe mythical in-universe. Except for Kyogre, Groudon, and Rayquazza which were unfortunately confirmed as real. The last one will be humanized more than the first two.

these intro lines continue to be straight fire

They're actually the last thing I write in an entry lol. Want to see where I end up going with things and what in-universe documents I end up citing.

dropped caps on "his" here I think?

"a" felt a bit weird here--maybe "the assassin failed because the man's floette took the blade meant for her friend"

Will fix

this was a cool bit of lore

I think Yveltal petrifies people in the anime and I felt like I had to do something with that.

on first read this looked like "if they do [visit without making a sound] then Yveltal might notice them" when I thik you mean the opposite.

chronologically I want this to read as "someday the new bird will lay an egg of her own and die."

Will clarify.

LOL

wow, Xerneas sure was jealous in that garden. one might even say envious.

BRELOOMINATI CONFIRMED

Fun retelling of the Eden myth, although I'm curious how/if Zygarde factors into it. it is known that sneks are the better vessel for temptation.

Going to be honest: I forgot about Zygarde. It just... seems like it's part of some other myth altogether. If I did incorporate it into this entry it would've been the king / protector of the earth. Both sort of leave Big Z alone while playing their game with human souls. Zygarde, in turn, has little interest in governing the afterlife. So... pretty much irrelevant to Yveltal's story.

 

[Persephone]

Mewtwo – Kanto

“We set out to make a weapon. We made a god instead.”
-Dr. Genjirō Fuji

Overview

Mythology is the study of the stories humans have told about their gods and ancestors. These stories are useful for understanding cultures in a way that simple historical records cannot convey. How did a people think of themselves: Mighty warriors descended from the heavens? Impure and sinful beings wholly indebted to their creator? Tiny and insignificant beasts at the mercy of forces far outside their control?

In the late 20th Century humanity may have created a being capable of going toe-to-toe with the strongest of pokémon. The evidence for Mewtwo’s existence always has some sort of weakness. It is possible that all of it is incorrect and the being either does not exist or is much different than is commonly believed. It is also possible that Mewtwo is real. That humanity created a godlike pokémon, and most of us only realized what had been done well after the fact.

Mewtwo is more than a mere conspiracy theory or cryptid. Its existence has the potential to radically alter how humanity sees its place in the order of things. It is still too early to definitively say much of anything about The Child of Guren Island and how humanity will react to it. Still, it would be a disservice to leave Mewtwo out of this guide. If Mewtwo is real, and perhaps even if it is not, it has the potential to shake the spiritual foundations of human society to their core.

Appearance

Accounts of Mewtwo’s appearance vary. The most widely accepted descriptions and photos portray Mewtwo as a humanoid creature with very pale skin. It appears to have small breasts in the Kogane Daily photo. Alleged eyewitness accounts have claimed that it appeared to be incredibly thin with every one of its ribs visible. Mewtwo is usually described as having three fingers and three toes. Its head is vaguely humanoid with a slight muzzle and two bony ridges extending from the sides of the scalp. Some accounts describe a second neck stretching between the nape of the neck to the back of the shoulder blades. The second neck has been described as vaguely resembling an IV tube made of flesh. Mewtwo is almost always depicted with a long purple tail with a bulbous growth at the end.

There are two alternative depictions that are radically divergent enough that it is unlikely someone would have come up with them for clout. The first, and most suspect, described Mewtwo as being incredibly well muscled with a relatively short tail. Witnesses described set of bony purple growths extended from the shoulders. The second, and better documented, description did not describe Mewtwo as having a conventional tail. Instead, a long purple tentacle somewhere between hair and a tail grew out from the back of Mewtwo’s neck. This sighting, sometimes described as the Jersey Mewtwo, is usually described as being only three feet tall. Other sources usually describe Mewtwo as being between six and seven feet tall.

The Story

It is difficult to compile a ‘complete’ version of a conspiracy theory. The following is an attempt to piece together the most widely accepted version of events among those who believe in Mewtwo.

In the 1980s a series of genetic engineering experiments were conducted in Japan. Most of these experiments were performed on a privately owned facility on Guren Island. Accounts differ as to who funded and supervised these experiments. A local Yakuza clan is the most widely agreed upon source. Others attribute the Guren Island experiments to the Yamabuki Institute of Technology, Sylph Inc., the Japanese government, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Japanese Professional Battling Association, The Church of Life, the ghost of Genghis Khan, John F. Kennedy Jr., aliens, time travelers, the molemen, and Elvis Presly.

The Guren Island facility’s biggest project was a genetically modified clone of a mew. A team of researchers in Guyana managed to find a live mew, a cryptid and local fertility goddess. The expedition ended disastrously. Either a live specimen or a tissue sample was retrieved, depending upon the source. At this point a heavily modified embryo was created and inserted into the mew or the tissue sample was used to create an entirely new creature from scratch. The former theory is more popular, well-supported, and plausible. In any event, the creature, Mewtwo, eventually was born or otherwise awoken on February 6th, 1989.

The Yakuza clan controlled Mewtwo for a period of sixteen months. During this time one of its high-ranking members, then a gym leader, used it during several battles. It may have also been involved in a series of raids on rival gangs that consolidated the Rocket faction’s dominance over Honshu’s criminal underworld. On June 11th, 1990, Mewtwo rebelled against its masters and destroyed the Guren Island facility. It fled to the Philippines where it created its own biotech lab. A group of trainers was invited to the Simula Island facility. On November 6th, 1991, a Category 4 hurricane encompassing most of the Philippines was created over the course of five hours. Mewtwo clashed with a being of similar power at the height of the storm. It then quelled the hurricane and fled the area, leaving behind an abandoned island laboratory and nine humans with short-term amnesia.

