Well, now I'm curious. Why does the move curse involve your pokemon stabbing itself with a nail?
For those who don’t know anything about Pokemon: the move Curse (started as a ???-type movie, later because Ghost type) halves your Poke’s HP while removing 1/4 of an opponent’s HP per round if they’re a ghost type (it works differently for other types but we don’t care about that). That wouldn’t be weird except the animation involves your Poke just like, stabbing itself repeatedly with a fucking nail, which has nothing to do with curses??
Anyway, in order to answer this we need to look at the Spaceworld beta. Spaceworld was a gaming convention in 1997 that had a preview beta version of Gold/Silver, and those files leaked online. The beta includes data for all that Gen’s Pokes at the time, including ones that didn’t make the final cut. There’s a lot going on there, but we need to focus on this evolutionary line:
Their Japanese names are Norowara and Kyonpan. I’m using the fan-translated names of Kurstraw and Pangshi because I don’t speak Japanese. anyway
now, if we pop open the movesets for Kurstraw there:
See that move at the bottom there, “Nail”? (Also have heard that translated as Nail Down, not sure which is more accurate.) Opening up our 17th document of the evening to grab the move descriptions, we find this:
That’s right--”nail” is a beta Curse.
And Kurstraw not only didn’t learn this move until lv. 100, but it was also its signature movie (as in, no other Pokemon at the time had that move). As a reminder, signature moves usually have animations unique to the Pokemon using them.
Also, Banette is the closest thing we have in canon to Kurstraw, and check out its dex description:
Replace “pins” with “nails” and you get the idea.
SO BASICALLY, Curse invovles your Pokemon stabbing itself with a nail because it was originally the signiture move of a scrapped voodoo-doll Pokemon that’s already impaled on a giant nail anyway, with the idea being that it would stab itself to hurt the opponent (because that’s like, how voodoo dolls work). But then that Pokemon got scrapped, the move got renammed, and someone was like “should we reanimate this so that non-doll Pokemon aren’t shoving nails into their bodies” and someone else was like “nah”.
thank you for coming to my TED talk
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