>>45125542>the real ideal solution would have been to simply just redesign venomoth to look a lot cooler, less unappealing.I spent about 10 minutes trying to find this old artwork of Venomoth where it had red eyes and psychic waves emanating from its head. I thought it was from the original Topsun pokemon cards but I was mistaken, though it was definitely around that era (~1996). My guess was that they couldn't translate the design of Venomoth to sprite form well, or it looked a little too evil. My guess (or hope) would be that Venomoth was also intended to originally be psychic type. I like the idea that Butterfree was moved into its place because it was cuter.
It may also have been the case that Venomoth was supposed to be the early route mon but psychic type might have been too powerful for the early routes, so was changed to poison. Then they moved Venomoth to the later routes and didn't swap it back to psychic.
In any case, Venomoth got done dirty. I like to think that every pokemon has its champion working at Game Freak who came up with the idea or for some reason supports that pokemon. Whoever Venomoth's champion was had no say in what finally happened to it. So it got shifted around, bumped down the order of importance, and finally became a wall-eyed shitmon moth for your pokedex.
Fun fact: Apart from Dream Eater, Venomoth can learn every damage-dealing psychic move in Gen 1. It learns no damage-dealing poison move in Gen 1.