Mewtwo sightings have occurred sporadically over the next three decades. Sometimes surveillance cameras have captured Mewtwo standing on the roof of a skyscraper. Most eyewitness accounts and rumored sightings occur during the destruction of biotech or pokémon trafficking facilities. The most notable occurred in October 2013 when a Plasma Liberation Front facility in New Jersey was destroyed. Witnesses reported seeing a creature resembling Mewtwo battling augmented bugs. Strangely, eyewitnesses to this encounter documented Mewtwo having a feminine telepathic voice as opposed to a masculine or neutral one.

In early 2014 a massive explosion was documented in Kalos. There were a series of Mewtwo sightings in the area in the months before and after the blast, leading some to speculate that Mewtwo was responsible. The Kalosian sightings contain the majority of reports describing Mewtwo as being muscular.

The Evidence

There was a research expedition to Guyana in 1987 that ended disastrously. Part of the trip’s funding was provided by a front organization for the Rocket Clan. Following the partial collapse of the Rocket Clan in 1996 and 1997 a variety of documents pertaining to the expedition were recovered. There were several photographs of an ancient temple depicting a cat-like deity. A debriefing of the youngest survivor was also found. Rocket Clan members pretending to be police officers interviewed the girl. Few notable answers were recovered, but she did claim to have encountered a strange pokémon that wanted to be her friend.

Few members of the rival Yakuza clans or confirmed members of the Rocket Clan have been willing to testify about the gang wars of 1990. It is difficult to determine if Mewtwo held any role in those battles. Recovered internal memos from the Rocket clan refer to ‘GI1,’ potentially ‘Guren Island 1’ several times when discussing individual battles.

Sakaki Iwasaki, a high-ranking member of the Rocket Clan and former gym leader, may have used Mewtwo in a handful of gym battles in 1990. Challengers reported entering a dark room and facing a single pokémon shrouded in shadows. This pokémon was allegedly capable of telekinetic and telepathic attacks capable of one-shotting every pokémon sent out against it. The trainers report blacking out and waking up in front of the gym about an hour later with the badge in hand and their team fully healed. These accounts are all similar enough to be plausible. It is also possible that the pokémon was an exceptionally powerful alakazam. Sakaki is a known psychic and owns an alakazam. He also has a well-documented love of theatrics. League records of those battles record the gym leader as only using a single alakazam. All of these matches are recorded in league records as ‘Challenger Defeat, Badge Distributed’ with no further information provided.

Investigative reporting has uncovered financial links between a Rocket shell company and the Guren Island facility. It was known for employing or consulting with a number of high-profile geneticists and biologists. Officially the facility conducted research on treatments for pediatric cancer. A handful of papers on the subject were published by some of the facility’s scientists.

The facility was destroyed by a series of explosions and the resulting fires on June 11th, 1990. Most of the staff were inside the facility at the time of its destruction. The survey of the building was conducted by a Rocket front company and all media inquiries were rejected during the process. Contemporary reports note that the wreckage was fenced off and heavily guarded, officially to prevent members of the public from being exposed to asbestos or otherwise injuring themselves. The official report on the facility’s destruction attributed it to a gas leak that later ignited other improperly stored vats of flammable materials.

The most widely cited source for Mewtwo’s existence is the memoirs of Dr. Genjirō Fuji, the ranking scientist who survived the Guren Island facility’s destruction. On his deathbed he dictated a lengthy confession. His confession described the Guyana mission and the creation of Mewtwo, leading up to the destruction of the facility. According to Dr. Fuji, Mewtwo was capable of exerting billions of tons of psychic force, traveling at speeds of up to Mach 6, and formulating sophisticated plans within a fraction of a second. While heavily encumbered Mewtwo could telekinetically defeat a trained alakazam within one second. Dr. Fuji described his creation, perhaps rightfully, as a god. The doctor would pass hours later. The confession’s accuracy is suspect as Dr. Fuji died of brain cancer and had been experiencing confusion and cognitive decline in the months before his death.

On November 6th, 1991, a hurricane rapidly materialized and then dissipated in the Philippines. The eye stayed stationary over Simula Island, an uninhabited rocky outcropping 15 kilometers offshore of Mindanao. Declassified documents from the U.S. military describe flashes of light being witnessed in the center of the storm shortly before its dissipation. In the aftermath nine humans were found on the island. Eight had short term amnesia and could not remember how or why they went to the island. The ninth had longer term amnesia stretching back several months.

Simula Island has been sealed off from the public after the incident. Leaked photographs have shown highly sophisticated organic technology. The Filipino government’s official stance on Simula Island is that a large laboratory containing unknown technology was found after the storm. Many conspiracy theorists believe that the storm, technology, and mindwipes can all be attributed to Mewtwo.

The other leading theory is that Simula was an early testing site in The Cipher Organization’s XD001 projects to enhance and tame Lugia. The storm and mindwipes are consistent with Lugia’s documented abilities. However, the technology on Simula Island bares little to no resemblance to the technology found in Cipher Organization laboratories. The XD001 project would also not be field tested for fourteen years after the incident on Simula Island. The incident also occurred nearly a decade before Cipher captured Lugia. No records of a facility in the Philippines have been unearthed in the court proceedings against Cipher and its executives.

The next major incident involving Mewtwo was the New Jersey incident of 2013. A Plasma Liberation Front Facility was destroyed and a number of insectoid creatures were sighted and photographed in the aftermath. There are blurry photographs of something resembling Mewtwo fighting against the insectoid pokémon. While the creatures, later named ‘genesect,’ were well documented, Mewtwo’s involvement is limited to a handful of eyewitness accounts. All cameras that were pointed at the Mewtwo were batted aside at the last moment so the shot ended up blurry or were summarily destroyed. Multiple eyewitnesses report speaking to the creature for brief periods of time. One, a PLF scientist, reports having a long conversation with Mewtwo about why she deserved mercy. The scientist noted that Mewtwo expressed extremely negative opinions about biological engineering. All other scientists were executed during or after the incident. She was left alive as a warning.

