Turatal

Gowatu (basic stage)

Turatal's Phoenixdex Entry

First new art of 2010! I did it earlier in the month, actually, but just hadn't gotten around to uploading it yet. For the curious, yes, I do still have that large backlog of pics, but the thing about that is that the vast majority of the leftovers were members of unfinished evolution lines. I didn't want to upload one if the others weren't ready. Well, a... project I'm working on needs a lot of these pictures to be finished, so I got off my lazy ass and completed those unfinished lines. Now, not only are they ready for my project, I can finally get around to uploading them *and* the other members of their families here on dA! The end of the backlog is in sight!

Anyway! Turatal is based on a type of bird called a turaco. Turacos and their relatives are very pretty and colorful... and noisy. Very, very noisy. Turatal like nothing better than to set up a huge racket for absolutely no reason whatsoever. They scream and hoot and rattle their feathers and shake tree branches and generally make excessive amounts of unbearable noise. Sometimes they even hold noise-offs to see which Turatal can be the loudest and most obnoxious. They're decent battlers but, as you can imagine, a real headache to own.

For those who don't know, Cacophony is actually a real ability--I didn't make it up. Its effect is identical to Soundproof. It was programmed into Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, presumably to be used for Loudred and Exploud if not Whismur as well, but was never used for whatever reason. They removed it from the coding for Diamond and Pearl. Ditching Cacophony has never made any sense to me, especially since duplicate abilities (like Huge Power/Pure Power) do exist, so since these guys are nice and noisy I figured it would be nice to bring it back for them.

No amount of wishful thinking will ever make Pokémon mine, but at least I get Turatal as a consolation prize.