The number 666 is notable for being mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible:
Wisdom is needed here; one who understands can calculate the number of
the beast, for it is a number that stands for a person. His number is
six hundred and sixty-six.
- Revelation 13:18
Some sources provide the number 616 instead. While this book is a notoriously complex text to interpret, the relevant context is that the passage is commonly understood to be referring to a great persecutor/enemy of Christians. Because letters in Hebrew have numerical values associated with them, a leading interpretation identifies the Beast as Emperor Nero (who lived from 37–68), whose name in the Greek form gives 666 and in the Latin form gives 616. The number 666 also symbolically represents a defect since 7 was a symbol of perfection.
However, many extremely different beliefs about who the Beast is have developed, and the figure has often become culturally conflated with the Devil, particularly in the United States, where Evangelical Christianity is popular. This has led to a phobia within Western culture where some people associate the number itself as an omen of evil or attribute malicious powers to it, even taking great measures to avoid it, or otherwise use it colloquially to denote satanic or occult connotations. This superstition is rarer elsewhere in the world and unlikely to have been a concern for Japanese audiences; in East Asian cultures, 4 is considered the ominous number.
Far from appearing sinister, Vivillon is a happy, colorful butterfly. Due to the irony that a Pokémon who looks friendly and pleasant has an "evil" number, jokes about Vivillion secretly being sadistic or demonic arose around XY's release.