There are a handful of photographs of Mewtwo from Kalos circa 2014. Allegedly Mewtwo, described by witnesses as oddly muscular, broke up a human trafficking ring. After executing all the traffickers he then freed and even comforted the victims. All cameras in the facility were destroyed and first responders found no sign of Mewtwo. There are no solid links between the Cromlec’h explosion and Mewtwo, aside from the sightings of the creature in the region around the time of the incident.

There are a variety of alleged photographs and eyewitness encounters with Mewtwo. Some were later discovered to be hoaxes. Others are suspect, such as a story about a man who, while in an altered state of mind from an illegal substance, allegedly shared a cigarette with Mewtwo and talked about the nature of memory.

The most credible photograph of Mewtwo comes from security camera footage on the rooftop of the Kogane Daily News building in Kogane City. The video was taken in September 1991, before the Mewtwo conspiracy theory was widespread. The video’s source, the paper of record for metropolitan Kogane, makes it credible. Even then the video is grainy and in black and white. Something humanoid with a large tail and a somewhat misshapen head floats into view, stares off the edge of the building for several minutes, and then disappears between frames.

In Popular Culture

The most well-known depiction of Mewtwo comes from the American film Evolution. The movie depicts Mewtwo waking up in a test tube, not being born from a live Mew. In this version Mewtwo immediately destroys Guren Island and flies to the Philippines. Multiple trainers are invited to the island so Mewtwo can evaluate whether or not humans should be allowed to exist. After deeming all of the trainers a burden to their pokémon, Mewtwo summons a storm to destroy the world. He states his intentions to use the laboratory to then clone every pokémon species that goes extinct during the storm and release them in a world without the humans who hurt him. A mew arrives and fights Mewtwo. Their battle is inconclusive. During the fight one of the trainers sacrifices his life for his pokémon, moving Mewtwo to abandon his plans and dissipate the storm. The film was released in 2011 during the height of the Plasma Liberation Front’s popularity. It was also primarily an action film, with the villain bringing up a philosophical point only to adopt the most extreme version possible and ultimately decide it is not worth it. The ideas of clone identity and human-pokémon relations are not seriously explored.

Spontaneous Generation, a Japanese novel, is more faithful to the most plausible set of facts. It depicts Mewtwo growing up under the watchful eye of his creators, only to eventually decide that he has outgrown them. He goes to the Philippines and builds a lab capable of making new creatures. He invites some of the strongest trainers in the nation to face his ‘children.’ When their pokémon are unable to defeat his creations in any metric, Mewtwo decides that naturally occurring life is imperfect as it was created by the random processes of evolution rather than the guiding hand of a brilliant creator. He then resolves to destroy all life in the Philippines, populate it with his own creations, and then set out to cleanse the rest of the world of its imperfect life. In the end his mother, here depicted as the goddess of evolution and chaos, appears and challenges him. Mewtwo is stronger and has more developed strategies, but Mew simply has too many tricks for him to overcome them all. After the end of a lengthy battle and philosophical debate, Mewtwo changes his mind and agrees to spare existing life. He ventures off to parts unknown to take care of his creations. Spontaneous Generation is known for its extensive exploration of the relationship between parent and child as well as the meaning of life in a random, godless universe.

Mewtwo vs Genesect, a 2018 film by American director Michael Bay, dramatizes the events of 2013. It is an action film primarily focused on the U.S. military battling a swarm of Genesect for the overwhelming majority of its 210-minute runtime. Mewtwo appears at the 155-minute mark. The film has been panned for its poor cinematography, bad dialogue, lack of Mewtwo, excessive runtime, and adding the U.S. military into an event in which they did not play a major role.

Hunting for Mewtwo, a History Channel series, extensively documented both the more plausible elements of Mewtwo’s story and the most fringe elements. Season One is widely regarded as an excellent summary of the evidence for Mewtwo’s existences. Seasons Two spends most of its runtime exploring the possibility that Mewtwo is a time traveling alien who built the pyramids.

Worship

If Mewtwo is capable of the feats listed by Dr. Fuji in his confession and created the storm in the Philippines, it is one of the strongest pokémon confirmed to exist. It is also far and away the strongest pokémon ever created by humans. What are we to make of an artificial pokémon more powerful than many of the gods humanity worships? Philosophers and theologians are divided.

There are a handful of religious movements that worship Mewtwo. The largest is The Church of Science, a ‘religion’ that believes all gods should be cast aside and instead scientists and their inventions should be held in the highest esteem. Invention is morally correct. It is through innovation, and not faith, that the obstacles facing humanity will be overcome. Mewtwo is not worshipped per se, but is regarded as the pinnacle of scientific creation and a herald of what is to come in The Fourth Scientific Revolution.

The Church of Life, among other established religions, has issued official statements claiming that Mewtwo does not exist. Even if it did, it could not have been responsible for the Simula Island. Even if it was, it is an incarnation of Yveltal making sick, perverted creations to spite the true creator, Xereneas. If Mewtwo’s existence and power were ever concerned, church theology is that it would be a sign of the end times.

Here it must be asked: what is the point of gods? To pray to for blessings or to ward off curses? In a strict sense Mewtwo may be able to offer humanity many blessings or bring down suffering upon us. If Mewtwo made its existence public and demanded tribute, would granting it be akin to giving offerings to a god? Does there have to be some supernatural and spiritual element to a god, or is it enough that they are an incredibly strong being humanity conducts transactions with? The questions are not yet ripe. If Mewtwo wants something from humanity it has not deigned to ask us.

For now, we must wait and see what the future of theology holds.

