I’m a big fan of this take on a house cat. The contiguous face leading into her big ears smacks of clasically-animated cats, and the that shapeliness plays extremely well into giving her a personality. Just look at that pose and silhouette, and even without the half-lidded stare you can tell that Glameow is a hoity-toity snob judging you from her perch. Excellent form, and the needlessly-curled tail adds that extra layer of “needlessly posh”. It even evokes those over-the-top curled hairdos that anime-forward media loves to give to bougoisie women.
Probably the cat-est cat we’ve catted yet. Good form.
I can absolutely see what they’re going for here, and I appreciate the team swinging for the fences with a “deliberately unappealing” monster design. It’s deceptively hard to design something that evokes bad design without actually being off-putting in such a way that people outright hate it. In Pokémon’s case, it’s even harder to balance this against the fact that the “bad” design needs to fit in with the relatively clean aesthetic of the rest of the series, where its relative simplicity makes most of the early-series designs comparatively robust.
That said: this ain’t it, chief.
It’s so very close to actually meeting the “ugly-cute” aesthetic for me, but there’s just a little bit too much going on here. “A bit too much going on” will increasingly be a factor as we look at later generations, but given that I’m having this thought about a monster drafted in 2006, clearly this is not a new problem for the series.
The poof around Purugly’s mid-section works once you realize it’s her tail, acting as a makeshift corset to keep playing off of Glameow’s vanity. But we most often see Pokémon either from the front or behind, especially back in the 2D games where Purugly was designed, so this intent is obscured and lost on the viewer. We doubly lose the fact that Purugly has a Nekomata-like split tail, because I can count on one hand the number of times we’re ever shown this monster with its tail uncoiled; the Pokédex may as well not even list it as a feature.
Then you have her ears, where the fringe matches Glameow’s tufts of fur, but since they don’t spread out as much, they read as hands or wings, which just doesn’t seem to contribute to the other design ideas here.
I think what cinches it is the colors on her face. Glameow’s eyelids were odd for matching the flesh-tone of her inner ears, but it worked; here, the purple contrasts against the pink, and it’s just frustrating to look at, especially as it matches her ear-tips. Really, I think pulling in the shape of the ears and chaning the tips to white would do wonders for her design, but that’s not the world we live in. As is, Purugly overshoots the mark just enough to become actually ugly, and it doesn’t work as well as it should.
Luckily, she has a little going on stat-wise to help, including somehow their speed – Purugly is surprisingly quick for being so plump. Pile on that Purugly gets ability-based resistance to Fire and Ice moves or immunity to confusion, and she actually starts pulling her weight if you can get her trickier moves like Fake-Out or U-Turn to set up a more situationally-useful teammate – though how often are many of us thinking that deeply in the games’ core campaigns?
Aside from the expected observations of Glameow and Purugly being bully-ish, fickle, and difficult to house-break, the former’s entry in Legends Arceus plays into a recently-popularized observation about how house-cats wormed their way into domestication despite being so aloof.
Purportedly, cats are the primary carriers of the parasite Toxoplasma, which is generally asymptomatic up to the point – in fact, fome findings point to between a quarter and half of people in the world being affected with it. In theory, this can have behavior effects that result in suppressed emotional responses. In prey like mice, this makes them easier to catch; in saps like humans, this makes them more receptive to allowing cats inside their homes.
Glameow doesn’t act on something nearly so fancy – though I would love a Poison-type regional variant that does play up the parasitic-cat angle. Rather, Glameow in particular is noted to be a sly trickster that bewitches humans in particular with a mere gaze and a swish of its spiral tail. What else is that kind of enchantment meant to evoke if not a cat’s largely-passive power to bend wills outside of its own.
What’s that? Witches? Nah, we’ve already talked about those. Gotta be toxoplasma.
There’s also an interesting observation that Purugly’s shiny variant is a combination of soft blue, purple-pinks, and whites that evokes Sylveon‘s coloration. Interesting that they were able to take one frustrating element of a largely-panned visual design, invert it, and then bake it into a monster that’s so widely-loved.
I’m a cat person. I adore these little fuzzballs in all their forms. Glameow might even be the most distinct of the three yet. And yet, three housecats in four generations of designs is too many, and it seems like Game Freak agrees considering that Glameow has never once shown up natively in the wild outside of Sinnoh. Sorry, kitty, but I think it’s safe to say that your whole family could be Retired outside of return trips to the region and few folks would think about it.
Dextraneous 