I’m glad you enjoyed the read! The research that went into Beta Gyarados was one of my favorite things to work on. For literal YEARS I always wondered what their original intent was because even in the early stages of Pokemon, they did their research and always based their creatures on something. But like everyone else, the talons kept throwing me off until one day when I compared them to the teeth and wondered why they weren’t as sharp if they were meant to be talons. Then I wondered if they were fins and suddenly the antennae reminded me of barbels! I started pouring over Japanese mythologies of fish and then realized it may be a catfish which is how I stumbled across Namazu. After that, everything just fell into place - the Lake Biwa connections, the historical descriptions, everything! It was a wild ride and I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out.
@sharkfyn I have to give a lot of credit to @fiery for his post here. I already knew that World Championships went deep into their lore but didn’t know that Pokemon Centers worked on the same philosophy with their research. It was due in part of his post that I started looking deeper into other Pokemon Centers and even a deeper look into Worlds depictions - leading into the findings of the Vancouver and Hawaii articles.
Honestly I also have to thank a couple of additional people for this as well. Major thanks to @kurtosisblakeinfini too for our past conversations on Pokemon’s mythology as the man is a walking encyclopedia of that type of information - he was one of the first to make me realize that Pokemon did their due diligence since the beginning and made me appreciate some of lore behind Pokemon I didn’t even like. Also super major thanks to you too, @papafrankgod since I shared a lot of these preliminary findings with you and got your input, tested the evidence for my theory, and finalized some points when I did the initial article for Beta Gyarados.
Thanks again everyone. And @vampire I completely agree with that list. Pokemon definitely likes to make it one of its side-Mascots for sure.
If anyone has any questions or wants more elaboration on anything you’ve read, please let me know. 
I’m happy to hear any critiques and already I see a couple of minor typos that I’ll have to mull over later.