 

[Negrek]

As always, love all the little details and means of joining different bits of canon here. The proposed connection between Mewtwo and Cipher is still one of my favorite things; on the face of it, totally random, but you make a good case for why people in the pokémon world would look at it and draw that particular incorrect conclusion. I also love that people have only been able to get shitty cryptid-level photos of Mewtwo most likely because it's actively fucking with them. And Hunting for Mewtwo ultimately devolving into aliens and pyramids got a laugh out of me.

I'm also delighted by the fact that Ash apparently exists in this universe, given the Simula Island incident. He must have the most interesting life in this universe if so, lol. Seems like he'd have to time to get anything done with all the legends he keeps getting tangled up with.

The framing of this entry is definitely on point. What does it mean for humanity to create something stronger than its old gods? The little hints we get about what pokéworld religion think of Mewtwo are tantalizing, and I crave more exploration of the questions this entry only raises, about what the purpose of a god is and how people might relate to superpowerful beings they (or someone with way more money than sense) created... but that's rather out of scope for this fic, isn't it? These are the sorts of questions that might get a person writing fanfic. :P

Thanks again for writing this! I was very lucky to be able to snag one of your open slots on this year's prize ladder. A lot of fun seeing you take a more "conspiracy theory" than "mythology" angle with this entry.

 

[Persephone]

Ho-Oh — Johto

“The Youngest Daughter of Creation had fully grown in The World Below. When she emerged her body was coated in ash, blood, and molten iron. All who saw her professed that she was the most terrible and beautiful of all goddesses. ‘Take me to my father,’ she said. ‘For I must speak with him.’”

-Sōzō no Rekishi

Overview

Ho-Oh, Rightful Empress of the Heavens, Purifier of Souls, Creator of the Sun, and Guardian of the The World Below, is one of the most powerful deities in Japanese state religion. As the traditional ancestor of the Emperor she is closely tied to the legitimacy of the state and concepts of politics, priesthood, and governance.

Ho-Oh’s overall popularity has been in decline since Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. The clash of gods in Hoenn only accelerated the decline. Ho-Oh is still looked upon favorably by most citizens of Japan.

Appearance

In the earliest known records and artifacts Ho-Oh is described as a male serpent with rainbow feathers.

Incarnations after 200 BCE shift to describing Ho-Oh as either a bird with rainbow feathers or a beautiful human woman wreathed in flames. In either form Ho-Oh was described as the most beautiful of goddesses.

Ho-Oh has been extensively documented by modern photography. She is a very large bird with a wingspan of nearly thirty feet. Most of her plumage is blood red and always smoldering with small fires breaking out and dying down across her body. The back of her wings is green and her tail feathers are a dark orange like leaves in autumn. Ho-oh has a long, flexible neck. The top of her head is adorned with more orange plumage. The feathers around her eyes are black and her beak is orange.

Ho-Oh is always distorting the light around her, creating rainbow patterns and partially masking her true form. It is only through piecing many photographs together that a complete picture can be created. Sometimes in the distorted light the image of a woman of apparent East Asian descent will appear. Ho-Oh is capable of speaking with or without this avatar, but she seldom does.

In Johtonian Mythology

Unlike most deities in this book, Ho-Oh has an official religious lore and text, Sōzō no Rekishi. This is maintained and occasionally edited by the emperors of Japan. Relatively few alternative myths exist. Stories not from the Sōzo no Rekishi will be noted.

In the beginning there were two beings, one male and one female. Together they created the earth, the seas, the skies, and the first life. Of all of the life they created, only a few were conceived and birthed by the first beings themselves. The exact list varies across time and space. Lugia is always on the list. Celebi, Jirachi, and Rayquazza often were as well. Palkia and Dialga were added during the Meiji Era.

The Youngest Daughter of Creation was Ho-Oh. The flames around her burned her mother badly during childbirth and she perished shortly after as a result. The Father of Creation went into The World Below to find his wife’s soul, but only found a badly burned and disfigured corpse. He fled in terror. As a result of her rejection The Mother of Creation swore to create a new breed of creatures and maladies and unleash them upon the Earth.

Young Ho-Oh took up the role of Defender of the Living and Guardian of The World Below. She used her awesome flames to destroy any who dared crawl out of The World Below. While fighting beneath the earth she noticed how her flames could melt and distort metal. The metal would harden again when it cooled. She used this knowledge to forge the first weapons and armor, and ultimately to build a series of traps and gates that could contain her mother’s creations. Ho-Oh still had to venture down to fight and repair the defenses from time to time, but she was now free to spend more time above the surface.

Upon her return she persuaded her father to attempt to make peace with her mother. She guided him down to The World Below and helped them reconcile their differences. To atone for his rejection, The Father of Creation stays in The World Below to keep his wife company.

With no one left to rule the heavens, Ho-Oh reluctantly accepted the position of Empress of the Heavens. Even as ruler of all, she still took a great deal of time to herself to invent things. Her first great invention was the sun, a source of light for the world. Her brother, Lugia, grew jealous of the praise her sister earned and made his own light, but it was not as bright as his sister’s.

Depictions of Ho-Oh, with the notable exception of Alph’s Houa, never have Ho-Oh take a husband. Various myths describe her as being fascinated by her own reflection in shiny metal and growing close to a ninetales who took the form of a human woman. With one potential exception, Ho-Oh never engages in conventional procreation. All of her children are created from fire, clay, ash, and departed souls. Her main creative partner, Jirachi, is usually depicted as female. One Hoennese folk tale describes Ho-Oh being devastated and retreating underground in grief when Jirachi departed back to the stars. There are scholars who argue for a queer reading of Ho-Oh. Her priestesses strongly reject this interpretation.

Next Ho-Oh invented her own race of beings. They did not have the sheer power of her parent’s creations, but they were clever and ambitious. Out of respect for the creator of these creatures, humans, the rest of creation agreed to serve them to make up for their physical weakness.

