Mega Beedrill

Image from Pokémon Omega Ruby, Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (video games, 2014)

Once-Empowered Poison Bee

Beast/Toxic Type

Original Media: Pokémon Omega Ruby, Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (video games, 2014)

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• Mega Beedrill
  • Story
  • Abilities
  • Voice
    • General Description
  • Behind the Scenes
  • Images

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Story

Before I had even joined The Chaos Zone, a major event took place that split the setting into two main universes: Dimension 1, and Dimension 2. Dimension 1 is where most things happen, but Dimension 2 is still worth noting, especially as not too long after it was created, it was merged with a world where sapient Pokémon existed separate from humans.

However, for a short time, Dimension 2 was similar to Dimension 1, and in this short time, there lived a Pokémon: a Beedrill, to be specific. When Dimension 2 changed, the Beedrill became similar to most Pokémon there, except he held on to certain knowledge.

The main thing he remembered was that trainers could “Mega Evolve” their Pokémon, bringing them to new, unseen strengths. With Beedrill (plural) being weak enough to need to work in swarms as-is, the chance to become powerful and independent was tantalizing, especially to this Beedrill…and when he found that this great power was erased (referring to how newer Pokémon games have removed Mega Evolution), he was furious. But all he could do was sit and mope…

…until one day, when a strange paper ended up in his grasp. Thinking it was nothing, the Beedrill wrote about his past potential to be Mega Beedrill…and just like that, the paper (actually a magic-imbued page of a book used by another character to alter the powers of others) granted him his wish, transforming him into Mega Beedrill.

But Mega Beedrill wasn’t satisfied. He was happy he had his power back, sure, but without care for why it happened or if it was done to wrong him (or any Beedrill, for that matter), he decided the world needed to pay back, and see him for the great being he thought he was. He wrote the four Seekers of Strength into existence, seeing their purpose as just to symbolize his own power, and announce his undying, universal rule.

As the Seekers were some of the first to learn, Mega Beedrill is greedy, insatiable, angry, and mean. He couldn’t have cared less for the free thinking the Seekers all had, refusing to even call one of them, Battlewing, a “her” and not an “it”. Trying to convince him to take a different approach is a lost cause; all you’ll do in trying is ramp him up, because when he’s at his most furious, he doesn’t care if he dies as long as he makes himself seem more misunderstood than he is cruel.

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Abilities

Twineedle image is from Pokémon Colosseum (video game, 2003).

X-Scissor image is from Pokémon Sword or Pokémon Shield (both are video games released in 2019).

Poison Jab image is from Pokémon Sword or Pokémon Shield.

Infestation image is from Pokémon GO (video game, 2016).

Fury Cutter image is from Pokémon Sword or Pokémon Shield.

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Voice

General Description

Young Adult; medium pitch; rude, mouthy, very prone to anger, can raise his voice up to the top of his lungs when angry

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Behind the Scenes

Beedrill and Mega Beedrill have always held a special place in my heart. While I greatly enjoy the design of normal Beedrill, I feel bad that its power is low enough in the Pokémon series that it’s not used as much when people are near the end of a Pokémon game, and especially not when people organize competitive Pokémon battles. So, when Mega Beedrill was revealed, I was ecstatic to see a favorite Pokémon of mine get a boost in power, and given that Beedrill was just one of the earliest Pokémon to face such power struggles, I was hoping it would set a precedent for other Pokémon like it to get Mega Evolutions to make them viable choices in even the grandest of fights. Over time, I’ve only appreciated Mega Beedrill more, especially learning how it got such a power increase; while Mega Evolution adds a fixed amount of total power to every Pokémon who can get it, Mega Beedrill gets a further power boost by lowering stats it didn’t use anyway, and giving however much was lowered to stats it does use.

As I allude to under “Story”, the idea of Mega Evolution was removed from the main series in Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield, both video games released in 2019. While I admit Mega Evolution wasn’t perfect when it was around (Some Pokémon with Mega Evolutions were so strong they didn’t need such a power boost, and some might have benefited a little too much), what it did for some Pokémon, especially Beedrill, was something I hated to see go away. To this day, my interest in modern Pokémon has waned with the loss of Mega Beedrill.

Around 2021 or 2022, inspiration struck for an idea of making a Mega Beedrill a character to write; on top of the aforementioned history of Mega Beedrill’s existence and my interest in it, I felt inspired by two ideas previously introduced to Chaos Zone:

Recently (at the time), one character had been using some sort of “character book” to create and alter the power of existing characters. Thinking about how books often have a blank page at the start, I thought of what happened if one of those pages ended up in the hands of a Beedrill who had suffered through the real-life introduction and removal of Mega Evolution, and wanted that power back.

The thing is, many of the known Pokémon in the world(s) of Chaos Zone are sapient beings who live in a different universe; one based on the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon spinoff games, which take place in a world where sapient Pokémon live in a world without humans…except, near the very beginning of the roleplay, when this world was created, there was a short span of time where it wasn’t like that. I decided to take this detail (otherwise an incredibly incidental one) and use it for part of why this Beedrill knew about so many things that wouldn’t be known to a Mystery Dungeon character: They were a Pokémon in that alternate world even before it became a world (initially) populated only by Pokémon.

Meanwhile, I was interested in writing a new villain whose motives were different from those I had written before. With most of my villains enjoying doing the wrong thing, I wanted to try writing a villain who didn’t see themselves as evil, despite thinking the same way other people think. I felt Mega Beedrill’s backstory gave a good chance at this, and decided that even after he found a way to become Mega again after (supposedly?) losing that power, he had built up a sense of wrathful greed, thinking that the world owed him an apology for what had happened (even though the roleplay never said that the disappearance of Mega Evolution was an act of divine malice).

This was where the other idea based on the “character book” came in; much as the past character had used the character book to create fusions of other characters, Mega Beedrill used the magic-imbued blank page he had to create characters who were similarly designed to resemble multiple existing characters (Mega Beedrill’s knowledge of a world that wasn’t just Pokémon helped explain this, too). This is where I really got into writing Mega Beedrill’s vices, having him think living beings are below people just because he made them, and being unable to stop and think “maybe I’m the problem now”.

Overall, Mega Beedrill is one of my favorite villains I’ve written. His motives give the impression that you could have sympathized with him at one time, but he’s so much more demanding, abusive, and greedy for more than he lost in the first place that you can’t call his actions justified anymore.

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Images