[Essay] Why do you look like me, Beta Blaziken?

[anomalymonster]

Author: Kabo
Written: January 5th, 2025
Word Count: 1,539

An essay about my experiences realizing that I'm actually a beta Pokemon after phantom limbs and form just happened to match up to leaked concept art of Blaziken.

---

My system has a lot of beta Pokemon - Pokemon or earlier designs that were once considered during the development process but got left on the chopping block. Headmates who are Beta Pokemon were even among the first headmates we identified back in 2016. I'm not even the only one of us drafting an essay.

I didn't consider myself a part of the beta Pokemon group for most of my self awareness. I first identified myself in 2020 or so as a rooster-like gryphon. My appearance as I drew it and identified was sort of like the Pokemon Blaziken, but not quite. I didn't have much of a reason to question Blaziken at the time.

What things even more complicated for my self discovery was that I realized I existed during a phase of our system where we were trying to avoid discovering or acknowledging any new fictives. I got caught up with feeling like I had to be a standard, totally original gryphon with no weird fictional identity about me and certainly not another damn Pokemon to add to the majority they already have.

So no reason to question it because I'm totally normal.

Besides, the closest fictional species to me at the time was a Blaziken, and surely I wasn't anything close to that, right?

We had two different versions of Blaziken we knew of that would be equally likely to exist in our system. The one on the left is the beta Blaziken that was shown in shared concept art in the early 2000s that was given the fan nickname "Latiken", and the right is the final version of Blaziken.

Neither of these fit how I perceive myself or what phantom limbs I have. While the final has the larger amount of plumage and tail, it's missing the wings. While the prototype sort of has the wings, they aren't feathery like mine and my legs don't move like that pose.

Because of all that, I never considered myself to be a Blaziken. There were similarities and Latiken was a beta Pokemon my system had questioned having years ago (and we theorized we had a Torchic at some point in childhood, and that was probably me too in retrospect), but a lack of consistent phantom limbs and still years away from trying to unlearn the shame of having so many weird Pokemon kept us from exploring it. By the time I finally hit my point of self awareness we had no reason to think I might be a beta Blaziken.

The closest I got to something clicking in me before I saw any further concept art was the Pokedex entries we got during the 2020 Nintendo gigaleak. No Pokemon designs or visuals to speak of, just early text (that wasn't even translated until months later). Here's what we got for Blaziken -

"By flapping its wings, it generates high-temperature Heat Waves that turn plant matter into char. It can barely see in dark areas."

This was the first time our system and I started to think of a concept of a more modern Blaziken with wings, but there was no images with these dex entries, so we could only guess. In the state we were in with our identities when this leak happened, we probably wouldn't have connected the dots if it hit us in the face anyway.

Then a few years later we get to October of 2024. Gamefreak had a massive leak that hit the holy grail of beta content for my system - the Ruby and Sapphire prototype builds.

While combing through all the sprites (and trying to survive a hurricane at the same time), we were excited to see Latiken in some official-looking, cleaned up way. We even finally got an official name for this beta form with "Elhawk".

While this looks much closer to how I feel than its concept art with that thicker plumage and the sharper-looking beak, it's still not quite enough to make me question-

Oh. Well okay.

This was the concept art that made it start to click. There's a Blaziken with the features I have of Blaziken and Elhawk and the feathery wings that was missing from both of them.

I started to experience myself more vividly as I questioned this. My phantom limbs and my movements became clearer, I could feel like I had that sharp beak and larger amounts of head plumage, and I had my feathery wings but not quite the urge to fly like some of the avians in my system do. I'm not trying to force myself to avoid being a Pokemon anymore.

I began to embrace a bit more that I exist in the system too. I felt more confident in who I am to front more - and it helps my system has been working on dealing with the shame and awkwardness we've been feeling about being a system.

This art isn't a perfect 1:1 of who I am and there are some features I know that I have that aren't a match with this concept art (namely I can switch between quadrapedal and bipedal), and I think something more accurate might be an in between with this design and Elhawk, but aside from that this is pretty damn close. Odds are there probably is a bit of concept art or sprite scratchpad somewhere that match what I look like. Hell, I think as a little Torchic I probably looked closer to the unfinished concept sketches that were officially shown instead of the more finalized-looking concepts, so that wouldn't be too big of a stretch for me to be a closer match to a random development doodle instead of something that was more seriously considered later down the road.

Even if the art or sprite I'm looking for doesn't exist, I don't need that confirmation. I feel confident enough to say that I'm a Blaziken and finding an exact match be damned I'm still pretty close. Who I am could get hard delegitimized at any time (which even happened to another Betamon headmate during a leak!) and we could somehow learn that winged Blaziken is the only piece of concept art ever made for between Elhawk and Blaziken, but that would be okay.

My experiences would have been a lot easier if I just accepted my identity as an in between prototype and final Blaziken sooner and embraced the parts of my phantom limbs or form that didn't seem to make sense even if we never got that concept art or if that concept art never existed.

It's a bit of a chicken (ha!) or the egg situation. I don't know how I developed in this system. It probably happened when I was a hatchling and I was too young to remember that. It could be a coincidence or our brain subconsciously recognizing patterns (especially for a system who had a heavy special interest in beta Pokemon and the development of Pokemon since we were like 9), or even a "fictionkin destiny" thing or any handful of theories about spiritual fictionkin could apply here. I do not have an explanation for how this happened (I don't even identify on the spiritual/psychological binary at all, headmate or 'kin) and I don't think it's as important as how I experience this identity and how I explore this identity.

Having a fiction-based identity in general, whether fictionkin/fictive or even fictionlink or fictionhearted, can be complicated when you get into the meta nature of fiction. All of this was created and developed by another person or people at some point. The way you interpret their work might be different from theirs or it might be very close. You can guess and latch onto the parts that changed during the development.

There's also some awkwardness around it. This art and development work wasn't obtained in the most ethical ways, and employees got doxxed for it while private developer logs were shown to the public (with people wildly misinterpreting it - looking at the leaked mythology documents especially). I wish this concept art and these builds were shown consensually and maybe even with actual commentary for people who are curious, but now that it's out in the open it's hard for me not to look at it and appreciate the process that fiction goes through to get made and have these realizations about myself.

It makes me a lot more aware of my place as a fictionkin. This was made by a real person and given feedback by a team of people. My feelings on it are the final design turned out pretty cool, but my mind or soul preferred the unfinished ones that were forgotten about.

And that's what I think being a beta Pokemon is to me. Some fictionfolk are tied to the meta of fiction in other ways, but my tie is to the development of it and the rough parts of fiction. A final Blaziken might feel a connection to the finished world and the exploration of it, but I'm in the rough pixels and sketches of people trying to figure out what Blaziken was even supposed to be in the first place. I represent what could have been.