Early on in the art sub portion of this CAP, and shortly after it was decided that we were going Water/Fairy, I had the idea of a swordfish knight wielding seashell armor and weaponry which I went as far as to make a finalized artwork with shading - but as it turns out, there are many more special Fairy moves than physical and a good portion of the important moves for this CAP wouldn't have fit that design in terms of flavor, forcing me to scrap it completely and start over. I didn't want to let go of the long-nosed, piscine silhouette I liked about that design, however, and repurposing the snoot into a wand of some sort if we went for a special attacker wouldn't be too much of a stretch... or so I thought. It took me a weekend of brainstorming ideas (in the midst of suffering through a nasty dental abscess, mind!) to finally hit upon an idea I liked: a combination of two Japanese youkai, which fits Fairy perfectly since Mawile (who is also based on a youkai, specifically the futakuchi-onna) is also part-Fairy. Namely, this is a
samebito, a youkai that's essentially a shark-human hybrid, with elements of
tengu, which are long-nosed winged men with magical powers. The tengu also lends its name to the Japanese word for the
goblin shark,
tenguzame, which in turn was back-translated into English to get its common name - and given that we already have a Fairy-type goblin line in the form of Impidimp and its evolutions, it all comes together quite nicely. Add in a
sorcerer motif to justify this being a special attacker, and there you have it!
To this end, I styled this design a bit like a merfolk of sorts with a purely goblin-shark-like red head, moving the dorsal fin onto the head like a wizard's hat and giving it enlarged, slotted pectoral fins with pterosaurian hand claws that invoke both a bird's wings attached to a pair of humanoid arms and the sleeves of a wizard's robe, with matching pelvic fins and two extra dorsal fins on the shoulders along with a wing-like upper caudal fin to further those impressions. Three large, wavy barbels on the lower jaw suggest a long wizard's beard, and luminescent star-shaped markings along with matching pupils invoke both wizard star ornamentation (to justify space-themed moves like Moonblast) and the fact that some deep-sea sharks have bioluminescent organs, though their red color is pulled from other abyssal carnivorous fish that use red light to conceal themselves from prey. A red ring around the torso with smaller finlets coming out of it also invokes the belts with tassels of many traditional Japanese outfits, and it also holds a modified piece of coral (a branch from Corsola, perhaps?) resembling a
kiseru, an ancient Japanese smoking pipe - by blowing through this with its singular nostril (also inspired by Impidimp), it can create enchanted bubbles and seafoam for powerful magic attacks! Finally, to hint towards Multiscale, I gave the belly a segmented, scalloped look, to reference both the denticles of real sharks and the belly armor of many Japanese kaiju - its overall look does, after all, remind me of Zigra from the
Gamera series, whose design has been compared to a goblin shark by a lot of fans.
