Character · Pokemon
Ditto
A pink blob whose entire personality is copying yours, badly, with its own eyes left in.
In Otakana the clue reads: Pink blob that copies whatever it sees
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- 5 · Normal
Transform is the only trick Ditto has and the only one it needs. It reshapes itself into whatever it is looking at, copying moves and stats along with the outline, then holds the shape until something knocks it out of concentration. The copy is never quite right. In the anime the face keeps its own dot eyes and flat grin, and in Pokemon Yellow the sprite made the flaw official.
Competitively it has two famous uses. Breeding, because it will pair with almost anything and pass on the other parent's species, which makes it the single most farmed creature in the games. And the Imposter ability, which copies the opposing Pokemon the instant Ditto is sent out and turns an entire strategy back on the player who built it.
The design has aged into a joke about itself. A featureless pink lump standing next to hundreds of elaborate creatures, doing an impression of each of them in turn, and always getting the eyes wrong. Fan art leans on that gap constantly, and the games play along: a Ditto pretending to be something rare is a running gag in the overworld encounters of the later titles, where the disappointment is the point.
Spelling DITTO
DITTO is five letters with a double T, and the double is the only thing to get wrong. The word is English before it is a creature: a ditto is the mark meaning same as the line above, from the Italian detto, meaning said. In Japan it is Metamon, out of metamorphosis, so each language picked a different joke. Two T's, one D, ends on an O.