Qwilfish and Overqwil: The Poisonous Pufferfish Mythology of Hisui

[00:00:01]what's this a video about quill fish it's more likely than you think because here it is what's this a video about quill fish it's more likely than you think because here it is wait a second look at this something seems so odd about it is this some kind of regional variant oh wait that jogged my memory quillfish has been a pokemon since y2k it's just that nobody talks about it because i mean look at it it's just a puffer or blowfish what more than that is there to say i mean it's cute look at his little face look how it inflates so then why does no one ever talk about this does it just have to do with it being a forgettable fish like so many other forgettable fish pokemon or could it be because you need a super rod only on a handful of routes and even then it only has a five percent chance of appearing so like nobody had it and then even the people who did have it didn't use it because it it's not good like its stats are terrible and its move pools probably probably both of both of those things well game freak hasn't forgotten about it pokemon legends archaeolus has given us a regional variant hissuian quillfish and it even evolves it's like literally the porcupuffer from super mario what is this splatoon obstacle doing in my pokemon game well let's get its etymology out of the way quail fish it's a fish with quills which are spines or spikes and over quill that's just plain overkill it doesn't need spikes so big they don't even fit in the little pokedex journal image thingy but it has them anyway it's overkill so what's its deal what's so special about sinnoh in the past so mizui that makes this pokemon makes sense what historic connection is there and why oh why is it poison dark type now all these questions and more in today's fish blowing video [Music] now i'd like to take a minute to tell you all about a wonderful experience i had with today's sponsor sakurako a wholesome japanese snack box subscription company that wants everybody to experience traditional japanese tea time with authentic artisan sweets snacks and tea whose flavors all work delightfully well with one another and i enjoyed a hanami picnic in my studio tasty little matcha cookies sakura manju oh man sakura blossoms just in the jelly i'm bad at eating there's a little peach in it oh each box also has an informative booklet that explains each of the 19 snacks and bit of kitchenware such as where they are from what they are made of and even tidbits of cultural detail ume from niigata it's so soft honestly the whole experience was super pleasant and if this interests you i definitely recommend checking it out with the link at the top of the description and using the coupon code lockston for five dollars off of your first soccer echo order it's hot pun it's like a small duck uh i i can explain but first a fun fact this isn't even the first time game freak considered giving cool fish an evolution all the way back in gen 2's development there was a beta pokemon named shibere fugu which loosely translates to numbness puffer fish and he's a pretty cute dude right well for some reason they didn't stick with that design because then later in the 1997 demo of gold and silver it looked like this which isn't terrible by pre-release mod standards but it's got nothing on the previous design in my personal opinion also it looks even less like a quill fish or even less like a puffed up puffer fish at all though the lightning bolt on the 97 demo one does sort of imply that it was going to be electric type though as we know when the game actually did come out see barry fugu was gone and quillfish ended up being water poison maybe the indecision of what its evolution should look like or be is what led to it eventually being scrapped completely who knows but then why add quill fish at all well the easy answer is that there are many species of blowfish that live all around the world japan included because it's a part of the world and many of them are poisonous hence the poison typing on both forms in fact it's their poisonous nature that makes the consumption of them considered a daring delicacy there's a pretty decent chance that you've heard about fugu which can either refer to risky traditional japanese delicacies made from puffer fish or can refer to several species of puffer fish or porcupine fish in japanese most of which are used to make said japanese dish a bit confusing eh not as confusing as why eating this would cross someone's mind fugu if not prepared exactly right is highly poisonous due to a toxin called tratodotoxin which is 1200 times deadlier than cyanide and it's the same toxin that makes blue ringed octopus and cone snails so deadly it's so deadly in fact that the dish called fugu is heavily regulated in japan and you have to train for three entire years to be allowed to legally prepare it because it is that deadly if gotten wrong and only about a third of the chefs who trained to do it ever actually become legally qualified granted that is genuinely reassuring given the black standards of cooking in a lot of other parts of the world freaking beans on toast monsters to make matters worse the part of the puffer fish that used to be the most sought after was the liver and the dish was called fubukimo but since the liver is literally the most poisonous part of this water for brains fish the japanese government did the sensible thing and made the liver illegal to prepare in restaurants whatsoever there were just too many deaths happening everywhere and this law didn't happen until 1984. yeah they were censoring the food oh yeah and another fun fact that i love is that the tetrodotoxin isn't even made by the buffer fish itself it's created from the bacteria inside of the puffer fish that it gets from eating stuff that contains that bacteria this last fact is probably why overquill's pokedex entry says that it likes to slurp up poison to nourish itself it eats poison the same way puffer fish eat poisonous things that