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evangelineartemiasamos · 4 years

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have you read the dragon republic? what do you think of it?

Sorry this took me so long, but I didn’t want to reply with “haven’t read it yet, but I plan to”, so I waited until I’ve finished the book.

I’m somewhat disappointed with it, mainly for two reasons. Spoilers!

1) Rin is quite an irritating protagonist. It’s strange when she claims to be morally right in the first place given that she is a woman who committed genocide, but even worse is that she doesn’t have a moral compass but rather a moral rollercoaster. First she says one thing, then the other, depending on wholly subjective, unreasonable standards. Like, she is more angry that some people have to eat but not that other people have to starve in the first place? Like, she’d rather all people suffer equally???

Her motivations are an even bigger conundrum. First, she just wants to survive, then she wants to die, then she wants to lead, then she wants be ordered around, then she is pissed off when people don’t agree with her opinions, then she feels guilty about what she has done, then she stops feeling that way, only to feel guilty about something else that isn’t even her fault etc etc. And later on, she complains (again) that people pick a side just to survive as if she hasn’t done the same thing. IDK what the destination of her character is, all comes down to being angry because she needs to be angry about something, just because. Probably Kuang wanted to write a a character who is rightfully angry but the way she wrote Rin as always being angry just erases the cause of her rage: It doesn’t matter anymore if something is unjust and wrong when you’re angry for the sake of being angry because you begin to contradict yourself and you stop to care about the things you claim to be angry about. Rin’s anger isn’t rightful, it’s part of her mental illness. You can blame the Phoenix for it, though the book claims she stops hearing the Phoenix at some point, so make of that what you will.

All in all, Rin’s sole conflict is whether “to burn or not to burn” which is also her main military tactic: kill as many people as possible or necessary, she has never other advice when she takes part in war meetings. As if she didn’t go to a military academy and learned warfare and strategy! She doesn’t deserve to be treated like having literal firepower is the only thing she can contribute to war. This is esp. frustrating in the middle section where she loses her superpowers so The Guys™ (more on that later) can talk actual strategy while Rin is only supposed to ask where to run and who to kill. It’s like Rin lost her brain because of her mental illness and the possession of the Phoenix that burns up her character. It’d be different if the book recognized that but I don’t really see it in TDR; it acts like it’s a natural progression that Rin is reduced to anger and her mental illness nothing to be concerned about.

And her whole, “I don’t care about democracy, I don’t care about politics”-attitude really made me question why I should root for Rin of all people in the book, and not someone who knows what to strive for.

I also don’t like that she wants Nezha to become a shaman although the book makes it abundantly clear that being a shaman is totally shitty apart from the superpower. Like, the book never stops reminding us that shamanism only brings madness and death. Nezha wants to remain sane, is that so bad? I also think that Rin should consider that - trying to care for her mental health instead of reducing herself to a soldier who is a living mass-destruction weapon. That she and everyone else only consider her as that is sad, not making her important. BTW, Nezha suffering from constant pain which never stopped him from being a capable fighter? Talking about ableism …

2) The book is disturbingly sexist and violent to women. Here are some examples. There is no relevant female character besides Rin who isn’t a villain, and all female side characters are equally villified or raped or killed off or described as weak and incompetent. Even the empress is called weak and the narrative likes to point out that the empress only made it this far because her deity is so strong and because she is sexy enough to seduce people to her side. Repeat: The empress isn’t powerful because she is competent but because she is beautiful. She isn’t clever, but has a sexy body. It’s peak sexism to code a female villain this way. In contrast, male beauty inspires loyalty?

When the empress uses a cruel strategy costing innocent lives, she is a vile monster that has to be stopped, when a male general applies the same strategy, it’s ugly but necessary. This is most apparent when it comes to Jinzha: He is often called cruel but his deeds are shrugged off and accepted as okay and when he dies, it’s portrayed as the tragic loss of a good leader. What?

Otherwise, it’s disturbing how Rin reacts when women are killed: She rather feels with the murderer or the man suffering a loss (sometimes the same person!!) than with the woman who dies. There’s a scene when Rin hears of a myth about a goddess whose suitors drown in the pursuit of her. The goddess is called “a bitch” for letting those men who harassed her die. Seriously. And is there any reason why the Sorqan Sira and Qara have to die??? Oh, I suppose it will matter in the next book but still: That cemented the book’s sexism for me. A female leader isn’t allowed to stay alive and in power. I felt like I was in an sjm book.

