>>56294116Venomoth is abundant in Cerulean Cave, which back in the original generation was essentially the only "post-game content", before games really had or needed any post-game content.
Since Cerulean Cave had the highest level pokemon in the game, it was the best place to raise your pokemon up to 100. That meant that anyone raising their pokemon without just making infinite rare candies spent a long, long time in Cerulean Cave, and saw a lot of Venomoth.
It's probably something akin to Stolkholm syndrome, but eventually, you grow to respect Venomoth. Not as part of your party, but as a repeatedly encountered enemy.
But, I like Venomoth because it became the foundation of my post graduate study in microorganism evolution, inspired by the way Butterfree and Venomoth's evolutions are switched. My thesis was looking for examples of this in reality, where rather than Parallel or Convergent evolutions occurring between two species, the two switched ecological niches, and what was assumed to be the ancestors were actually their opposites. Genetic information has been invaluable in this, because it allows us to see past many assumptions based on physical characteristics, and to find "true" ancestors.
While most of my work was done on microbes, I did work with myrmecologists for two years, though that ended up leading nowhere since ant evolution is a nightmare.
