Falinks, with their short height and segmented body (at least in their most common formations) have often been mistaken for bug pokemon – a relative of Caterpie or Charjabug. This advanced form of camouflage developed not to fool human trainers – which it often does, at least to new or foreign ones – but the similarly intelligent psychic pokemon which would otherwise feed on them. The squadrons or teams in which these pokemon live are also a form of camouflage, or perhaps the next step up from common social behavior; a single large pokemon is more fearsome an opponent than a colony of equivalent biomass.
The strength of Falinks is in their tactics and cohesion, and has made them since ancient times a common historical metaphor for the power of unity, long popular among soldiers and, more recently and tragically, among a militarist movement named after these pokemon. Falinks and their trainers, regardless of the latter's actual politics, were often made scapegoats for the disaster in the war's aftermath. Those who avoided postwar vigilantism also had to grapple with a politically motivated, internationally mocked ruling by the Galar League that, for the purposes of official battles, Falinks counted as six pokemon and not one – the act also applied to Exeggcute, but no one doubted its intent.
The act lasted for over twenty years, and those trainers who really liked their Falinks, finding them understandably unable to 6v1 an opponent, plied their trade overseas, often learning from Falinks trainers who went into exile for a very different and far more sinister reason. But once it was legalized to let them fight as a team, a new generation of crafty trainers, most of them oblivious to the species' historical associations, came to cherish the Falinks' potential for teamwork and deception.