Pokémon Sun and Moon has turned everyone against one of the coolest original Pokémon

If you’ve seen the Pokémon cartoon, you know that two of most interesting monsters in the original Pokédex are Meowth and Persian. The feline pair are regularly employed by Team Rocket, and while Meowth is a beleagured (English-speaking!) chatterbox, Persian is the definition of cool cat.

Not so with Pokémon Sun and Moon. We’ve met the new Nintendo 3DS games’ bratty take on Meowth before, but yesterday’s datamining of the demo introduced us to a new version of Persian. In case you didn’t think Pokémon could get much worse than a fighting pair of keys or a breathing pile of garbage, the Alola region’s variant of Persian seems to be in the running to change everyone’s mind.

It’s that big face that has the internet in an uproar. Comparisons to Garfield, one of history’s most infuriating felines, are aplenty, and Alolan Persian has been slapped with pejoratives like “inbred” by brusque Twitter users.

But perhaps Alolan Persian is just developer Game Freak’s attempt to revamp the original Pokémon, who we’ve known since the Red and Blue days, to be closer to its real life inspiration. Actual Persians have huge faces; they’re not svelte and menacing like Team Rocket’s pet of choice.

This interpretation won’t change the minds of aesthetics-driven trainers who were looking forward to using Alolan Persian’s pre-evolution. The official description for Alolan Meowth highlights how spoiled it is, suggesting all it does is eat fancy food all day and expect to be pampered. Perhaps that’s why Alolan Persian’s face looks so bloated?

But then, who can say for sure? That is, other than Nintendo or Game Freak, each of which has stayed mum about the recent leaks that brought to light Alolan Persian and the entirety of the region’s Pokédex. Information continues to dribble out of the new Sun and Moon demo’s files, and while none of it has been confirmed from the companies themselves, of this we can be certain: Alolan Persian, they did you wrong.