>>53118441So, ignoring OP's...unique...spin on things and addressing the actual article, I can understand the problem from a technical standpoint. While keeping the Nidos as two separate species instead of counting them as one with gender differences (like everything that came later) is archaic and out of place in the modern games, actually changing them to the same 'mon would end up shifting the entire 'dex's numbering system over one, displacing literally HUNDREDS of other Pokemon in the internal numbering structure of the games' coding just to correct one mistake. They SHOULD be counted as one Pokemon, but it's far too late to change that now that we're 1,008 Pokemon into the franchise, and the amount of coding that would have to be rewritten to adjust for the change would be massive, to say nothing of all of the merchandise displaying Pokemon 'dex numbers that would be retconned from the shift. It's just more work than it's worth to try to fix something that's a remnant of a time where the games didn't have genders at all.
The one thing that's bugged me all these years, though, is WHY the Nidorans were important enough to warrant the distinction between their sexes in the original games to begin with. What made them so special when Pokemon like Pikachu, the franchise's mascot, didn't even have a sex back in Gen 1? Why wasn't it changed immediately in Gen 2 when sexes were first introduced, before the number of Pokemon getting displaced by the necessary renumbering had a chance to build up and cause a major problem?
