>>49812781I can't imagine looking at Primarina and immediately thinking about trannies. It's surreal. I just connected with the design immediately.
The people who find Primarina uncanny, I at least understand, but I think it's partly intentional. A lot of Fairy types, like fairies in real folklore, are very otherworldly. They're generally cute and 'girly', but there also have a sense of mystery. Even a Pokémon as conventionally cute as the Clefairy line is portrayed as being nocturnal, reclusive, and possibly extraterrestrial creatures that come out at night to dance around meteorites and drink dew from the grass. I think the comparison with the more anthropophilic Chansey is a good illustration of what the Fairy type suggests in otherwise similar Pokémon. Primarina is meant to be beautiful and elegant, but sea lions are also predators, and sirens have always been portrayed as dangerous creatures that might whisk you quite literally 'away with the fairies'. I really like this otherworldly and uncanny dimension of Primarina; there aren't really any other starters that evoke eerie and mysterious power (like Shiinotic or Gardevoir) rather than more direct visual expression of physical might.
