Here Are The Strange Winners Of Pokémon GO’s Community Day Fan Vote

Pokémon GO held a fan vote this weekend to select the next two GO Community Days, with the two top vote-getters taking the honor.

The choices were Squirtle, Weedle, Sandshrew and Gastly, and here are the results after a full day of voting where 671,000 fans chimed in:

In case you can’t read the embedded tweet, that’s:

• Weedle – 34.1%
• Gastly – 32.3%
• Squirtle – 22.8%
• Sandshrew – 10.8%

I’m sorry, WEEDLE won? (along with Gastly). What exactly happened here?

Diving into what exactly went down, there are a few different reasons that Weedle, one of the most common Pokémon in history, pulled off an upset over potentially more interesting rivals. Here are the reasons why Weedle won:

1) It quickly became something of a community meme to vote for Weedle as a joke, WEEDLE GANG was spammed endlessly on the vote tweet.

2) Community leaders like ZoeTwoDots and TrainerTips made videos supporting Weedle as a choice.

3) Weedle, Kakuna and Beedrill are the only new family of shinies in this list, while all the others are already in the game.

4) Beedrill knowing the unique community move Drill Run, a ground attack, actually makes it a force in PvP against two common foes in Pokémon GO’s Great League, Azumarill and Registeel.

So, all of these reasons combined to make Weedle a winner. Half a joke pick, half a collector’s pick as a new shiny, half a PvP pick for select situations. Gastly won because I don’t know, I guess people want to farm a good Gengar which can be useful in a wide variety of situations as one of the better ghost Pokémon.

According to Niantic’s latest tweet, it appears that the winners will go in ranking order. Weedle will be the June Community Day Pokémon while July will be the Gastly Community Day Pokémon.

I do enjoy fan voting when it comes to picking future Community Days, and I hope that Niantic keeps doing it. I would rather have them make more interesting picks in the future as I don’t really think any of these Gen 1 choices were all that interesting, and we’re now even getting into repeat territory with ones like Squirtle (granted, he was one of the earliest Community Days). But for now it seems that we are set for the summer in terms of the next two events, and August remains the last month of mystery for now. See you out there to catch some…shiny Weedles I guess.