>>50914677I'd have to know all possible creatures GF could have used. And I'd have to weigh the popularity and marketable-ness of a certain creature (not a very easy thing to make a statistic without digging up serious research). I'd like to get your opinion on this then. If all fire starters lined up exactly without debate from anyone, would you think it was inspired by the zodiac or just coincidence? Just going through a list of all Pokémon, and there are tons of different creatures. But I couldn't tell you which one GF would or could have chosen instead. Point is, in the end this isn't random. A person is choosing to make a design. If that person has inspiration from something, his designs will reflect that. When presented constantly with such a pattern, if we can make out the Chinese zodiac pattern years ago, does no one really think GF would have figured it out had they been doing it by accident?
>>50914776Gameboy limitations, marketability, Sugimori art style of the time, they didn't think of it until gen 2 or 3 when Pokémon demonstrated that it was going to actually have a "decades-long" at all—I dunno, man; choose your favorite.
>>50914858Ah, what I think is going on here is that toridoshi doesn't specify the bird, so any bird can be placed for the rooster, despite the Chinese specifying rooster. This doesn't seem to be the case for most other years that specify which animal, except the illustrious nezumi. (Sonic is a nezumi, I don't understand your One Piece reference, seahorse is "dragon's child" in Japanese, shiisa are a cross between a lion and a dog, Saru works for both monkeys and gorillas in Japanese.) Whew. That's a ton of explaining.
