30. Nidorina

SO MANY NIDOS I'M ALREADY SICK OF THIS

wait what is this I don’t even

I went poking around looking for stuff to write about Nidorina, and I found a few things. One was a rather inappropriate series of images involving a talking Nidorina and Pikachu. Another was the character sheet above. It is from a site called Aqua Bunny.

At first I thought it was weird that there was such a devoted site for Nidorina, like even weirder than a site about Pokemon sprites. Maybe there was a site like that on the internet for every pokemon, but I didn’t think so; this was a serious outlier to normalcy I was looking at. But then I started reading it. And going through its fanart. And it all started to make sense. Nidorina is awesome. I am indoctrinated. I take back everything critical I said about these pokemon.

There’s a certain reaction we have when we see someone, say, making up fictional characters based on fictional creatures, designing them, attributing them personalities and backstories. That it is emotionally immature, indulgent, eccentric. “Just remember if you become obsessed with something you stop making sense to other people." But here I am, writing a pokemon blog, and every minute of it thinking, “What am I doing I am horrible I am writing a pokemon blog.” So part of me admires those people who can pursue their fandom so far that it becomes impractical, devoid of incentive, and yet show no insecurity about it. It’s a good thing the world is still a place where people can have creative hobbies that don’t need to pander to others.

So there is indeed a lot to say about Nidorina, despite her lack of frills and utterly average stats and abilities (seriously, her stat distribution looks like this:

), but not a lot that hasn’t already been said by whomever runs Aqua Bunny, who actually knows things about animation and puts me to shame with this look through time at the evolution of Nido artwork, and informed commentary about which ones are best. My god, what have I done

The Winner:

Nidozard

wait no
Diamond and Pearl

Gold’s pointing dog pose amuses me. A lot of these sprites, including that one, seem to have trouble with Nidorina’s foreleg, like they can’t decide if you should be looking at the underside of its paw, or at its knee, with the paw bent out of sight. There’s something odd with the perspective going on there. R/S and FR/LG exemplify this, as that paw is the sole difference between the two.

Most of these choose to depict Nidorina as pretty hostile, so might as well go with the one that does it the best. Of the ones bounding forwards, Silver’s isn’t bad, but D/P’s is less top-heavy and has arms of actually functional length.