Pokemon GO
Drowzee is an interesting sort of Pokemon, a rare beast indeed. The Kanto-region Psychic mainstay straddles the line between two major categories of Pokemon: on the one hand, it’s an existential nightmare with terrifying hypnotic powers, but on the other hand, it’s just sort of an animal. The design is basically a Tapir standing on two legs, with little other alteration save a yellow coloring on the top. And it’s also the focus of this week’s Pokemon GO spotlight hour.
As usual, spotlight hour will take place from 6:00-9:00 PM local time, and during that time you can expect to see a whole lot of Drowzee.
What interests me is that Drowzee’s status as a terrifying Tapir is actually straight from mythology. According to Wikipedia, the Japanese word Baku can refer both to a Tapir and a dream-eating Yokai that also has connections to Chinese Folklore. It’s far from the only Pokemon to have its roots in these sorts of stories, and it’s always interesting to see when these sorts of these crop up in the game’s fictional bestiary. I’m not aware of any particular meta relevance for Drowzee, but it may have some PvP use that I’m not really considering.
When it comes to shiny, there’s really no missing it. Shiny Drowzee is a sort of mellow pink color, which one supposes is just as reasonable a color for Tapir to be as bright yellow. I think I got one of these a while back:
The bonus is always an interesting one: double XP for evolving Pokemon. That means you can pop a lucky egg and spend the hour straight evolving for one of the biggest XP boosts the game has to offer. If you really want to take full advantage, you’ll need to spend much more time evolving than actually catching Drowzee, but perhaps you already have enough Drowzee.
And there it is: it’s a beautiful 68 degrees in Philadelphia today, so I just may get out and enjoy it. Stranger things have happened.