make the poison inside of it and since the porcupine fish are sometimes used instead of puffer fish to make fugu kisuian quillfish's dex entry states that it sprays poison from its spines getting it everywhere and one of normal cool fish's pokedex entries says that it shoots the poison from the spines on its body in all directions that could very well be a reference to the common misconception that porcupines shoot out their quills as a self-defense mechanism they don't actually since we're talking about pokedex entries here's one for classic cool fish when faced with a larger opponent it swallows as much water as it can to match the opponent's size which like any opponent's size so why is a sui and quillfish dark type now well it's dark type because shooting its poisonous load everywhere is gross and mean but also it's more interesting than that it's also because some species of pufferfish are considered extremely aggressive as far as pet fish go especially the red eyed puffer it's like a stoner name but also it's more interesting than that and it has to do with its own history how perfect for a historic region than a fugu the dish not the fish has been around in japan for centuries though i'm sure the fish has two fugu bones have been found in several shell middens called kaizuka from the yoman period which dates back to more than 2 300 years ago eventually during the tokugawa shogunate too many important people were dying from this dish and it was just banned outright in the parts of japan they controlled but once the shogunate weakened fish speakeasies started popping up if you don't know in the 1920s the u.s made alcohol illegal all this did was make the underworld richer as secret bars known as speakeasies popped up all over the major cities mostly controlled by the mafia same thing here except it was fish that could kill you [Music] how very very japanese as the shogunate continued to weaken further however they just straight up could not enforce it nobody took them seriously so it just sort of became legal again daredevil's gonna dare and i'd like to congratulate fugu on winning the war on fugu though actually i guess either way it loses because like [Music] the fish dies but this association with the black market and crime could be exactly why it's dark type after all dark type is also known as the evil or mean-spirited type and plus just think haunts crow it's just straight up a mafia mob boss this is also why dark type pokemon are weak to fighting type because the fighting type is also seen as the justice hero type but it gets even better if you remember a while ago we did a video talking about when legends of rks seems to be taking place based on the clothing architecture technology politics and more and we more or less hit the mark the meiji restoration the period where japan sort of forcefully modernized hokkaido conveniently it was the meiji era that fugu found itself banned all over again it's illegal dark even today according to some fugu chefs in tokyo the emperor of japan has never eaten fugu due to an unspecified centuries-old ban of course though the peasants citizens can risk it for the biscuit all they want so what's so good about this fish that makes it worth risking your life over i mean it's even popular in china and korea and one chinese scholar statesman poet conveniently named sushi which means something different in chinese but i just couldn't not bring it up that's hilarious given the topic of what we're talking about uh he specifically said that the taste of fugu is the worry of death how poetic so like that's not a real flavor is it really just the thrill of potentially ending it all really worth all the hype that sounds kind of like suicidal ideation not actively planning to kill yourself but not really caring if you die so just risk it see a therapist please sushi besides nobody would really want to die by fugu because do you even know how you die if you got yourself even the tiniest little nibble of poison it's not pretty allow me to explain as i mentioned earlier it is their tetrodotoxin that you gotta watch out for and rather than being made by the fish itself it is actually produced by a certain infecting or symbiotic bacteria so do alta ramonas or pseudomonas and vibrio i can pronounce that one at least the puffer fish eats all that bacteria and it gets stored in their liver intestines and ovaries and so to prepare the dish you need to slice off the flesh of the fish without damaging or getting anywhere close to those organs as doing so will poison the flesh or the knife in fact japanese law in many prefectures states that restaurants who serve fugu have to have a separate knife and prep station for fugu and only fugu and oh boy do you have to clean it like a lot the last thing you need is cross contamination and now the whole restaurant is filled with dead men walking so what does tritotoxin do well it is what's known as a sodium channel blocker which means that it inhibits the conduction of sodium ions through voltage-gated sodium channels it does this by inhibiting the firing of action potentials in neurons and blocking the movement of sodium ions into the neuron put in a way this fish could understand it prevents the nervous system from sending messages via bioelectricity which means that muscles can't contract and so nervous stimuli happens body can't understand what anything means basically it makes your body just like not like like no more anything at the cellular level if we want to get even more specific than that though tetrodotoxin binds to what is called site 1 of the fast voltage-gated sodium channel the toxin binds to the outside of the ion channel and when any molecules are bound to site 1 it temporarily disables the function of that ion channel which in turn blocks the passage of sodium ions into the nerve cell which as i mentioned earlier makes it to where your body cannot communicate with itself essentially there are a few other toxins that do basically the same thing but tetrodotoxin is the most