Mimikyu

Confirmed 186,812

Part of a series on Pokémon Sun and Moon. [View Related Entries]

About

Mimikyu is a Ghost-Fairy type Pokémon that will be featured in Nintendo's upcoming generation of the video games Pokémon: Sun and Moon. Upon its introduction in July 2016, the character drew a quite a bit of attention from the fanbase due to its mysterious nature under the veil of a makeshift Pikachu costume.

Origin

On July 12th, 2016, Pokemon news site Serebii^[1] tweeted a scanned image of two new Pokemon characters, Mimikyu and Kiteruguma, to be featured in the upcoming Pokemon games Sun and Moon from an issue of CoroCoro Magazine (shown below). Within a week, the tweet^[2] gained over 4,900 retweets and 3,800 likes.

On July 19th, Nintendo officially introduced Mimikyu along with five other new characters in a trailer released via YouTube, where it garnered nearly two million views in the first 24 hours. Aside from its type and costumed disguise of a Pikachu, little is known about the character's actual appearance.

Spread

Following the initial leak of the character, YouTuber Shofu uploaded a video the same day discussing and analyzing parts of the CoroCoro magainze, gaining over 76,000 views and 4,000 likes (shown below). On 4chan's /vp/ board, users replicated the Give Pikachu a Face exploitable with Mimikkyu, with two templates made and several edits created^[3]^[4].

Various Examples

Shortly after its unveiling, the character quickly gained a fandom due to its Pikachu-like appearance and dark backstory. Fanart and mentions of the Pokémon exploded on Twitter^[5], DeviantArt^[6], and Tumblr^[7].