Finally, Ho-Oh realized that when creation died their souls had nowhere to go, for she had barricaded The World Below to prevent her mother’s creation from escaping. Ho-Oh decided to fix this mistake by reincarnating the souls of the dead. First, she tore away the memories and body with her flames. This process is longer and more painful for those who think highly of themselves at the expense of others. Then she forges a new body and puts the soul within. It is said that the noblest souls are put into human bodies, and the noblest of those are put into the body of the direct descendants of her first and most favored human.

When she was not busy governing or tinkering with her inventions, Ho-Oh loved to descend to the mortal world, perch on a tower, and watch the humans live their lives. Her favorite perch of all was located in Chōji.

Lugia had grown jealous of the attention his youngest sister earned. While she had been tasked with fighting in The World Below, he had been safeguarding the earth from evildoers. After defeating one particularly large sea dragon he began to party so furiously that a hurricane swept the land. In the resulting storm many lightning bolts struck Chōji and the wooden city burned.

Ho-Oh had been in The World Below visiting her parents and reincarnating souls and had not noticed the storm as it happened. When she returned, she saw her favorite city burned to the ground. Three pokémon had taken refuge in her temple, believing even as the flames engulfed it that Ho-Oh would notice and save them. Moved by guilt and the devotion of her followers, Ho-Oh resurrected them into godly forms.

The goddess was consumed with fury, but feared that a clash between her and her brother would destroy creation itself. She returned to heaven and faced her brother in front of the gods. As calmly as she could she handed Lugia her crown and walked away in silence. She dove down from the heavens, took the form of a bird, and flew away. She will not speak to her brother even to this day out of fear that her rage would overwhelm her. Even her sun is not kept in the same sky as his moon.

There is another version of the myth asserted by xatu, ninetales, and a few other extremely long lived pokémon. In the alternative version, a human army burned down Chōji and set about killing all of the city’s inhabitants. Soldiers set her tower ablaze with civilians in it. Ho-Oh elevated three pokémon to godhood, reincarnated the rest, and flew away. Despite many temples built to her in the intervening centuries, Ho-Oh has never once roosted in any of them. She does not want grand temples: she wants humanity to make peace with itself and the world around them.

Sometimes Ho-Oh will answer the call of a worthy human, usually of the Imperial Line. She will either appear before them to offer advice or, on occasion, provide her flames to help forge legendary weapon or armors. Weapons made by Ho-Oh herself hold mystical properties. Most are now owned by the Imperial Family and held in her shrine in Chōji.

One of Ho-Oh’s most valuable gifts are her feathers. Ho-Oh feathers can cure fatal wounds and terminal cancer when applied directly to the skin of the afflicted. Anyone who carries one with the intent to use it selfishly will be badly burned and the feather will be reduced to ash. Ho-Oh was not usually regarded as the goddess of healing, but sometimes people will pray to her when their situation is truly desperate. On occasion she rewards a pious worshipper with a feather.

The clans of Hisui have a legend about a giant bird wreathed in flames roosting on Firespit Island. She laid an egg, which later hatched into a froglike creature that dwelled in the volcano. The pokémon, Heatran, was venerated as the god of fire in the area before the conquest of the region and its renaming.

During the Meiji Era, Japanese religion was heavily altered to focus upon two near omnipotent gods: Ho-Oh and Lugia. Ho-Oh was cast as the ruler and inspirer of the Japanese people, helping them grow and flourish. Lugia protected them and would help them assert their dominance over foreign skies and waters. Ho-Oh worship increased in prominence. The goddess was also syncretized with Groudon and Heatran.

Worship

Ho-Oh was never the most worshipped deity in Japan. The Japanese state religion assigns domains to each god and major spirit. Prayers should be sent to the deity whose domain is most applicable. Ho-Oh’s domains of nobility, governance, priesthood, metallurgy, the sun, combat, beauty, and reincarnation made her very important to the Imperial family, priesthood, and samurai. To the average person she was venerated, but not often prayed to.

The main rituals for Ho-Oh occurred around the planting and harvest, where she was prayed to alongside Lugia for help in regulating the weather. Funerary pyres, where the remains of the deceased were burned, were also dedicated to Ho-Oh. Offerings would be given over the next seven days to ensure the soul’s quick reincarnation ad favorable next life.

Girls on the cusp of puberty, especially in the nobility, often had ashes smeared over their body and were prayed over by a priest so that they may gain a tiny fraction of Ho-Oh’s beauty.

A close female relative of the emperor traditionally served as the high priestess to Ho-Oh. She safeguarded the goddess’s sacred relics, brought new art and inventions into The Burning Tower, and prayed for her assistance in restoring clear, warm skies during storms and during the tail end of winter. Births of potential heirs to the throne were accompanied by festivals dedicated to Ho-Oh.

Craftsmen, smiths, and inventors also regularly provided offerings to Ho-Oh and typically worshipped her above all other gods. To this day The Yamabuki Academy of Engineering, one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the world, has a large statue of Ho-Oh and altar to her at the center of campus. Her festivals are treated as school holidays. Most factories also contain shrines to Ho-Oh and will sometimes begin shifts with prayers to her.

Temples to Ho-Oh take the form of large towers with a nearly flat top for her to roost upon. Her main temple is the Burning Tower in Chōji. The tower is believed to have been burning continuously for nearly 2,000 years. Sometimes flames will consume nearly the entire tower only to dwindle to smoldering embers in the basement. The rest of the tower will emerge charred but structurally sound. The tower is also a sacred site for Entei, Raikou, and Suicune who were reborn there.

Prayers to Ho-Oh are traditionally written down on parchment and then burned. It is said that messages burned in the Burning Tower have the greatest chance of reaching Ho-Oh.

