hello everyone i've seen a lot of people having trouble with memorizing the ruinous quartet's names, so i decided to make a guide on how i was able to memorize their names myself! welcome to:
lydian's culturally inaccurate guide to memorizing the ruinous quartet's namestm
chien-pao:
this one is the easiest to memorize! as someone in this thread mentioned, but i realized that beforehand because i'm so much more smarter than them, "chien" is dog in french — which are similar to leopards, of course — which may seem odd as all the letters are pronounced! which is not something that normally happens in french. this should be familiar to us pokémon players, as it is the etymology of species like poochyena, as well as the term "shiny" itself, as the most common shiny pokémon canonically is poochyena when you're soft resetting for a shiny starter in the third generation games. "pao", on the other hand, is an anagram of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th letters of "leopard" and it also kinda sounds like if, if you squint your ears a lot!
chi-yu:
you don't need to use any tricks to memorize who chi-yu is, because it is the best of the four, so you just memorize it instinctively, because it deserves so! but if you still want some tips, then fine: chi-yu is clearly a contraction of "i choose you", which is what you say to chi-yu because it is the coolest (actually the warmest) of the four, and also the greek letter "chi" looks like an "x" which is the letter we use to represent when choosing an option, say, in a multiple choice exam, so if there was a multiple choice exam with the four ruinous pokémon as options, you'd "chi" chi-yu, of course.
wo-chien:
wo-chien also has "chien" in it, however it comes second as opposed to chien-pao, so wo-chien is based on an animal that is dog-like, but less doglike than a leopard. obviously, we're looking for a snail. the "wo" bit is two thirds of "owo" which is the face you make when you see a wo-chien.
ting-lu:
ting-lu you can memorize as "the other one", but since that's boring, i decided to come up with a way to memorize it still. so. "ting-lu" sounds like "igloo", if you turn an igloo upside down, it becomes the upside down of the opposite of an igloo, which is a pyramid, of course. since igloos are cold and pyramids are hot, it's basic math, honestly. so, as you can see, ting-lu has an upside down pyramid on it's back, connecting it to igloo, connecting it to its name "ting-lu". you're welcome!
(note: this post is meant as a joke, if that wasn't clear, please don't actually take any of this seriously, and do research the actual etymology of these names because it's much cooler than whatever it is i did above in this shitpost)