malicious and potent of them dark poison type fun fact though your average fugu fish has enough of this toxin to kill over 30 grown adult humans and what is it that these fish are like actually trying to protect themselves against other fish talk about overkill but now what does this happening to someone look like well in layman's terms tetrodotoxin causes the following terrible symptoms dizziness exhaustion headache nausea and difficulty breathing all of these continually worsening until you start going numb and then the difficulty breathing leads to death by asphyxiation the bluing of the lips and eyes involved with this may be what the pokemon's faces are pulling from but the best part about all of this is that the victim is fully conscious the entire miserable time just imagine the panic just knowing that there's no known antidote and your best bet at survival is to get put on respiratory and circulatory support until your body metabolizes the toxin and then poops it out hospitals will sometimes also have your stomach pumped and they would administer activated charcoal to help get rid of some of the remaining poison in the stomach but there's not really much else they can do but despite or maybe because of all of the above stuff fugu is a very popular delicacy in japan and the most prestigious species used to make fugu is the tiger puffer fish or as it's known in japanese the torah fugu so why is this one so sought after just because it's the most poisonous of all of the species used why why why why why why something something humans crave fear something something there's a reason terror and terrific have the same root word something something in fact fugu is so sought after that the japanese government had to enact very strict laws about the amount of fuguble puffer fish to be caught at a time because they are being fished towards depletion yeah they're overfishing the deadly fish because people just love eating it so much but even with these strict laws tiger pufferfish are currently considered near endangered and their numbers are dropping still being caught in amounts that are considered unsustainable for the continuation of this species so considering the way humans seem to be acting lately we won't have to worry about people dying from fugu for much longer at least there i've gone and made myself sad again something that may or may not be related to overquill is ibisu one of the seven gods of fortune and the god of fishermen and luck specifically but because he didn't have arms or legs or sometimes not having bones depending on who tells the story he was thrown into the sea but he eventually washed to shore in hokkaido and was cared for by the ainu those indigenous to hokkaido and as we all know hisui and sinnoh are based on hokkaido and they have many things inspired by the ainu some versions of ibisu's story states that he eventually grew arms and legs again but is still very slow but many seafood restaurants known for their fugu will incorporate ibisu into their whole motif and decor after all the god of fishermen and luck you'd better hope you have a bisu's blessing not to be the unlucky one who gets the death juice plus he was also known for wearing a very tall hat an inspiration for overkill's name and tall spikes maybe no and even to this day many a fisherman can be seen praying to ibisu before heading out to fish for the day because he is said to protect both the ocean and fishermen another aspect of buffer fish and quillfish and over quill by extension that we haven't really talked about yet is the inflation no no that wasn't funny this kind of inflation how do puffer fish do that well the short of it is that they inflate themselves with water as a defense mechanism from being eaten and they do so by using specialized muscles in their throat and mouth to suck the water that's all around it into its stomach it takes about 10 to 15 sips for them to inflate to their maximum size though but that tends to be about three times bigger than their normal size and it's able to do this because its stomach lining has folds similar to an accordion so you can think of it just like an accordion except it's a fish and it's water also because of the way their spikes are built around the fishies as they expand those spikes as the skin stretches the spikes all spike out making it even more of a pain to bite into so most fish kind of leave them alone interestingly puffer fish don't actually process food in their stomach at all rather it goes into their intestines to be fully digested that way there's always room in its stomach for the off chance that it needs to inflate specialized organs are really cool just want to say also i'm glad that the pokedex is actually reasonable with an early gen pokemon for once here's another one of original cool fish's pokedex entries to fire its poison spikes quillfish must inflate its body by drinking over 2.6 gallons of water at once it's definitely a pokemonified version of how real world pufferfish work but still cool it needs to inflate to shoot out its spikes just like how real pufferfish need to inflate to raise their spikes and 2.6 gallons that's very reasonable quillfish is half a meter and weighs 4 kilograms and a gallon of water weighs 3.8 kilograms so it's swallowing 2.6 gallons of water yeah that's about tripling its body size remember what i said earlier it takes about 10 to 15 sips for them to inflate to their maximum size though but that tends to be about three times bigger than their normal size amazing wait so quill fish is just a puffer fish then sure it can shoot its spikes but like i guess it kind of is like a c mine it has like eyes on its tail and then the new one has like a big q and a little q on his tail for quillfish i now understand why nobody talked about it well what do you think does eating fugu appeal to you what is wrong with you let me know down below and until next time never stop using your noggin [Music] please don't eat food without dying at an alarming rate just like you probably will [Music]