Origins

Ho-Oh is undoubtedly real. She has been photographed many times and is usually being tracked by satellite. Humans witnessing Ho-Oh should have been able to accurately describe her. This makes it all the stranger that her depiction has varied over time.

The Alph Civilization worshipped many gods, including Houa, god of fire. Houa is depicted as a serpent with rainbow feathers wreathed in flames. The rainbow flying serpent has been documented in Anahuac, Australia, China, and several other cultures. Rayquazza, their probable inspiration, does not have rainbow feathers and rarely visits the surface. As such there are still those who maintain that a separate godlike dragon is behind Houa, Quetzlcoatl, and Nüwa.

Houa was always described in masculine terms. He was the god of fire, weapons, and death. Some of this undoubtedly inspired Ho-Oh’s early characterization as Guardian of the Underworld.

After the collapse of Alph the remaining people of Japan changed Ho-Oh’s characterization to a mostly peaceful bird, one who fought demons but ultimately reconciled her parents and backed down from a fight with her brother rather than starting a war.

The transition was gradual and accompanied by several revisions of the Sōzō no Rekishi. It also mirrored the transition of the emperor from ruler of Honshu to a spiritual figurehead of a fractured nation. Ho-Oh’s transition back into a war goddess upon the Meiji Restoration mirrors this trend.

Still, it isn’t clear how Alph regarded the definitely-real Ho-Oh as a serpent. Did Ho-Oh not come to Japan before the civilization’s collapse? Were they confused by the lights around the bird? Or was Ho-Oh, perhaps, born after the death of the original rainbow serpent. Scholars are still divided on the subject.

Today

During the Meiji Restoration Ho-Oh was rebranded as a goddess of agriculture, the protector of Japan, and the syncretized goddess of fire. She was closely tied to the emperors. When the war ended with Japan’s defeat and the limiting of the Imperial Family, Ho-Oh’s worship began to rapidly decline. Engineers still worship her and she is still often invoked during funerary rites and coming of age festivals, especially in rural areas. Her role in agricultural festivals has been limited.

The rampage of Groudon has further reduced her popularity in urban areas and Japanese communities outside the islands.

The 1986 graphic novel Dust to Dust and its prequel and sequels has led to a slight resurgence in Ho-Oh worship. The comic depicts the world’s gods reduced to human form and banished to a strange world without humans or pokémon. Ho-Oh is depicted as a shy engineer who ignores most of the other gods’ drama and works on finding ways to survive. She expresses guilt for the actions committed during her name in the Second World War and it weighs heavily upon her throughout the comic. Portions of the fanbase came to see Ho-Oh as their favorite character. She got her own prequel comic and was the protagonist of the movie of the same name. Partially in response to Dust to Dust, Neo-Pagan communities outside of Japan have adopted Ho-Oh as a peaceful goddess of engineering and fire. To what extent their rituals matches traditional Ho-Oh worship varies by community.

Ho-Oh continues to fly around the world at an average altitude of 10,000 feet above ground. She prefers to fly over continents, especially Asia. On rare occasion she will venture closer to earth to speak with someone she deems important or to distribute a feather. She rarely, if ever, answers questions about herself or other gods.

In 2004 Ho-Oh appeared in Orre and killed four employees of the Cipher Organization, leading the arrest of its CEO. She did not state her reasons for violently interfering. It is speculated she did so as retaliation for the group’s experiments upon Lugia.

Two years later on August 1st, 2006, Ho-Oh returned to the Burning Tower. She flew within ten feet of the top but did not land. After speaking briefly with some of the priestesses on site she flew away once more. Exactly what she said remains unknown.

The queer rights movement has adopted the symbol of the rainbow as a symbol for queerness. This is particularly controversial in Japan where Ho-Oh is the goddess of moral purity and the rainbow. The Japanese government asserts that Ho-Oh is either asexual or straight and the association of her symbol with “perversion” is a misdemeanor offense. Ho-Oh herself has never given a statement on the matter.

 

[Negrek]

Really enjoy this take on Ho-Oh! Shy inventor bird just wants to be left alone to make cool shit. Dealing with people sucks, and so does her brother.

Very fun to contrast this entry with the previous Mewtwo one--going from a myth only emerging to one that goes back centuries and is highly canonized. This sort of thing always makes me wonder what the legend would think of the stories being told about them--with Ho-Oh it seems like it would be a pretty firm "don't care" or perhaps "I would prefer that you stopped talking about me at all, actually," but I'm amused at the thought of some more image-conscious legend trying to set the record straight with humanity all the time.

Ho-Oh was never the most worshipped deity in Japan.

I'm very curious who is! Johto doesn't have that many legends, relatively speaking... would seem kind of weird for the beasts, as presumably lower in the pantheon than Ho-Oh and relatively recent, to take that spot, it doesn't sound like it's Lugia, and I guess I personally tend to see Celebi as fickle and not who'd be your pantheon's most popular.

The 1986 graphic novel Dust to Dust and its prequel and sequels has led to a slight resurgence in Ho-Oh worship.

I'm guessing this is a reference that's going over my head, but it was a fun little bit of lore, and I thought the thought of a graphic novel being popular enough to influence Paganism (again, guessing this is based on a real thing that happened) is amusing.

The little tidbits about Lugia here and in the Mewtwo entry are making me super curious about how you'd play the whole Cipher thing that's canon in this universe, ngl. Seems like a legend getting captured and corrupted like that would be a Big Fucking Deal (albeit not on the scale of the Groudon/Kyogre thing) even for the more aloof of the mythological creatures.

All in all a fun entry, and I'm glad Tetra requested it! As always I'm delighted by your ability to blend canons together and come up with a pokémyth that feels as patchwork and living and genuine as the messy myths in our own world do.

(It's *Rayquaza with one Z, btw.)

