Oddish.
During the day, it keeps its face buried in the ground. At night, it wanders around sowing its seeds.
Transcript
0:00What if I told you one of the cutest things in Kanto is a medieval horror story, shrunk down and given a smile until the whole world forgot to be afraid of it.
0:03Meet Oddish.
0:07Now let's first look at what Oddish actually is for a second.
0:10A round little body that's really a root, with a face on it, and legs.
0:14It buries itself in the ground and holds still all day with just its leaves showing.
0:17And if anything grabs those leaves and pulls, it screams.
0:21Now go back about five hundred years, because Europe already had this exact thing, and people were terrified of it.
0:24The mandrake.
0:28A real plant, that you can still grow today, with a thick forked root that looks uncomfortably like a small human body.
0:31The old stories gave that root one rule.
0:35When a mandrake is pulled out of the ground, it screams, and you did not want to be anywhere near it when that happened.
0:38People believed this so completely that nobody would pull the root by hand.
0:42They had a method, and the method tells you everything about how scared they were.
0:45And as insane as this part is going to sound, this part is genuinely documented...
0:48They would literally tie a DOG to the plant and then put food out of reach.
0:52The hungry dog would run for it, ripping the mandrake from the ground while the person stayed far enough away to survive the scream.
0:55And in some versions of the story, the dog wasn't supposed to survive.
0:59Five hundred years later, the games took that monster and kept almost every detail.
1:02The body that's a root.
1:06The little human shape.
1:09The burial.
1:13The scream when you pull it.
1:16They just made it small, and round, and blue, and gave it two sleepy eyes and a smile, and it worked on all of us.
1:20Thirty years of players have squeezed this thing, collected it, stuck it on lunchboxes and phone cases, and almost nobody ever noticed what they were holding.
1:23So, homework, because Oddish is nowhere near the only one.
1:27Every generation has Pokémon hiding a real myth or a real horror story under the cute version.
Special firepower at 75.
Oddish's base stat total is 320. The shape of a stat spread tells you everything about a Pokémon's role. Tanks lean defense, sweepers lean speed and attack.