I remember when this guy was leaked as a Pokemon Gen 8 Starter.

That freaking blows my mind. THIS GUY WAS LEAKED, BUT FOR THE WRONG GAME XD

I'm just glad it actually became something, it was my favorite fakemon

Yes he is a cute and good boy. uwu

I know this is an old comment but just in case you never actually found out the full story behind Platypet, he did start off as a fakemon made by an artist over on twitter. When Temtem was still in it's kickstarter phase someone called PokeNinja went and bought the rights for the fakemon trio from the artist then backed Temtem at the HUGE $6000 tier which lets you have Crema help with making your own temtem to be in the game. Instead of designing his own though he had them make Platypet an official Temtem because it was such a beloved design when people thought it was a leak.

...Okay so it's even crazier than I thought. Owo