>>40317469Yeah, I genuinely think so. Gen 3 was hardly a pattern, it was just 3 points and only 2 of them REALLY matched up, and keep in mind that the zodiac animals are mostly pretty common animals and nothing outside of the ordinary from what you'd expect when sampling a handful of different mascot-material animals. Then gen 4 happened, and they clearly wanted to do Sun Wukong. Okay, that's fair, but still at this point literally no one was saying anything about the Zodiac. Then gen 5 happen and they went with idk Oolong from DBZ I don't know Journey to the West that much, but it seems that more than anything they were specifically following on the gen 4 Journey to the West thread here. It's also very worth noting that THIS is when the fandom started picking up on the alleged zodiac theme. I personally thought it was a bit premature at this point especially since gen 2 was a stretch. So then gen 6 happened, and foxes explicitly aren't in the zodiac, theory irreparably debunked in my eyes. Except, people kept saying the fox is "close enough" to a dog. I didn't buy it, seemed like reaching, especially when 2 of the 4 good points of data (Infernape, Emboar) were explicitly from Journey to the West and the other 2 (Charizard, Blaziken) could've conceivably come about from random chance. Then gen 7 happened, with Litten the cat (an animal very explicitly known to be not part of the zodiac), and I took that as proof that it was all a bunch of nothing. But then the Incineroar leak happened, citing it as Tora3. And then Incineroar was confirmed, confirming that it was a tiger and that was exactly what they referred to it as during development. Welp, I couldn't really deny it anymore. And then a fucking rabbit happened and anyone would have to be delusional or trolling to continue denying it.
This is the testament of a strong denialfriend turned strong zodiacfriend.