 

[Persephone]

This entry was commissioned by bronzonghittransplant on Thousand Roads.



Manaphy - Sinnoh

“It’s always the same,” The Prince said. “It’s always different. The same stories across centuries, across nations, across class divides. Everyone is the same at heart. Yet everyone brings something different. A choir singing in oblivious harmony, all insisting the others are singing the wrong song.”

-Atsuo, Ultramarine



Overview

Manaphy, Prince of the Seas, The Ambassador, Sage of the Grotto, is a deity that has historically been popular in the coastal areas bordering the Sea of Okhotsk. They are most famous for their temples and folk stories in Sinnoh, most notably the Taishi no Dōkutsu.

Manaphy is known for being a wise philosopher and sorcerer who sometimes comes to the spiritual or physical aid of those who appeal to him. He is notable for the ability to swap the bodies of anyone who comes before him.

Manaphy worship has weakened in Russia and strengthened in Japan over the last century.. The Soviet Union cracked down on the religions of the Far East. Officially, Japanese State Religion syncretized Manaphy with Lugia and Kyogre. In practice many in Sinnoh rejected the idea that peaceful Manaphy was a war god or a primal force of nature like Lugia and Kyogre. His church was mostly unaffected by the decline in religiosity in Japan following the Second World War. Both Lugia and Kyogre falling into disfavor in recent times has also made Manaphy one of the most popular sea gods in Japan.

Appearance

Manaphy’s appearance in art and literature is highly variable. Almost all stories about him agree that he is a shapeshifter prone to changing his sex and even species on a whim. While male pronouns are traditionally used for him, the official Temple of Manaphy believes that Manaphy is both male and female. The Prince of the Sea is always in flux like the water itself.

Nonetheless, a few things are mostly consistent about manaphy’s descriptions. As a pokémon he is translucent or pale blue with a large head with big eyes and a comparatively small body hanging beneath it. One or two long blue appendages variously described as hair or tentacles extend from the head. The surface of his body is said to ripple when he moves.

As a human manaphy consistently has long dark blue or black hair, mid-back length at minimum, regardless of sex. He is also almost universally described as being physically attractive, although the exact details vary by depiction. As manaphy is attributed the abilities to change shape and reader and alter minds, many worshippers believe Manaphy chooses to present himself as whatever his audience finds most desirable.

Manaphy’s most famous symbol is a translucent blue egg containing a red nucleus suspended inside. A ‘crown’ of motes of yellow light hovers above the nucleus.

In Sinnish Mythology

The clans of Hisui regarded Manaphy as a powerful sorcerer and a wise sage, but not necessarily a god. In the oldest beliefs Manaphy was the prince of the underwater kingdom of Samiya and the kingdom’s ambassador to the surface world. He is most common epithet was Manaphy Taishi, The Ambassador. The Japanese colonists preferred the epithet Manaphy Ōji, The Prince.

As an ambassador Manaphy would stay close to the coasts and greet the leaders of the clans and the Celestica. He would offer them counsel, mediate problems, and sometimes sire a child with a local human or pokémon. Manaphy’s wisdom and beauty were renowned in equal measure.

Manaphy’s philosophy centered on compassion for all things, for the circumstances of birth were mere chance. Your hated enemy or prey could have been you had the universe made a different choice. There is more than one story of Manaphy preventing a war between the clans by swapping the souls of their leaders, or swapping a particularly bigoted leader into the kind of body they most despised. This has always made Manaphy popular with the downtrodden.

Manaphy’s temples have long been seen as an inviolable sanctuary for the persecuted, including the final leaders of the independent clans of Hisui when Japanese dominion over the island became absolute. When the occupying general went to the Taishi no Dōkutsu to slay them and end the war it is said that he emerged successful, but forever changed into a figure far more sympathetic of the clans. It was widely believed at the time that Manaphy had swapped his soul with one of the clan leaders before their death. No one has attempted to perform an arrest inside the temple ever since.

One of the most popular stories involving Manaphy is that of Pasekur, the son of the Pearl Clan’s leader and presumptive heir to the clan’s leadership. He went to Manaphy and asked to experience every walk of life so he might become a wise ruler. Manaphy obliged and shifted him into a number of forms, male and female, old and young, rich and poor, and even into a pokémon. At every step of the way Manaphy took up a body beside him and they discussed their views on virtuous living and righteous rule. At the end Pasekur returned to his original body and Manaphy became his wife, having grown romantically attached during the course of the story.

Pasekur is hardly the only human Manaphy is alleged to have sired a child with. There are at least a dozen folk tales of such unions in Sinnoh and nine more in the Russian Far East. There are many more stories of Manaphy having a child with another pokémon. If Manaphy had a child with a man, he was said to leave them an egg out of which the baby would hatch. Children with a woman were born the more traditional way.

Manaphy’s children with humans were said to be powerful water, psychic, or fairy bloodliners. This could also explain the relatively high frequency of those bloodlines in Sinnoh compared to the rest of the world. It became a standard origin for the great heroes of Hisuian folklore to have been born of a union between Manaphy and a human. Manaphy’s pokémon children were said to resemble a smaller, less grandiose Manaphy with traits of the other parent mixed in.

The most common version of these stories involves Manaphy approaching their partner disguised as a traveling merchant, a sailor, or one of his own priests. He would court his chosen partner for several weeks before finally revealing his true nature and, if his partner desired it, siring a child. There is at least one story of a woman who wished to avoid the attention of the gods and rulers of the area and declined his advances. Manaphy remained in the town as a close confidant until the woman died, childless, of old age.

Worship

Manaphy’s primary temple is the Taishi no Dōkutsu in Sinnoh. The temple is built inside of a grotto that is only accessible at low tide. It contains various shrines for Manaphy as well as small residences for priests and a large, ceremonial chamber for Manaphy to live in. It is said that those who make the trek to the temple and earnestly seek Manaphy’s guidance may receive an audience, even if the supplicant does not realize they are speaking to him.

