There Were Only Ever 151

There are 151 Pokémon. Everything after that is someone else’s problem. The talking keychains, the grass hedgehogs, whatever generation we’re allegedly on now—all fan fiction as far as I’m concerned. Charmander, Bulbasaur, Squirtle. Pikachu, fine, though I won’t pretend I never wanted to throw him off a roof. Pikaaaaaa.

Designer Karolin Gu apparently agrees, at least for now. She set herself the task of illustrating each of the original 151 in her own style—one per day, patient and quietly obsessive, which is exactly the energy those games always deserved. The results are soft and a little surreal: familiar creatures filtered through a sensibility that makes them look like something you half-remember dreaming at age ten. They accumulate on Instagram, one tiny monster at a time.

What gets me isn’t really the illustrations, though they’re genuinely good. It’s that Pokémon sits in a specific stratum of childhood memory where nothing required explanation. The only question that mattered was whether your friend’s team was better than yours—before taxes, job interviews, and the thousand other adult obligations that turn out to just be more of the same thing in different packaging. Gu’s project is a small door back to that. I’m glad someone left it open.