But hey, even though the other female characters are treated like shit, we still have Rin as the female lead, right? Well, that’s what I thought in the first book. But with book 2, I’m not so sure anymore. First of all, Rin’s gender doesn’t play a role in her story, but okay, that’s not a must. Yet on the other hand, I don’t think her story is written as empowering in general.

Rin never gets to be right from the start. She is always wrong somewhere, she comes to false conclusions, acts rashly, and makes mistakes and then she has to be corrected, to be chastised, to suffer abuse, only to learn and start again from a weaker position. Her fate revolves pain, abuse and destruction, period.

She also never gets encouragement. No one tells her she is more than a weapon, that she doesn’t deserve to be dehumanized, called insults and used like a tool. No one protects her against (verbal) abuse. Actually, being called useful are the only moments when she feels worthy of respect! Duh, I said I don’t agree with her often, but that is too much. To me, it’s clear the narrative wants her to suffer and nothing else. If the only empowering moments for her are when she uses her superpower, it’s not empowerment at all, because she still isn’t respected for herself (note that I believe superpowers are overrated as metaphors for empowerment in general because they are unrelatable for real life people compared to learned skills. EG in Captain Marvel, Maria flying through the canyon will always be more inspiring than Carol suddenly being able to crush spaceships with a wave of her hand).

What I like the book though is that - once you’ve steeled yourself for the grimdark, violent content - it’s rather easy to read and never boring. Naval battles on rivers are something fresh, too. It’s creative too that Kuang made-up a western country and religion instead of picking and adapting one european country and branch of christianity - not that they wouldn’t deserve it. It’s still the same bullshit in different words and a strong call out of the horrors of colonization, social darwisnism, white supremacy and christianity.

Also, the last hundreds pages make up for some of my frustration as finally, the characters realize what goes on behind the scenes and begin to doubt and act on their own. On the other hand, I don’t get what stopped the characters from figuring out that shit in the first 550 pages as many readers will certainly wondered EG about Vaisra’s real plans. I hope in the next book, Rin will show more of her leading skills now that she’s a general and see herself as more than a weapon (please).

I’ve read by now that Rin is supposed to become a dictator like Mao Zedong and that makes me excited, tbh. I’d like to read about a villain protagonist but please let it be one with a brain and a purpose.

#regina reads #spoilers #rf kuang #the dragon republic #the poppy war #review

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wobblyfet · 7 years

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The Definitive Ranking of Villainous Pokémon Teams

With USUM just coming out and Team Rainbow Rocket being a thing, I thought I’d dig up a ranking I started a while ago!

7. Team Flare

Look, those outfits are snazzy. There’s no denying that. But… who the hell are these people? What’s their goal as a team of villains?

I mean, Lysandre talks about creating a more beautiful world because he thinks humanity is dumb. The qualifiers for what a more beautiful world exactly are is never made particularly clear, just that this involves the purging of everyone not in Team Flare. He gets a bit of backstory about having a genuine savior complex turned into radical disillusionment, but it doesn’t really cover how murky his goals are here. Like, what exactly is he objecting to about the ugliness of the world? Does he want to wipe out much of the world’s ecosystem with the laser beam of doom in their headquarters or just people? How does that work? And what is Team Flare?

I’m not sure at all what the organization of the rest of this team is. The grunt dialogue suggests getting in is quite expensive, and some of them seem pretty caught up in this whole beautiful world business. There’s suggestion Flare membership is kind of an issue of status. Much of both Lysandre’s and general dialogue about it do sort of resemble the dialogue from real world radical organizations, but the problem here is that radical ideologies tend to have a deeper surface rationale than what Team Flare’s deal is. They care about class elitism while also wanting to destroy what makes the world economy, and I don’t really know why these people would be more invested in genocide than, say, aggressively running a fashion line or a country club.

The problem for me probably boils down to how little depth this team is given. The grunts are just sort of there, admins are indistinguishable, and nobody has really any characterization except Lysandre and Malva, and even that’s pretty murky. Because of that, they fall flat as antagonists.

One thing I did like about them as villains: how Lysandre uses the Holo-Caster to spread his message. Having him pop up between videochatting your friends to monologue about purity and cleansing was genuinely disquieting. In this day and age, abruptly revealing that this world’s equivalent of a smartphone is actually a vehicle for ideological evil is intimidating and relevant.

Though, I gotta say, a Pokémon game is really not the place for Holocaust puns. Boo on that.

