Pokémon

Until I began doing some research for this article, I thought that Stantler was simply a basic deer Pokémon with nothing particularly unusual to make it stand out from the crowd. I picked it because it is the Pokémon equivalent of a reindeer and, in some Pokémon media, it is depicted as pulling Santa’s sleigh through the sky, so I thought it would be a nice Christmas tie-in (its shiny form even has a red nose!). But when I started taking a closer look at Stantler, I found its origins to be more interesting and complex than I’d initially imagined.

Stantler lives in herds in temperate forests. Rather than having a dainty cartoon deer face, it has a bulbous nose (almost reminiscent of a koala) and floppy jowls. Its most distinctive features, however, are its strange antlers, which both male and female possess. The shape of the antlers (and the black orbs within them) makes them look like eyes. Stantler can distort reality and create illusions with these antlers by subtly altering the flow of air around them. Staring into them creates an odd sensation, as if you are being sucked through them, and you may become so dizzy that it is impossible to stand. These antlers were once so valuable to hunters that this Pokémon was nearly driven to extinction. Today, Stantler is protected, but the round balls found on its fallen antlers can be legally collected and ground into a powder that aids in sleeping. Even though Stantler can learn a variety of Psychic- and Ghost-type moves, such as Hypnosis and Confuse Ray, this Pokémon is 100 per cent Normal-type, which I always found a bit odd.

Stantler’s English name is an obvious combination of stag and antler. Its Japanese name, meanwhile, is Odoshishi. This comes from the term shishi odoshi, a general term for a range of devices used to scare away animals. The device most commonly associated with shishi odoshi is the souzu – a hollow bamboo tube on a pivot, with its heavier, closed end resting on a rock and its open end raised. A stream of water pours into the mouth of the tube from above, gradually filling it up. When the water inside reaches a certain level, the tube’s centre of gravity shifts, causing it to tip up, pour the water out, and then swing back to its original position. As the tube hits the rock it rests on, it makes a sudden noise intended to scare away any nearby animals.

In the English-speaking world, we’re familiar with the concept of a scarecrow – a humanoid figure dressed in old clothes that is placed in open fields to deter birds from disturbing and eating seeds and crops. In Japan, what we call a scarecrow is considered just one type of shishi odoshi. But, just like the word ‘scarecrow’, shishi odoshi is associated with one animal in particular – not a crow in this instance, but a deer. That’s because the literal translation of the phrase is ‘deer scarer’. Most of these ‘deer scarers’ aren’t actually used to specifically deter deer (just like how scarecrows aren’t intended to exclusively scare away crows), but the deer is nonetheless the animal identified in the Japanese phrase.

As mentioned earlier, Stantler’s mesmerising, hypnotic antlers are curved to resemble a pair of huge, staring eyes, complete with black orbs that look like pupils. This seems to be a reference to a type of shishi odoshi that is sometimes called ‘eyeball balloons’. These consist of large balloons decorated with concentric circles, resulting in something that looks a bit like a giant eye. These are said to be very unnerving to most birds, who associate them with the staring eyes of a predator. Stantler’s antlers have simply been changed from scaring off foes to hypnotising them instead.

So, like a surprising number of Pokémon, Stantler is actually the product of a pun: it’s a ‘deer scarer’ that also happens to be a deer. The thing is, deer and scaring animals aren’t really associated with each other outside Japan, so the wordplay doesn’t translate well into other languages. That’s why there’s no hint of a joke in Stantler’s English name¹.

Next time, we look at Stantler’s evolved form, Wyrdeer – even if it took 20 years to arrive on the scene.

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1. Nob Ogasawara, the translator of the Pokémon games to English, suggested ‘Scaribou’ for Stantler’s English name – a combination of ‘scary’ and ‘caribou’ (an alternate name for reindeer) – which would at least have touched upon the Pokémon’s inspiration, but Nintendo of America did not accept the name. ↩︎