The Shapeshifter Surfaces

Ditto has no real form. That’s the whole point of it—a Pokémon defined entirely by its capacity to become other things, a pink blob with two dot eyes and a fixed grin that transforms into a perfect copy of whatever it’s looking at. In the original Game Boy games it lived in a single cave on a single route, lurking there as though it had been placed specifically to unsettle you. In the anime it wore other faces so completely that you’d only know it was Ditto when the copy started slipping, the features going slightly wrong, the two black dots staying the same no matter what body they sat in.

When Pokémon GO launched in the summer of 2016 and briefly became the only thing anyone was talking about, Ditto wasn’t in it. The game launched with 151 Pokémon from the first generation, but Ditto was simply absent—not withheld in the way the Legendaries were, announced and promised as future events, but unacknowledged. Players catalogued everything catchable and Ditto appeared on no list. It became a running joke and a genuine blank: the one missing entry in an otherwise complete set.

Then in November 2016 the reports started coming in. Players claiming they’d caught it—not as itself, but hiding inside other Pokémon. A Pidgey or a Rattata or a Zubat that, once caught, revealed the transformation. The reveal animation. The two dot eyes. The grin. Niantic had apparently had it in the game the whole time, disguised as the most forgettable Pokémon in your neighborhood. Which is exactly what Ditto would do.