6. Team Aqua

These guys are the only ones to seriously rival Team Flare’s stupidity. To begin with, looking at the original games, the whole hook of “More water! Yay environments for Water Pokémon!” is really bizarre in the context of a villainous team on Hoenn. Hoenn is a goddamn island, and at that one that is already thoroughly integrated with the sea. Why there would be enough radical water lovers in this area to warrant any a whole group obsessed with expansionism is kind of beyond me.

I do like that how the remakes broadened both Aqua and Magma’s motives, but… remixed Team Aqua is still incredibly dumb. They’re a radical group in defense of wronged Pokémon, which is cool, but the answer is to destroy the world and restore it to another primordial state? What? I’m no expert in environmental science but I’m pretty sure something like that would, like, definitely wipe out most Pokémon, including the ones that live in the sea. A questionable goal for a group purportedly all about saving wronged Pokémon.

And what’s the long-term plan here for the rest of the group? Is this destruction of the world like a death pact for the members or what?

Archie is entertaining, but let’s be real, he’s also pretty lame. Going so far as to recruit a potentially suicidal eco-terrorist cult only to chicken out when a big whale starts to make it rain is kind of pathetic.

Things that win Team Aqua villain points: fleshed out and entertaining characters in Archie, Shelly, and Matt. Also, pirates are cool.

5. Team Galactic

I feel like Team Galactic started the trend in Pokémon games of there being apocalyptic stakes with the villains. A good Pokémon villainous team doesn’t really need to be world-destroying to work well as bad guys, as I’ll elaborate on below. That said, I would still put a big gap between Galactic and the bottom two teams, and I do generally like these guys.

Cyrus wants to create a new universe without pesky things like spirit or feelings. This makes enough sense for a villainous team in the context of Sinnoh, where a person can capture deities of space and time in Pokéballs. And I also quite like how the game contextualizes Cyrus as a villain of emotional abuse in his childhood- not to say this excuses him, but it adds a nice bit of depth.

Like the last two villainous teams, I have some questions about how exactly Cyrus’s goals translate to an ideology for an entire team of mooks, or, more importantly, how such a wet blanket of a leader convinced a legion of followers to run around Sinnoh in those embarrassing spacesuits. It’s never made super clear what the rest of Team Galactic is hoping to get out of the deal, but unlike Team Flare or Team Aqua, it’s easier to headcanon a large group of people being enticed by holding positions of power in a new world where, without any spirit, people and Pokémon might easily function as slaves.

Another thing I like: Cyrus’s eventual fate in the distortion world. No redemption, no dramatic downfall scene, just him eerily ranting about his ambitions as he wanders off into the netherworld. It’s creepy and sad, and fitting ending to his saga.

Overall, I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about Team Galactic. It’s satisfactorily developed but comparatively not as interesting as other bad guys in this franchise.

Those team spacesuits, though. There’s no explanation for that.

4. Team Magma

Look, this team suffers from a lot of the issues that their counterparts do. Namely, the way Maxie and his team just kind of fuck off very quickly after awakening Groudon. It’s sort of ridiculous to go so far to advance your villainous team only to give up so quickly. But, other than that, Team Magma is so much better.

To be fair, in the original Gen III games, their motives are pretty thin. However, for the same reasons Team Aqua doesn’t make much sense, Team Magma does. Hoenn is a tropical island in the middle of the sea that demands travelling through the sea and jungle to get anywhere. Hell, I spend enough time facing Wingulls and Tentacools on water routes and I’m ready to sign up. Or take a Team Magma pamphlet, at least.

I kid, but that’s mostly why I like Magma’s expanded motives in the remakes so much. In a world that’s obsessed with accommodating Pokémon and keeping balance with the environment, a reactionary group obsessed with human expansionism makes for realistic bad guys. And expanding land for development at the cost of the ecosystem is exactly what a group like that in Hoenn would focus on. To be clear, none of this is to say that Team Magma is condonable, or that Pokémon’s pro-environmentalist message is somehow a bad thing- it’s just that in this context, Team Magma would be one of the most plausible villainous organizations to come up.

I also quite like Team Magma’s characters. Maxie is a cool customer and exactly the type of smug asshole you’d expect to present an environmentally-unfriendly development plan at the corporate meeting, and Tabitha and Courtney are quite amusing. Updated Courtney in particular is weirdly charming, and I kind of hope we see more of her. And even though I just whined about how easily Maxie turns around and changes his mind, I don’t really think a redemptive ending for them is necessarily a bad thing. Isn’t an ending like that what most of us are trying to get from the Maxies of the real world driving our planet to ruin?

