Greetings little monsters, welcome back to the ‘wonderful’ world of Pokémon. Today I will take a look at another pokémon and look at it’s abilities , skills and mostly it’s mythological inspiration. Today we discuss one of my least favorite pokémon of my favorite type. Mawile! The deceiver Pokémon.
Mixed emotions
The fact that this pokémon is one of my lesser loved ones among the fairy types doesnt mean it is not a good pokémon. In fact Mega-Mawile, introduced in the sixth generation, can be quite good. However here lays my problem with this little monster, it really does need it’s mega stone to be good. This means you kind of have to run it as a mega set, in order to make it live up to any potential or for it to have solid stats. While Mega-Venusaur and Mega-Garchomp for example feel much more .. optional, with a lot of potential ways to play the pokemon. Mawile in its regular form just has its physical traits going for it the rest of it’s stats really are quite bad. It is an interesting typing though. It’s fairy typing covers it’s steel typings weakness to fighting moves and the steel part gives the fairy part of it an immunity to it’s poison weakness. In fact Mawile resists ten out of eighteen typings and is immune to two besides that. That means two thirds of all typings can not hit it effectively. On paper this would make the little lady like pokémon a good defensive pokémon, unfortunately it’s weaknesses are ground types and fire types which are very common moves and a lot of pokémon can learn elemental punches, bites or even earthquake. You can not equip it with an air balloon to negate this because it does really need to hold its mega stone.
It is a nice pokémon to nuzlocke with but for a regular playthrough or competitive play it is quite lacking. It’s design is good, it has some creepy elements to it as well as some cute, which is meant to be part of it’s design , yet I can not help to feel like it should evolve somehow. It is just a bit too basic for a non evolving pokémon. The mega evolution fixed that but at the cost of giving it an item. While it does learn some decent moves, it only starts learning those past level 33 and up to level 49 and even then it’s just really has one viable way to build. So all in all , while a useful pokémon, I would not particularly call it charming. There is little room for playing around.
Design
While I already went over how it’s design looks just looks a bit to basic let’s talk about it some more , but this time we also take into account what the makers want it to be. It’s backstory and all those qualities which can explain why a pokémon looks the way it does. It’s design is based on depictions of the japanese entity called a Futakuchi-onna, whom we will talk about more in the next ‘chapter’ but basically it is woman with a mouth in the back of her head. When we look at Mawile we can clearly see the mouth is not in the back of her head but actually is in the back of her hair. However Mawile can be both genders, which is a bit odd given it’s inspiration can exclusively be feminine, it is explained that what we see as hair is actually a steel horn, to explain it’s steel typing. The fairy typing was only added after generation VI (Kalos) so before that it was just a pure steel type. Perhaps this is partially why I do not like Mawile as much, it just doesn’t feel like a steel type , with what it was based on a dark type would have made so much more sense. But I guess Hoenn , the region it originated must have needed some additional steel types or something.. because I can not see a relation to most of its lore.. the only thing is the steel horn thing which feels forced.
Nani?! That is ONE weird steel horn Gamefreak!
Mawile is being described as the deceiver, it lulls pokémon or people into a false sense of security with it’s cute face before turning around and beginning to chomp on them with it’s bigger mouth. The bigger mouth can not taste anything so it will eat anything just to get enough sustenance, the mouth can even chew through iron beams. Weirdly enough Mawile doesn’t get the Strong Jaw ability. It can learn intimidate.. which makes sense cause it is scary as hell to see such a mouth, or Hyper Cutter (an ability that prevents abilities from being lowered) which also makes sense.. because it deceives making people think the cute part is the actual monster while it kinda actually is the mouth that is in control. It’s hidden ability (you can get by transferring) make it a lot more impressive fighting wise and symbolise it’s sheer determination to eat and nothing else. This pokemon just wants to consume. Many dex-entries warn for how extremely dangerous a Mawile can be. The egg coloured body looks cute while the mouth does look quite ferocious so they do a good job at that at least but you get the sense there is more. We see that more when it Mega-Evolves.
Mawile says! ‘Eat your vegies kids!’
Mega-Mawile looks a bit more feminine than i it’s base form, her dress has now been given multiple colours and the hair mouth has now become two even more evil looking twin tales. It’s ability now becomes Huge Power, which doubles its physical attack stats that now has ridden to an already quite impressive 105. Compared to regular Mawiles 85, that is quite an increase. This makes Mega Mawile quite good in fact, at least in the ‘useful’ sense of the word. Alignment wise this pokémon seems to be quite evil. The pokédex says the mouths have become extremely vicious after transforming and now use one mouth to catch their prey in while the other mouth tries to rip them apart. The mouth seem to be able to fight over the food. Imagine that two T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park the lost world but on a cute girly pokémon with a pokemon in between two of her three mouths instead. Yikes! A single gash from them is said to be able to turn a boulder into dust. Not so cute after all, but hey if you ever want your Porygon2 to be two Porygon2 we know whom to mega-evolve.
