I know I took a lot of time to post another one of these but hey, sometimes you are overwhelmed with so many different tasks and it's difficult to get the results you long for!
My concept here is around a feature that was removed from the original source due to its ties to adult activities that should not be promoted to children, and that part I understand: the casino! Yes, my concept revolves around a Pokémon related to casino coins or tokens, and it's even named after that! I also did something that the original canon hasn't done yet: a three stage pure Dark type evolutionary line. Although I call my equivalent Shade type.
As you can see I decided to make a raccoon evolutionary line, getting inspirations from the aesthetics of cartoon prisoners and novelizations of the presentations of organized crime. I think this is a perfect introduction of what Shade type is to me. As I personally consider this universe to be better left in a veil of mystery and not delve deep into things, because when you start, everything starts falling apart very quickly, I wanted to explore something that they have already explored, like organized crime, under the lens of something that the iconic Team Rocket has already played with. And you know what it is said about casinos, house always wins. What if, in this theoretical reboot or region, Pokémon were in charge of being "house".
I beat myself a little bit up with these concepts as I thought they were a bit simplistic and didn't have enough bone in them, so to speak. I took a very superficial approach, but in some occasions, that should not be a bad thing, probably. Even with the shinies, the approach was really simple: oh, they're raccoons with a grey and red as an accent palette, let's make them red panda inspired. The golden hue was a second choice, I initially thought of making it green, not just because of my huge bias, but because of the shades that can be found in a roulette. But it just wasn't working with those exact red shades and decided to move on and try other possibilities. Grey wasn't flattering, so I went for gold.
And I will also add: I won't apologize, this is baby's first furry bait, I hope you enjoyed it. The people that saw Tokapo said that the design could be categorized as "daddy" and I'm... confused, about how did I achieve that. Not disappointed, though!
This is the first evolutionary line that I'm posting here, so something important to me is how it interacts with itself, what does the evolution add to the design, personality wise and just in a progression sense. I wanted the first stage to be very light-hearted, to not make the whole line gritty and tonally dissonant with the rest of the universe, but at the same time I wanted to make the final evolution imposing. The humanoid approach here was something that I settled on quite early on the design phase because I thought I could add elements of gangsters and yakuza easier on that kind of portrayal, but at the same time I wanted to exaggerate proportions to not go full on furry trap. The middle stage, though, it had probably the more varied iterations, because several attempts were too disconnected from either the first or the last stage. A scrappy middle ground that wants to steal but is not good enough to get what it wants cleanly felt nice.
Honestly, I almost consider that this evolutionary line shares elements with what we could qualify as the official starter formula: cute first stage clearly showing the animal and a personality trait, in this case I'd say cheerful is the superficial one although the rest could be classified as clumsy, an awkward middle stage that nobody will pay attention to because what we want, what we need, is that final evolution that in so many cases has to stand on two feet and basically be almost humanoid in behaviour and personality. I got comparisons from this fakemon to the official Incineroar, vibes wise, and I wanted to slightly stray apart from that.
In any case, I wanted to further solidify the casino theme, so as an additional requirement for evolution I thought that you'd have to have a certain amount of casino coins or tokens for the evolution to go through. You can't become the boss without capital, so the trainer is providing that, in this particular scenario. And yes, they'd be consumed, now are Tokapo's. I kinda dislike how gimmicky one-time evolution methods can be, specially in the later generations, because there's no way we're not meant to look it up on the internet. So I wanted something in the middle, something simple and very thematic but also unusual. I will consider adding this "pay in game to win" mechanic to another creature down the line, but it's something that I can't promise. I don't even know what will be the next fakemon I'll post, I still have to make it!
Additional art of these three is dropping, too. I do animations for the front, backsprites and icons, see you in I hope less than two months, readers that are here for fakemon design:
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