i have a question that seems like it'd be something you're interested in. my favorite glitch pokemon is the bug/glitch pokemon c 7 (index 233), and i wanted to think of a visual design for it so i could draw it and maybe turn it into a plushie. my c 7 is just my little dude that i want to draw, but i have absolutely no idea where to begin making a design im happy with
do you know any bugs that either resemble wooper a little (johto guard), have a pink and blue color palette, or are known for being fast and having a weird ability (high speed, very high special)? i think it'd be cool to base my c 7 design off an actual bug like an actual bug pokemon, but i know pretty much nothing about them lol
i love this blog btw. from what ive seen, its got a lot of joy for flora/fauna stuff i dont know much about, but im delighted by it nonetheless. im planning on reading through your glitch run because it looks really cool, but as of writing this it is almost midnight lol. i noticed #233 there and im excited to see someone else using it! cant wait to see what mischief it gets up to in your game :D
Oh!! I love #233 so much! They were amazing in my playthrough and are one of my favorites too. I imagined them as a sort of collective of nano-bots that came together to make a larger being (similar to Wishiwashi) since I was trying to incorporate the fact the menu sprite is a pokeball, and thus more machinelike (and the fact their front sprite has multiple forms, kinda shapeshifty). Plus, playing around with the whole bugs = glitches concept, so making it more digital/mechanical in nature, yet sticking with something that seemed buglike (nanobots). But there's so many other fun ways they could be conceptualized.
I am probably going to go on a bit of a ramble since insects are a special interest of mine, ahaha, I hope you don't mind.
In terms of speed, Tiger Beetles are probably the fastest land bugs out there; they chase down their prey like Cheetah, basically. Meanwhile, Dragonflies/damselflies and Robber Flies are also pursuit predators, essentially the hawks/eagles of the insect world, snatching prey out of the air at high speeds. They're honestly all really cool, charismatic species.
But there's also lesser-known critters that I find really cool too, which I think would be great inspiration for a pokemon. For example, springtails. These are technically not insects but are closely related animals, and they come in a wide variety of shapes and colors. Everything from Round Bois to fat, spiky gummi bears, to shimmering and sleek:
As the name implies they often have tails that allow them to spring up to incredible heights relative to their teeny tiny size.
Wasps also offer some intense diversity that most people are not aware of (with ~30,000 species identified and many more estimated). Most are solitary and many of them are parasitic/parasitoids on various fellow invertebrates. "Fairy wasps" are especially teeny-tiny, some of them smaller than an amoeba. That's a complex, multi-ceullular insect, smaller than a single-celled creature! (I think they would be great Bug/Fairy types) One species of parasitoid wasp injects its host prey (a caterpillar) via its ovipositer/stinger with virus DNA (along with its waspy eggs) to help subdue its prey's immune system. The wasps have basically domesticated the virus DNA for their own use as a biological weapon. Bonkers. Here's three species of wasp I took pictures of myself! The left one is a teeny parasitoid wasp that landed on me, the middle actually has paralyzed a cricket and is dragging it back to the hole she dug so she can lay eggs in it and bury it for her bebbies, the third wasp was looking in those nooks and crannies in the rock for a nest site, I believe. <3 This is just a small sample of the crazy shapes and sizes of wasps ("Velvet Ants" are also some beautiful wasps, and Ichneumon Wasps, and the stunning Tarantula Hawk . . . I could go on and on)
There are definitely lots of bugs with blue and even a decent number of bubblegum pink insects (including the California Pink Glowworm, the Rosy Maple moth, pink katydids, pink springtails, etc) but I'm not sure of any that have both the baby blue and baby pink at once. Not off the top of my head at least, odds are there's something out there though lol
The bug that first comes to mind when thinking about Wooper is maybe the Toad Bug-- Wooper isn't a toad of course, but there are some visual similarities and they are so neat. You also could look up Mayfly nymphs, who are aquatic with feathery gills on their butts (kinda like Wooper's axolotl-inspired gills). Damselfly nymphs look similar. Insects like mayflies and damselflies are, in a way, similar to amphibians like Wooper since they have an aquatic nymph stage and then turn into air-breathing adults.
I'm gonna stop here, since I could go on forever 😅 I'll probably think of even more I'd want to mention later haha. Also, thank you so much for your kind words. It always thrills me to find another person interested in some of the funky and wild creatures out there. I think that's why I love glitch pokemon so much too. They're weird lil freaks and I love that about them! Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, as Mr. Darwin said.
