Oh, Charmander is a Pokémon from the videogame Pokémon. In the video the titular animals evolve into different, stronger animals.
They fight battles and after winning enough of them it triggers their evolution.
The joke is that instead of evolving as they do in the videogame, they instead follow the meme concept of carcinisation and all evolved into a crab shaped Pokémon.
It’s a bit of a horror movie trope, where the protagonist is an ‘other’ and slowly swarmed by a group of identical or similar enough beings.
The implication being that their difference is not wanted and/or that they know too much about the situation which could be a threat, this further ties into the carcinisation joke because everything else has become a crab except for this one child.
You seriously never in any way came into contact with the pokemon series? It’s been huge with kids in the late 90s / 2000s and is still a massive franchise.
I love the joke, but technically carcinisation is only about non-crab crustaceans and their divergent evolution into crab-like forms, and it’s not referring to the evolution of other organisms at all
Oh, it’s a reference from the original generation of the Pokemon games. Charmander is one of three pokemon the player can choose between at the start of the gameto take on the adventure. Pokemon “evolve” after winning enough battles against other pokemon.
deleted by creator
XKCD
How do they keep doing this
They don’t have their finger on the pulse of the nerd zeitgeist, they are the zeitgeist.
That’s the second time in ten minutes that I bumped into a relevant xkcd this morning!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
tl;dr: Crabs are the perfect life form and we all yearn to evolve into them.
Applies to crustaceans only. :(
So it’d be like talking about lifes “many attempts at making a cow” and showing a bunch of bull like animals with horns.
Similar lifeforms, once put in a similar environment for a long period of time, tend to develop similar features.
deleted by creator
Oh, Charmander is a Pokémon from the videogame Pokémon. In the video the titular animals evolve into different, stronger animals.
They fight battles and after winning enough of them it triggers their evolution.
The joke is that instead of evolving as they do in the videogame, they instead follow the meme concept of carcinisation and all evolved into a crab shaped Pokémon.
Why are they all attacking the kid?
It’s a bit of a horror movie trope, where the protagonist is an ‘other’ and slowly swarmed by a group of identical or similar enough beings.
The implication being that their difference is not wanted and/or that they know too much about the situation which could be a threat, this further ties into the carcinisation joke because everything else has become a crab except for this one child.
deleted by creator
You seriously never in any way came into contact with the pokemon series? It’s been huge with kids in the late 90s / 2000s and is still a massive franchise.
deleted by creator
I love the joke, but technically carcinisation is only about non-crab crustaceans and their divergent evolution into crab-like forms, and it’s not referring to the evolution of other organisms at all
Carcinisation
deleted by creator
Oh, it’s a reference from the original generation of the Pokemon games. Charmander is one of three pokemon the player can choose between at the start of the gameto take on the adventure. Pokemon “evolve” after winning enough battles against other pokemon.
deleted by creator
This feels like an other XKCD comic
deleted by creator