Manivoir, the Siphonophore Pokemon

These guys have gotten quite a bit of attention on Twitter, so here's my convergent evolution line of the Gardevoir line!

In order, the line consists of Ralyp, Physirlia, and Manivoir. The line is based off of jellyfishes, in particular siphonophores like the man-o-war. The initial idea behind Manivoir and its line was the idea of an ethereal, almost ghostly underwater figure based off of Gardevoir. As jellyfishes tend to match the look I was thinking of, I went with that idea for the design.

Manivoir was designed first. When designing fakemon, I usually start off with the last member of the evolution line and work my way backwards, and this was no different. Manivoir's design didn't change much over its development - originally it lacked the luminescent pink parts of its body and was just blue all over. The glowing marks on its tentacles were added as well, though the circular marks on its head (supposed to resemble eyes) were there from the beginning.

Next came Ralyp, and this is where I started running into hurdles during design. Convergent evolutions are meant to be Pokemon that closely resemble their inspirations despite being entirely different species. In this case, I had to figure out a way to maintain the jellyfish-look for Ralyp while also keeping the silhouette of Ralts, Gardevoir's first evolution. The left- and right-most tentacles share a resemblance to Ralts' little arms, and the blue hull covering Ralyp's body resembles Ralts' "hair". The true challenge came when looking at Ralts' legs. Ralts has legs that flare out near the bottom, looking almost like a dress. Giving Ralyp "legs" would take away from the jellyfish theme to an almost distracting degree. I played around with a few looks before giving Ralyp two slightly larger tentacles, rounding out Ralyp's tentacle count to four. The idea is that the negative space between the two tentacles could be filled in to look like Ralyp still had legs. I think this was a good compromise.

Physirlia was designed last, and was probably the easiest to design after Manivoir itself. Kirlia's skirt and "hair" could easily be translated into tentacles, and the blades on its head became bladders for Physirlia to use to move around in the ocean. Kirlia's spindly legs became tentacles, and I made the decision to remove the "arms" of Physirlia was the longer, pink tentacles acting as Physirlia's legs seemed to originate underneath the blue "dress" tentacles. Having two other pink tentacles sticking out bothered me, and I feel the resemblance to Kirlia still comes through despite the design change.