Yokai
Now let’s see how much Mawile looks at its inspiration the Futakuchi-Onna. I was looking for a way to abbreviate this but somehow Futa seemed like a bad choice. There are to many other onna’s so I will refer to them as ‘ladies’ from now on. This lady is a yokai , not that weird anime with the orange cat that is sort of like pokémon but ancient japanese folk-tales. Like I said earlier they are women who have transformed , while sources differ on their origin all seem to have a theme of neglect of something. Depriving something of someone.
As far as we know the transformation to this demonlike state can happen for three particular reasons. First of all a woman can become a Futakuchi-Onna if she neglects taking care (step)children. In one of the oldest tales there is woman of moderate wealth who is very stingy despite being off well enough. She has a child of her own she keeps well fed. However she refuses to spend money on her stepchild allowing to to die of starvation. The kid’s spirit becomes a spirit of vengeance attaching to to the head of the lady’s actual daughter. You can probably guess where the story goes from there. As the stingy woman transforms from sinner to dinner. The trickster part of the mythologie seems to come from this part of the myth and possibly part of their design too. Mawile looks quite cute and young, hairstyles are either twintails or a single ponytail which I usually associate with something young and cute. Since mawile uses it’s cuteness it could very well be the spirit of a child that their mother let starve to death or something in a similar vein.
The second possibility to become a ‘lady’ is to neglect your own need for food. Woman starving themselves to look good can turn into the yokai over time. It is said that at one point during their hunger they can feel their skull splitting while new lips and a mouth begin to form. A mouth that needs twice as much food as the ‘main’ chomper. This new mouth is perfectly capable of feeding itself having control of the vessels hair. It oftenly whispers hateful or spiteful things to the vessel to make it more meek to its own wishes or simply manipulate it, usually not in a charming way though. The second mouth in nearly every source talks you down, never up. A lot of elements from this version can also be seen in Mawile, the way that the hair is being depicted as the dominant side, the pokédex entry that the second mouth doesn’t taste so Mawile uses that one to get enough food even if it doesnt like it. It hits the tones of the lady being forced to eat twice as much. The malicious character of the second mouth has also been shown in the Pokémon adventures Manga where a Mawile body got in conflict with her hair. The ability Hyper Cutter and intimidate seem to fit this form quite good as well.
The demon’s food must be Condoleezza Rice
The third and clearly less documented way to get your skull to split and form a mouth is by not speaking your mind. Women who hide their true feelings can form a mouth that will spout any idea you have going inside that big brain of yours. I do not think Mawile has any connection with this type of the lady. At best we could argue that as a deceiver she never shows her real mind but that feels a bit flimsy, especially when food and eating plays such a big part in her story. Then again.. maybe Mawile was once a girl that once starved because she wasn’t taken care off, starting out as a ghost pokémon trying to tell people what happened to her she failed and thusly grew her ‘metal horn’ now she is hungry for more.
This is why we women never shut up! We grow demons otherwise!
Whatever it is I am pretty safe from becoming a ‘lady’ myself. I love food and cooking way to much to go too malnourished, even when lacking money I try to be creative to produce at least some kind of meal. I always speak my mind, even when it might not be that appropriate my opinion is who I am and should I prematurely die I do not want you to know the woman I pretended to me but the Pinkie I truly am. I would however starve children cause I am really not into them. Luckily I will never want or get children myself so there is no one to starve. (Don’t worry I won’t let a random kid starve I would buy him a krentenbol, that’s a raisin bun. I guess from the Pokémon Mawile and the lady we learn to take care of yourself, those around you and to speak your mind when something is troubling you. Troubling like seeing a pokémon bisected by mega-mawiles gaping maws, or even myself. I’ll go catch a mawile now, nickname it Lisa, mega evolve it and let it eat me. Just so I can yell ‘You are tearing me apart Lisa’…. for the memes.
Question to my readers:
Have you seen: Tommy Wisseau’s the room?
Let me know your answer in the comments. Now it is time for this professor to take a nap. Though I might grab a little snack first. Takling about devouring has made me kind of peckish. Not really in my stomach.. just a feeling you know, a little gnaw in the back of my head.
The Pinkest Poké Blogger is blasting off again
XO
Pinkie
Pinkie's Paradise 