>>58257600I'm not buying this excuse. Digimon has had a number of fan design contests over the years and some of the most recognizable/iconic ones - Angemon, Kabuterimon, Birdramon, Mummymon, Dobermon, etc. - came from those contests. They did one as recently as 2020. Not once have I ever heard of Bandai, Toei, or WiZ getting sued over this. It seems to me that Harada is just projecting his own paranoia on the industry as a whole.
If there is any real threat of legal action, it may be that Digimon avoided it by having Kenji make drastic enough tweaks to the winning designe once they were chosen that they could argue are sufficiently transformative. Like, for example, the original contest submission for Angemon envisioned him as a centaur, but once it was put through Kenji's design process, he ended up becoming the bipedal humanoid Angemon we know today. If Pokemon ever did a similar contest, one would assume they'd do the exact same thing with their in-house artists.
In any case, it's ridiculous that Game Freak is actually worried about fakemons. As the number of Pokemon grows larger, and with how massive and active Pokemon's fanbase is, it's going to become more and more impossible for them to avoid designing anything that could possibly have any similarity to a fakemon, so it's a fool's errand for them to try. WTF are they wringing their hands about costs and lawsuits for? They're the highest-grossing media franchise on the planet, backed by the most hyper-litigious corporation in gaming and their army of shark lawyers. They're realistically never losing a lawsuit to some random dweeb from DeviantArt or Twitter.
