please i'm suffering just let me beat up an actual bad guy

[raisedbymoogles]

I feel like I'm counting down to the new Pokemon by continually shitting on Pokemon, which I'm sure isn't the correct way to be a fan of anything - wait what am i saying we're nerds we're eternally complaining lol

Honestly Chairman Rose's arc in SwSh left a horrible taste in my mouth. Pokemon's always been about - ....well okay it's about selling merch let's be honest but there's always been that thread of, like, ecology and environmentalism and "these non-human creatures are Friends not Resources", etc. And it's like someone in Nintendo must have gotten a bug up their ass about that because the whole 'moral' surrounding Rose is, like... 'environmentalism is bad, actually'? 'Activists who shout about climate change and the depletion of fossil fuels are just oversensitive Chicken Littles who are ruining everyone's fun'?

Who the hell greenlit that?

like I will be Pokemon trash until the day I die, but the series as a whole just seems to be either terrified of letting any hard edges into their worldbuilding or trying to write complex villains with sympathetic motivations and being really, really bad at it. Rose's motivation is so inexplicable that the best explanation I can come up with is 'he's suffering some kind of mental breakdown', Lysandre in XY follows the tradition of 'crackpots trying to destroy the world' because he apparently can't handle the absolutely miniscule amount of conflict the Pokemon world contains, and Lusamine... was kind of good actually, at least as a baby's first introduction to abusive family dynamics, but then I guess someone at Nintendo was like 'oh no we can't have that' so she got her edges sanded off for Ultra SM. And then there was Team Skull in the same gen, who were just, like... the dropouts of this world? People who don't fit in with Pokemon's admittedly creepily-sanitized society. (Hi, queer community, we can probably relate.) They're the first real indication we've had in a while that regular people can have conflict or struggle to fit in in this world and of course they're antagonists to our sweet little societally-accepted protagonist. I felt like a bully every time I had to fight them.

The reason I bring this up is a) I've been watching Alpharad's Sword supercut and I'm running on about four hours of sleep so I have a keyboard and no filter and I'm making that y'all's problem, and 2) because it looks like Pokemon SV is going to have another group of "dropouts carving out their own niche" as either main or secondary antagonists and I'm bracing myself for feeling like a bully again. It doesn't help that the truck... thing that Introductory Antagonist Girl rides on in the trailers absolutely looks like Roddy after a queer robot makeover and I want about 100,000 words of crossover fic now.

I just. As much as I'm sick of RBY worship, does anyone else miss Team Rocket? When actual crime was allowed to exist in Pokeworld? Enough of the game showing you a genocidal maniac and going 'he's Like That because people don't always agree on everything :( doesn't that make you feel guilty :('. Enough beating up on teenagers who clearly just need a Drag Mother to take them under her wing. Just let me be a ten-year-old who defeats the mafia, please.

Comments

[raisedbymoogles]

That's a good point. I also had the thought that Pokemon's kind of become a victim of its own success in a way* - when they were designing the first games they didn't even know if anyone would play it, if any of this would matter, and there's a kind of creative freedom in that. Nowadays Pokemon's such a juggernaut franchise that I can see the writers feeling this pressure to present a very clean, uncontroversial face to the world. I think your idea of Pokemon being such a huge nostalgia property feeds into that. Fanbases can be so harsh on new iterations of the things they loved as kids that it can be difficult to take risks.

OKAY BUT TEAM SKULL THO. They've basically got this Lost Boys vibe and they WILL hit every found family button you've got, they're basically the hired mooks of the Big Bad who shares some character-DNA with Mother Gothel. Their leaders Guzma and Plumeria drop occasional hints that their childhood wasn't all sunshine and roses, if you know where to look, but of course there can never be overt references to poverty/abuse/anything beyond "they failed to accomplish things and they're salty about it" because it's a Pokemon game. Which... honestly says more about the worldview you're being presented than about them. >_> As you say, fic writers can do it better.

*In many ways. Over a thousand Pokemon to model, many of which have different forms, lol. I can hear the animators sobbing from here.

[raisedbymoogles]

yeah, no spoilers, but I've been playing Violet the last couple of days and while I'm still having fun I am a little aghast at the graphical errors. Like, Legends had clearly had some graphical quality compromises happening to deal with the Switch's hardware limitations, but it was forgivable b/c Legends was unique and a genuine evolution (hah) for the series, and there wasn't as much in the way of genuine errors that I saw. SV, otoh, is a mainline game showing an unfortunate lack of polish that you just don't see from Nintendo's flagship franchises. I don't know if it's a matter of the game's reach exceeding the Switch's grasp or if they just didn't give the animators enough time to iron out those wrinkles, but it makes me worry because now that they've created this expansive open-world experience, there's no way they can walk it back in subsequent gens.

[scribe_protra]

Rose's motivation was so weird that I spend the entire time waiting for the revel that he was lying cause that was the only way I could see it making sense

(Not Fun Fact: I spent majority of X/Y feeling bugged out cause it felt to me that Lysrandre was being coded as a G-rated Pokeworld equivalent of a Nazi except the game never actually went there or treated him like one so like. What.)

[raisedbymoogles]

Right? Like if he'd had some sort of Ace Attorney-style breakdown after you beat him and revealed that he really just wanted to see what would happen, THAT at least would have made sense in a "this is how humans work sometimes" sort of way. Like it still wouldn't be a particuarly satisfying narrative but it would be a workable one.

(I never got Nazi vibes off Lysandre, admittedly. He just felt like Cyrus with better taste in clothes.)

[scribe_protra]

Any time I try to add him to a fic I have to do like extensive reworking of Rose's motivation to be believable (Depending on the fic, it is either 'dude has the moral center of a RL billionaire and knows to lie to keep a good rep' OR 'he is more like Archie and Maxie from Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald in that he means well but is so very very dumb')

(It was the fixation on beauty, for me. Someone who is super into mass murder and fixated on lofty ideas of vague meaning like beauty or purity or anything like that gives me Facist/Nazi vibes.) (Cyrus gave me the vibe of 'someone in such a self loathing depression pit that they lash out and harm others' only made worse because of how much harm and how large a range he had)

[raisedbymoogles]

dude Rose acting like a RL billionaire would be so much more interesting shame they didn't go that route ;P

ah, that does make sense.