Traditional worship of Manaphy involves the recitation of daily prayers or hymns based on his teachings. Charity is another key component of this worship, although most donations should be given to organizations other than the temple. The Temple of Manaphy has a set budget each year, enough to cover upkeep of the Taishi no Dōkutsu and the smaller temples as well as the pay of its priests. Once the annual quota for the year is met the temple refuses further donations. Gifts of art are still accepted and often displayed in the temples.

Manaphy is rarely the primary god that a household worships. He is instead a secondary figure that can offer wisdom and serenity but not the sort of general purpose protection people often seek from a deity.

Historically the priests in residence at the Taishi no Dōkutsu were a man and woman of similar age. It is said that Manaphy swaps their bodies at the start of their tenure so they may fully understand both sexes when advising worshippers. This has, understandably, drawn a number of transgender priests throughout the years. Many transgender people also find the temple’s teaching that bodies are irrelevant compared to the soul to be very appealing. Historically many people who felt uncomfortable in their bodies went to the Ultramarine Coast in hopes of catching Manaphy’s attention. Whether they succeeded at catching his attention or not, they built a small but thriving community that lasted until the fall of the clans and the Meiji Era crackdown on perceived deviants.

Origins

There are stories around the world about a visitor from the sea, usually a woman, who partners with a man before having to return. Manaphy roughly fits into these narratives.

There are a few unique elements to Manaphy, however. The first is the city of Samiya. The idea of an undersea city is not restricted to the Okhotsk region. A little further to the south the Chinese believed in four grand undersea dragon courts. However, the pronunciation of Samiya both Manaphy are remarkably consistent across time and cultures. Even nomadic tribes who have had very little contact with the outside word seem to know a variant of the story using remarkably similar pronunciation. This could be explained by China radiating the beliefs out with its merchants and soldiers, but Manaphy and Samiya have never featured prominently in Chinese folklore. They were even almost entirely unknown on Honshu before the colonization of Hisui.

All of this suggests a common origin centered along the sea itself. It is possible that sailors from Hisui reached the Russian coast and exchanged ideas, but there have not been enough Hisuian goods found in the area to support the theory. Hisuian shipbuilding was also restricted to fishing vessels that operated within two to five kilometers of the coast.

The Celestica seemed to believe in Manaphy. Various seaside temples from the Celestica era have been found, including what appears to be a vase depicting a Manaphy egg and two people connected by a string of blood. Cave art depicting a woman with blue hair and two faces has been found on Mt. Tengan.

Today

Manaphy remains relatively popular in Sinnoh. His main temple, the Taishi no Dōkutsu, is still in danger. Allied bombing during the Second World War destroyed the Ocean’s Gate, a prominent sea arch near the temple. Sea level rise has threatened to render the grotto inaccessible, even at low tide.

Manaphy’s existent is widely suspected but unconfirmed. Photographic evidence of a shapeshifter is highly unlikely to materialize. Manaphy himself seems to enjoy his privacy.

The most well documented modern encounter with Manaphy occurred when a Galaxy Corporation delegation asked local priests to take them to the Taishi no Dōkutsu. There they were allegedly greeted by the god, although their camera was destroyed when their boat capsized during the return voyage. The official report from the Galaxy Corporation was that Manaphy supported the continued cooperation between the clans and corporation. The Temple’s statement said that Manaphy was displeased by the corporation’s presence in Hisui and warned them that as the clans replaced the Celestica and they sought to replace the clans, they too would be replaced. The Galaxy Corporation denied their intention to replace the clans. Eleven years later the Japanese government would claim full dominion over the lands, arrest or kill the clan leaders, sterilize the remaining adults, and send the clan children to Kanto for reeducation. The Japanese government has yet to issue a formal apology for the genocide, although the current emperor has called it “unfortunate.”

A popular children’s book in Japan depicts the water-types of Hisui guiding a member of the Galaxy Corporation to Manaphy, where they have a tea party and celebrate their friendship.

There have been a handful of popular adaptations of the legend of Pasekur made in and outside of Japan. In 2003 a controversial novel, Ultramarine, was published. The novel switches between three story arcs: a homeless trans woman wandering the streets of Kotobuki City, a pair of childhood friends traveling across Hisui in the hopes of having Manaphy swap their bodies, and a conversation between Pasekur and Manaphy about whether the world was fundamentally good or evil. In the end the trans woman becomes a prostitute to survive but is able to get on estrogen, the couple have their bodies swapped only to see a Galaxy Corporation ship arriving over the horizon, and Manaphy and Pasekur cannot come to an agreement. The novel was widely banned from schools and libraries for its profanity and scenes depicting intercourse. It nevertheless received a number of literary awards and a Hollywood adaptation is in the works. The adaptation has already proven controversial for its entirely cisgender cast.

The current head of The Temple of Manaphy, Kimura Hekima, claims to be a daughter of Manaphy. She is a water elemental with the abilities to breathe underwater and create illusions in mist. This power had never been documented before. Novel bloodlines have been known to appear before due to random mutations or the intervention of powerful pokémon. It is possible that Ms. Kimura is a daughter of Manaphy or a random mutant.

In 2004 the Japanese high court heard a case where a couple wished to switch their educational transcripts and professional licenses and have it legally recognized that they had their bodies switched by Manaphy. The Temple of Manaphy supported their claim and anecdotal evidence suggested it may have been true. The high court nonetheless ruled against the couple, writing that they did not wish to set a precedent that could have far-reaching implications over one rare and unproven incident.

A number of explorers have attempted to find Samiya. The most famous attempt was made by Aqua-Dan before their leader turned his sights to another god resting on the seafloor. The city has never been located.