The Original 151

Only 151 mattered. Everyone knew this. Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, and if you were a kid with any taste, you’d pretend there was nothing after those. Maybe Pikachu if the moment called for it. Everything past that was noise—oversized whales, talking keychains, whatever they kept dreaming up. The real ones fit in a single generation. They had personality. They had restraint.

Karolin Gu apparently agrees. She’s been illustrating one Pokémon a day—just from the original roster—and posting them somewhere. The results are small, detailed, weirdly charming. You see one and suddenly you’re remembering the exact feeling of that summer, the specific texture of the playground, the person you were trying to impress.

That’s what this is really about, I think. Not the cute factor, though they are cute. Not the artwork, though it’s solid. It’s the permission to return to a moment when the only problem was whether Manu had better creatures than you did. No taxes, no rejections, no thinking about the future. Just: can mine beat yours? And sometimes they could.

The thing about Karolin drawing these day after day is that it feels both pointless and necessary in equal measure. Like she’s preserving something that doesn’t actually need preserving because we all remember it anyway. But then you see a well-rendered Gyarados and you realize that’s not what this is. It’s not about memory. It’s about the fact that these things were actually good, and someone’s spending their time reminding us.