Pokemon of the Week #7: Paras

Pokemon of the Week: Paras, the Mushroom Pokemon

Behind those cute bug eyes lie a
horrifying story!

Damn, we got a good one this week. Paras has been a Pokemon I really liked. I mean, I am a huge, huge fan of Bug-type Pokemon and insects and their ilk in general, but Paras looked kind of cool. He's like a beetle with huge front claws, spider-y rear legs, a very bug-y maw, cute eyes and two cute mushrooms on his back. I mean, he's a little bug with mushrooms, and when he evolves into a Parasect, the mushroom gets bigger. He's a simple design, like, a bug with mushrooms growing on it... it's like Bulbasaur, right? A frog with an onion flower bulb on his back. So yeah, he's a Bug/Grass type. Which means that Paras is, like, weak to everything. Sure, he quad-resists Ground and Grass, but honestly practically everything else hits Paras for huge, huge damage.

Paras is most prominent in the first two generations, being caught in the wild in Generation I's Mt. Moon and Safari Zone, the former being a relatively early location for players to go through. Paras also has a hilarious and very fun-sounding cry that probably ranks very highly among the Generation I pixel-cries that I remember the most fondly of. In Generation II, Paras hangs out in Ilex Forest in the mornings and nights, also a relatively early route for you to run around in. Throughout Generations III to VI, though, Paras is just relegated as swarm or secret Pokemon you only unlock after beating the game or whatever. Generation VII finally threw Paras a bone and had Paras show up in Brooklet Hill and Lush Jungle, and even had Parasect show up as a miniboss in Mallow's trial.

Paras had like an episode or two in the anime, one where Ash's Charmander evolved into Charmeleon. Damned if I remember what Paras did in that episode, but they needed his spores for... something. Crystal from the Pokemon Adventures manga runs Parasect as one of her core members, but I'm not sure it ever actually did anything particularly important.

But other than that, there's really nothing too remarkable about Paras or Parasect. They learn a pretty generic gamut of Grass and Bug-type moves, the odd Poison-type move or two. The move Spore, with 100% Sleep accuracy, used to be exclusive to Paras, but as more and more mushroom Pokemon are introduced (Shroomish, Foongus, Morelull...) Spore gets given to them and Paras loses the one thing unique to them competitively. Certainly nothing that really make you want to pick Paras to put in your team over so many more useful and interesting Bug-types. Paras has a base stat total of 285, which is average for Basic Pokemon. As a fully-evolved Parasect, its stat total barely exceeds 400, which isn't that horrible, reaching that of the middle evolutions of the starters... but nothing to write home about in the grand scheme of things. It's a physical attacker, but its stats are relatively middling, and really the only decent physical STAB he gets is X-Scissor.

So what about the lore? Beyond being a mushroom-bug, I mean. The Pokedex entries talk about how Paras burrows onto tree roots and how it absorbs nutrition from tree roots, and then the mushrooms on its back absorb nutrition from it. So it's a play on parasitism, which is fine. I mean, both you and I right now have like a huge colony of bacteria playing parasite inside our intestines and on our skins, and the more filthy among us have fungi growing in unmentionable places as well. It's a gross piece of nature fact that's actually quite cool for me to learn as a kid.

Various dex entries identify Paras's mushrooms as the Tochukaso mushroom, all the way from Generation II to even its entry in Pokemon Moon. While Pokemon has scrubbed out all references to real life (like South Africa in Mew's Gen I Pokedex entry, or references to elephants in Gastly's Gen I Pokedex entry), the Tochukaso is one of the few that remain. The thing is, the Tochukaso is a very, very real fungus in the world, the Ophiocordyceps sinensis, popularly shortened as Cordyceps. Tochukaso is the Japanese reading of its Chinese name, 冬虫夏草 (dong chong xia chao, literally caterpillar summer grass). 

Despite what popular culture might imply, not all fungi are mushrooms, and certainly the Cordyceps aren't shaped like the toadstool mushrooms that grow out of Paras's back. No, the actual real-life Cordyceps take the form of black, icky worm-like tendrils when grown out of their hosts. And despite the association of fungi with the Grass-type in Pokemon, they're actually the third kingdom separate from animals and plants. Where most plants create their own nutrition via photosynthesis, fungi are parasitic and rely on other living things to feed them. Most are content to just feed on dead plants and animals (or that slice of bread you forgot to eat and left on the counter for days), but the Cordyceps is just so much more insane. It's a specialized parasite straight out of a sci-fi horror story, just on a lower scale. Cordyceps sinensis specifically target a certain species of caterpillars, killing them as larvae, before sprouting out of their corpses and growing as crude-looking extensions of themselves into the air before spreading their spores to spread more grub-killing fungi into the world. 

While the actual Tochukaso is relatively benign, its other relatives in the Cordyceps genus is a lot more... graphic. Featured in the manga Terraformars for those of you long enough to frequent this blog to remember when I reviewed that manga, a species of the Cordyceps genus, the Cordyceps unilateralis, targets a particular species of ants, and instead of killing the ants directly like the Tochukaso, it consumes the ant's non-vital tissues, before spreading into the ant's brain, altering the poor ant's perception and compelling it to seek a high altitude, before clamping down with its jaws. Only then, on a prime position to spread spores to infect more ants, does the fungus allow the ant to expire. Yeah. It's... definitely not the fun, cartoon-looking happy insect that Paras is. No, this thing is a freaking zombie ant fungus, and it's one of the most horrifying things in nature. 

The thing is, as the years go by, the Pokedex entries have not been shy at enforcing that, hey, no matter how much Paras eats, the Tochukaso mushrooms steal away all the nutrients. And there's not a god damned thing you, the trainer, can do about that, short of ripping off the Paras's mushrooms, and then what would be left of your Paras? Just... a bug. Even evolving it into Parasect actually just enlarges the mushroom so that it envelops Parasect's entire body, acting more like a shell than a mushroom growing on it. Parasect's eyes are entirely white and brain-dead, showing that, yeah, by evolving your Pokemon to gain power, you have effectively rendered the bug portion of Paras brain-dead, nothing but the plaything of the Tochukaso mushroom, the entity that is calling the shots of the Parasect gestalt.

I mean, the Pokedex identifies Paras and Parasect as the 'Mushroom Pokemon', and never the insect Pokemon or the parasitic Pokemon, so it might be that even as early as its life as a Paras, the bug portion of Paras never actually had a chance, and the mushroom was in control all along. Hell, I know this article is mostly about Paras, but Parasect's Pokedex entries have such... graphic descriptions of how Parasect is a zombie bug controlled by its mushroom. Its very first dex entry describes it as "the parasite mushroom has taken over the host bug", and future dex entries get progressively darker and darker. "The bug host is drained of energy by the mushrooms on its back." "When there's nothing left to extract from the bug, the mushrooms on its back leave spores on the bug's egg." "The large mushroom on its back controls it."

Yeah. This went from going to talking about the Pokemon of the Week into a straight-up biology lesson, and I really, really love weird and creepy animals and plants and fungi, but Paras himself is just kind of a boring bug-type if not for this backstory. Pokemon has had a great history of exaggerating natural aspects of the weirder part of the natural life, but none, I think, is as well done and unsettling as Paras and Parasect are.