I love Pokémon so much that over the years I’ve spent a lot of time engaging in the extremely nerdy pastime of making up my own. In my stories there is a video game franchise that is an obvious “expy,” or export, of Pokémon, which sometimes gets mentioned or played, and I call it Culinpon.
Obviously this nonsense word sounds somewhat like “Pokémon,” but where I got it is in my opinion an even better story than just that. Back in the days where text messages had been invented but you had to send them with flip phones, you couldn’t just type letters. You had to use the T9 system that matched the keypad numbers to clusters of letters, like how 2 covers ABC so you would have to hit it twice to get a B, for example. The predictive T9 system would try to guess what you likely meant so if you typed 233 it would probably write “bee” but it could also write “add.” And when I typed the numbers for “Atkinson,” a somewhat bland English last name, into this system for the first time, it did not write “Atkinson” but… “Culinpon.” I was offended, then astounded, then charmed. Eventually I started using this word for my made-up Pokémon, or “fakemon” as the community calls them.
Culinpon or the games show up in a few of my stories, and as of right now two stories are actually set in the world of Culinpon. Sometimes I get bitter that Pokémon has already been invented because it’s just so awesome. It’s my dream in life to create something with so amazing a vibe. Something with such a huge sense of wonder.
Most notably I write about a human character called Shricky (whose name is a baby-talk form of Patrick given to him by his twin sister) and it is a minor detail that there also exists a Culinpon character called Shricky, which is a shrike (like how Pidgey and Starly are pigeon and starling Pokémon (actually Pidgey is not really pigeon-like but whatever)). I also have a story where this character makes a couple LLMs have a Culinpon battle with each other using fake Culinpon— yes, multiple levels of fakeness… this is called a theme.
I was talking a few days ago about how the canon in my stories is “squishy” and the Culinpon franchise is no exception. I’m not quite sure right now how many Culinpon games exist, what order they go in, which monsters are in which games, etc., but I do maintain a large database of Culinpon-related ideas and over the past year and a half have done a good job of writing stories that I can show people instead of filling out a spreadsheet of fake Pokémon, LMAO. One of my stories features the beginning of a Culinpon paired version called Culinpon Aloha & Ohana, which is set in a Hawaii-themed region but came out later than 2016 which is when the Hawaii-themed Pokémon Sun & Moon came out.