>>38650782This is a terrible idea, actually. Mainly because it makes pokemon seem inaccessible to young newcomers.
1. Some eeveelutions have some of the most convoluted evolution methods in the game, even when they shouldn't be(sun and moon stone for Umbreon and Espeon instead of happiness during day/night, Leaf Stone for Leafeon and introducing Ice stone earlier for Glaceon instead of levelling up in a single room tucked away in a mountain or forest in the game). Compared to just giving pikachu a thunderstone, you're warping a newcomer's expectations about what evolving takes.
2. Eevee is the only pokemon who can evolve into more than 3 different pokemon and the only case of 3 is an outlier, Tyrogue(who was just connecting two existing pokemon while adding a third evo). Imagine a kid having Eevee as one of their first pokemon akin to getting pikachu in viridian forest, then expecting some other pokemon in the game to have many evolutions. If they didn't make eevee the only pokemon who can have more than two evolutions, this wouldn't be as much of a problem, but that ship has sailed, it seems.
3. Pikachu is more expressive, mainly because it's both a biped and quadruped, meaning it can stand up and do things with its hands, but still be animal-like by running on all fours. Eevee can't do things like pic related.
4. Pikachu is just based on a mouse. Eevee has multiple animals in its design(fox, cat, and dog), and it shfits between eeveelutions. This doesn't mesh as well with a lot of pokemon being based on one animal if it's one of your first experiences with pokemon.
5. A normal type like eevee is one of the worst choices as an example for teaching type matchups, since fighting and ghost types aren't the most common, while teaching through weaknesses alone can be frustrating. Pikachu has a weakness, a resistance(though not in gen 1), and is super effective on two common types-flying and water. That part would have applied to
>>38651024 when it was normal, too.
