>>38249587Okay so consider for a second that this is a Japanese specific franchise exported for westerners to experience to the best of their ability to do so from the source material.
Japanese has a lot of ambiguity in animal names, alligators and crocodiles have no clear distinction in common speech. Anything small enough to be labeled a bug is essentially a bug, including slug, snails and hermit crabs, spiders, scorpions, isopods etc.
Take Horsea and Skrelp for instance. Based on the Sea horses, clear misnomers, they evolve into a Sea dragons and gain a literal Dragon typing in-game. “Close enough” and slight puns do come into play in the design process.
Porcupine in Japanese is Hire-nezumi. Nezumi means mouse. This word is honestly thrown around a lot in Japanese. The word Grey is translated literally as “Mouse-Colored”
So yes the Fiery Echidna/Porcupine/Shrew/Tenrec amalgamation is in fact a Fire Mouse as it is labeled in game. Taxonomy be damned, no one but you truly cares enough to split that quill.
