Ekans, Arbok
Ekans is “snake” backwards - get it?
Anyway, a purple rattlesnake is pretty sick. Total aside, did you know rattlesnakes are native only to the Americas? I think that’s pretty cool. And I think Ekans is pretty cool. I love the emotionless reptile eyes - a design woefully underrepresented in the series. I wish Arbok kept them and I wish you saw it more in general. There really isn’t much more to say about Ekans because it’s pretty much just a purple rattlesnake. I like snakes a lot, so it gets high marks, but yeah - if you like snakes, you probably like Ekans, and if you don’t like snakes, you probably don’t like Ekans.
Actually now that I think about it, I’ve never seen Ekans actually use its rattle. Maybe there’s an anime episode where it happens, but I cannot remember a single example. I know it was supposed to be the 64th pokemon in the original Pokemon Snap - maybe it would have rattled there. We can only dream.
Arbok is “cobra” backwards but with a “K” so it’s kooler. And it has a lot more going for it design- and Pokedex-wise. First off, Ekans is a bigger snake, but Arbok is a MASSIVE snake, which instantly makes it cooler. The eyes are a downgrade, but the fangs - while not biologically correct for snakes - are cool as hell and the hood pattern is sweet. In the early games, the face on its hood changed based on region, which made it the first regional variant! And then they promptly squashed that trend in I think the fourth gen? and proceeded to standardize our poor cobra’s aesthetic. But before they could do that, there was really cool concept art of pattern variants and some cool exploration of what that meant in the manga.
They really should bring back the pattern changes. More diversity in design is always cool in my book. Also of note - Arbok swims, which makes it kind of like an anaconda. Which makes it even spookier/cuter. As far as media representation goes - Team Rocket’s Jessie made Arbok a childhood favorite and it got cut in half in the manga, but outside of that, you rarely see it anymore. It was fun to see it in in the new Pokemon Snap game as a sort of reference to its pre-evolution being cut from the last game. But overall, there’s a lot of potential with them that isn’t often explored.
