>>45291742>>45291789i mean they demonstrably do sparkle in both the games and anime but even if they didnt, shiny doesnt mean rare. there are rare pokemon that arent shiny, like legendaries, or even just shit like feebas. rare and shiny arent synonymous. if you caught a feebas you wouldnt call it shiny, just because theyre so very hard to find. you wouldnt even call a spiky eared pichu shiny. thats completely fucking stupid. even if you want to say that shinies dont literally shine, id allow that, the word is still an aesthetic modifier. its referring strictly to appearance. no shiny pokemon has any physiological distinctions, no differences in stats, no different types or moves. shiny is a phenotype. variants are a genotype. regional variants are actually a perfect example. alolan raichu isnt a shiny raichu. if you took one out of alola and set it in a place where no others existed, if there was a very select and limited population of alolan raichu in kanto, they still wouldnt be "shiny." what youre doing is taking a word that means a specific thing and deciding to stretch and contort it to serve your purposes.
