![\"Fish](\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/5c23035024a6e\/fish-pokemon.900x.jpg\")
I’ll start this with a confusing admission: My favourite thing in the world is a trip to an aquarium. I could spend days<\/em> gazing through the curved glass of a tank, watching sharks glide past me, pressing my hand against the smooth, white underbelly of a stingray, and taking note of the clownfish darting in and out of the swaying mass of a sea anemone. Aquariums are my happy place. They’re fascinating, beautiful, entrancing, and for a kid who grew up pretty far away from the ocean, basically magic.<\/p>\n So why do I dislike fish Pok\u00e9mon so much? It’s precisely because<\/em> they have nothing in common with those actual fish in an aquarium, or in the sea. Let me explain.<\/p>\n Back in 1996, we were introduced to the concept of Pocket Monsters<\/em> \u2014 weird little animals that lived in tiny, portable cages, that would fight other Pocket Monsters on your behalf. Many of those Pocket Monsters were based on real-world animals, like turtles, butterflies, and birds.<\/p>\n In amongst all those real-life animals, of course, were fish \u2014 three fish, to be exact. Goldeen, Seaking, and Magikarp are the only fish-like beings on the Gen I Pok\u00e9dex, although you could<\/em> expand your definition of “fish” to include Gyarados (who is more of a dragon, if you ask me), the Horsea line (those are horses, duh), Shellder, Staryu, and Omanyte (those are shellfish), Poliwag (a tadpole), Tentacool (a jellyfish), Vaporeon (some kind of dog-mermaid), and Lapras (…dinosaur?). For the purposes of this article, I am talking solely<\/em> about the fish-shaped fish, and I’m going to ignore all other marine and piscine creatures, okay?<\/p>\n Listen, Goldeen and Seaking are pretty cool. They’re based on ornamental fish like goldfish and koi carp, and having grown up with a koi pond, I’m quite fond of the sparkly little guys. As a result, they’re quite pretty, with their frilly little fins and orange-white-black colouring, but let’s be honest: They’re the Rattata of the sea. No one actually wants them for any reason other than to fill up the Pok\u00e9dex. These fish are PC Box filler.<\/p>\n Now, you might argue that Magikarp is, in fact, the Rattata of the sea, but you’d be wrong \u2014 I’d argue instead that Magikarp is probably the most<\/em> interesting fish in all Pok\u00e9mon history (not that there’s much competition). There’s even a trope named after it: “Magikarp Power”, which is when a character or item seems completely useless at first, but eventually evolves into something great. And Magikarp keeps excellent company in this category: Chie in Persona 4, Donnel from Fire Emblem: Awakening, and even Exagryph from Hades are all the Magikarps of their respective games.<\/p>\n But it’s all downhill from Magikarp. I don’t think there’s been a single fish Pok\u00e9mon that I’ve actually wanted in my party since then, and though many of the designs are cool \u2014 Relicanth, Mantyke, even the stupid-looking Arctovish \u2014 I just don’t care for them.<\/p>\n I put forward my hypothesis: That, of all the types of Pok\u00e9mon (bird, dragon, humanoid) the fish ones are always<\/em> the most disappointing. You think I care about the difference between Tynamo and Remoraid? I do not. You think I want to put in a ton of effort to catch and evolve a Feebas into a Milotic? No. Has anyone ever picked Huntail or Gorebyss as their favourite Pok\u00e9mon? Probably not, right?<\/p>\n I know a lot of people aren’t keen on bird types either, and I’m inclined to agree that bird types suffer from the same boring “oh, it’s a bird” designs that fish types do. But bird Pok\u00e9mon tend to appear early in the game, when you’ll take just about anything to beef up your party for the next gym, and so I have an attachment to them because they usually stick around long enough to grow on me. Fish Pok\u00e9mon, on the other hand, require a fishing rod or the Surf ability, meaning that they usually start appearing in the games once I’ve already got a pretty solid roster of interesting and powerful Pok\u00e9mon, and there’s no room in my heart or my party for a weak-ass salmon lookalike.<\/p>\n I don’t get it. The ocean is full of weird and strange fish, but when translated into Pok\u00e9mon, they just seem so incredibly dull<\/em>. But I think I know why they’re so dull \u2014 it’s because fish aren’t really very interesting on their own. They’re interesting together \u2014 the way they move, the way they interact, the wondrousness of the ocean itself as another world beneath the land.<\/p>\n![\"Fish](\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/c1bbe7e55bd54\/fish-pokemon.900x.jpg\")
![\"Fish](\"https:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/b4d3b07940876\/fish-pokemon.900x.jpg\")