Every Cubone wears a skull. It isn’t a costume and it isn’t armor. It belongs to its mother, and Cubone never takes it off.

Because of that, almost nobody has seen a Cubone’s real face. You get two dark eye holes and whatever sadness you decide is behind them.

Lavender Town has a tower where Pokémon are laid to rest. It’s quiet on purpose, and the people who live nearby keep it that way.

Then Team Rocket moved in. They had worked out that Cubone skulls sell for a lot of money, and they went looking for them.

One young Cubone had a mother who wasn’t going to let that happen. When the poachers came, Marowak put herself between them and her child and told it to run.

It hesitated. Then it ran. She didn’t make it out of the tower, and the little Cubone was left with the only thing of hers it could carry.

A skull, and a very long night.

A man named Mr. Fuji later found the orphan and gave it a home. That’s the version told in Kanto, and it keeps coming back in the games and the anime.

Since then, Cubone cries whenever it thinks of her. The sound echoes inside the skull, which makes it hollow and even lonelier than it already was.

Trainers describe it as one of the most heartbreaking sounds in the Pokédex. Cubone doesn’t mind being called sad. It just wants someone to sit with it.

Marowak’s spirit never left the tower. In the original games she guards the way to the top floor, and you can’t even see her properly without the Silph Scope. She can’t be caught, and she doesn’t want to be.

In Red and Blue, the way through is a battle. In Pokémon Origins and Let’s Go, what reaches her isn’t force. It’s her child. Cubone runs in, she sees it again, and she finally moves on.

Closure, not victory.

The bone Cubone carries is a weapon and an heirloom at once. It throws it like a boomerang and always gets it back.

The lore around its evolved form says these bones come from a hidden graveyard that nobody has ever located. Which is a great reason to keep looking for Cubones.

Cubone doesn’t stay small. When it evolves into Marowak, the skull becomes part of its head and can’t be taken off, even if it wanted to.

In Alola the change happens at night and gives Marowak fire and ghost typing. You can read that as grief hardening into strength, or as a very good glow-up. Either way, he keeps going.

That’s why he’s our prince. He’s the saddest Pokémon in Kanto and also the most loyal, and people have loved him for thirty years for exactly that.

So we’re doing what Kanto never managed. We’re surrounding him with Cubones. Every vintage card the treasury buys is one more that isn’t alone.

See the treasury