This should be a better worded post that combines everything I have found so far. Thank you to @adobe-outdesign for getting the original out to a wider audience, and thank you casablancamoon for doing some additional digging.
This combined image is sourced from smearg-archive and was posted on June 9th, 2014:
From what we can glean from this image, it combines the following two settei:
As you may or may not know, these settei are from The Rise of Darkrai (or ディアルガVSパルキアVSダークライ). There's quite a few of these and you can find them on certain sites if you input the right Japanese keywords, like this Mandrake listing.
This is a reblog of this next image, but prior to the combined image, a blog named fishof-blog posted three separate images on May 25th, 2014. One of these has the infamous ass in much better quality:
However, for one reason or another, fishof-blog had deleted this photoset and replaced it with the combination image that smearg-archive posted. fishof-blog was only active for about twelve weeks before completely disappearing, and I do not know how long the original post was up, but it wasn't long enough to be crawled by Wayback Machine (Google discontinued their cache feature sometime ago, so WM is the only way to find these pages now).
This image is from the 2024 leaks. It is basically criticisms of Darkrai's design. As you may notice, it does indeed have a sort of lower waist, but no indication of a butt anywhere:
The following are five other settei that I could find:
The above settei is also featured on the Japanese DVD:
If you aren't aware, Darkrai was a very late addition to the movie, as evident by the Japanese logo, which was based on his beta sprite at the time:
Many of these settei of Darkrai are from the movie, and the criticism page is the only one that probably isn't. There are no results for the ass image prior to 2014. I even slapped these other settei into Google and Tineye and neither gave me any results past 2017. I only found these blog posts after punching in the right keywords and clicking through various images.
Looking up the Japanese name, combined with settei, gives you these results:
Additionally, there is a sold Yahoo Auctions listing for a lot of these settei, and you can see Darkrai in the upper left corner:
From my research, there are fifty available settei for the movie that were released publicly (I have not found out how they were distributed yet).
On May 13th, I was sent an ask by casablancamoon, who did at least three hours worth of digging, and like me, did not find any earlier postings of the ass image. We both came to the same conclusion: that it was likely the post smearg-archive made is what really took off and spread the image like wildfire across the internet. Where fishof-blog originally got this "official" art, we are not quite sure. There was no caption, and if there were any tags, we'll never know as the original post is gone now.
So, where does that leave us?
Well we currently know that:
These settei are from the movie, and Darkrai only has a few.
These were officially released. Not from any leaks.
The butt image only goes back to 2014 and is linked to two blogs.
The criticism art shows that Darkrai has a lower waist, but no ass.
I have flipped through countless Japanese webpages, going from between 2007 and 2014, and I have not found this supposed real ass image once.
Additionally, I will point out the following two images are not official settei, but were drawn by this twitter user:
If you see these floating around, they are not from any kind of official settei or other art. Do not credit them as such, I have already seen someone crop the top left of the first and say it was from concept art. It is not, this Japanese artist just copied certain scenes with Darkrai from the movie and wrote little notes about it.
Unless someone can conjure up an earlier instance of the butt image existing, this is 99% a hoax that has fooled people for the past ten or so years. All of the available, uncolored settei of Darkrai do not portray it with cheeks. As I stated on the twitter post I made, it is very likely a fan took the legs from one settei, plastered them on the other, and then edited it to make it look like Darkrai was caked up. Three of these tweets were liked by an avid Japanese Darkrai fan I follow, so that may add more confirmation that this image is fake as they come. If you read casablancamoon's ask, they also combed through twitter and did not find any earlier instances of this image.
I am someone who is dedicated to preserving the most obscure or weird media out there. I spent a large chunk of my time putting together a whole Google document that lists all the websites I could find on Wayback Machine that were related to a very old visual kei band and/or their lead guitarist. I am currently in the process of acquiring an old fanwiki dedicated to a game I played when I was like twelve. Finding things like this interests me, and with this super specific kind of media, I spent like two days combing through what I could think of. Also, this is my favorite Pokemon movie of all time, and Darkrai is my favorite one out of all of them. Of course I'm going to figure out if he actually has an ass or the internet is doing that thing of Lying To The Audience.
TL;DR shut up Denoriel: Butt image isn't real, someone edited it in for shits and giggles and it took off like wildfire and now everyone and their mom thinks that Darkrai has a whole hostess factory under the skirt of its cloak. Still funny though tbh.
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