>>45285130Typically, at least one of three things.
>Literally an animalPokemon itself is pretty guilty of this lately, but very few pokemon before gen 6 were "just" an animal.
The best examples of this are Growlithe and Mareep.
On the surface, it's a dog, and a sheep, right? But when you actually really look close, neither one actually resembles that animal all that much. It KIND OF looks like that animal, so you accept it, but really, it's just a fucked up monster. Eevee is another example of this, where it and its evolutions are somewhere between Dog, Cat, and Fox (and not at all just copypastas of the critter from Nausica)
>Designed backwards, with a "teenage" middle formMany, many fakemon are very clearly a final form, with two disposable preceding forms that are just incomplete versions of the third form. Very few pokemon actually look like this; there's a clear progression, but when they are next to eachother, they still kinda look like different animals, rather than different ages of the same animal. And as mentioned, bastard middle forms are another common sin; where it either has partial elements that don't come together particularly well, or just looks like a fucked up version of the first or third form.
>Unsettling/creepy designEvery single pokemon, with maybe a handful of outlier exceptions (like the Ultra Beasts) is fucking trimmed to perfection to be appealing. Anything that is potentially creepy is either trimmed, or accented by something goofy or endearing to balance it out The most unsettling a pokemon gets is "cool".
A lot of fakemons (and fucking again, a lot of time middle forms!) have fucked up proportions, faces only the artist could love, or other bizarre features that make the design offputting, and imbalanced towards "what the fuck is this" instead of "I want to learn more about this"