Anyways, if Magma started looking into building eco-friendly bridges across those damn water routes, I’d totally take a pamphlet. Just saying.

3. Team Rocket/Neo Team Rocket

Team Rocket! The OG villainous team! And easily still the most iconic, over twenty years later now. They invented the Pokémon villainous team, and they surely deserve some props for that. That’s the whole reason Giovanni’s coming back as the leader of the super-villains, right? (I have some qualms about this, but more on that later)

Nostalgic factors aside, I think Team Rocket works quite well as an antagonistic force. I just praised Team Magma for being possibly the most realistic villainous team in the Pokémon world, but I really think that dubious honor should go to Rocket. These guys don’t want to end the world or build a new universe or anything like that; they see simple profit in Pokémon and are totally willing to go after that, whatever the cost. And with that, they’re able to function on a large scale and do terrible things.

Even without threatening the Pokémon world with apocalyptic aims, for my money they’re still demonstrably scarier than any other evil team in the series. Yes, Team Rocket will actually murder that Cubone’s mother, and they will mutilate those Slowpokes for profit, and they will mess up Magikarps with freaky radio wave experiments. For that reason, Rocket plots are more memorable than like anything else in the series.

And, like any evil organization worth its butter, they won’t fucking die. They’ll be reorganizing and spreading their tendrils to the underbelly of Johto and the Sevii Islands and now Alola. It’s totally plausible to me that a mafia with an eye for exploitative profit would have more lasting power than any of those other cults and become the villains of the Pokémon world.

They’re only at #3, though, and that’s because of one thing: Giovanni makes very little sense as a big bad boss.

I mean, he’s the shadowy kingpin of Kanto’s criminal underworld, and a gym leader? Isn’t a gym leader’s entire job to be a public official/stepping stone for up and coming trainers in the league? I’ve seen the meme of the one dude in Viridian City musing on the mystery of the gym leader while standing right next a sign that says “GYM LEADER: GIOVANNI”, but really, that’s actually, that’s a really strange problem for the team.

Because really, why would Giovanni think it’s a good idea to run a criminal syndicate from inside an establishment that literally asks for kids to come in and beat him, and then when it happens, be all like “Welp, that’s it for my criminal empire. Time to fuck off to the mountains.” It’s easily the most inexplicable downfall in the series.

I’m not sure why Neo Team Rocket in Johto wanted this guy back so desperately. And I know he’s leading Team Rainbow Rocket because he’s the most iconic legacy villain and all, but let’s be real, all those leaders probably could’ve picked someone more competent to be the evil superboss.

2. Team Plasma/Neo Team Plasma

If I were in the Pokémon world and didn’t have the luxury of a video game screen’s distance, I would probably have some serious moral qualms about the whole catching, training, and battling system. I mean, like, PETA’s response to the Pokémon franchise is over the top and unintentionally funny, but the ethics of how you train Pokémon the only way the games let you is a fair thing to consider. Would the Pokémon world be better off without gyms and Pokéballs, really?

That’s the main reason I like Team Plasma. Their premise is more ideologically compelling than any of the other teams. Because, really, in the first four generations there’s a lot talked up about bonding between Pokémon and trainers and how the two built up the world through cooperation, but there’s really not much to indicate that this exchange is demonstrably preferable to Pokémon whose best interests might not, you know, involve forcible abductions and battling until passing out. Having a villainous team like Team Plasma let the franchise address this question in a thoughtful way, and I dig it.

It also let the Team Plasma grunts be some of the most gloriously awful hypocrites in the franchise. I still remember how absolutely infuriating it was to have all these twerps show up and obstruct me with Pokémon battles while getting all self-righteous about how battling this way was wrong, and how much I hated them all even though they had a valid point. I dig that too. A mix like that can be an ideal recipe for a good antagonist.

What really sells me on Team Plasma, though, is the family drama backing it all. N is great every time he shows up, with all his cryptic dialogue and struggles to do right by the creatures he loves. Pokémon never really had an anti-villain before and he was perfect for games as much about moral ambiguity and balance as Black and White were. Having someone intimately connected to Pokémon and their needs (I remember the chills I got when you first go in his room and see all the scratched-up toys) makes him ideal to communicate the message that good trainer-Pokémon relationships are a healthy reciprocal exchange where a trainer ideally pays attention to the needs of their Pokémon. It’s a nice message.

N adding moral ambiguity to the game is great, but the drop of Ghetsis as the true mastermind is a good one too. The extent of Ghetsis’s manipulation of N was damn chilling, and silly robe or not, adding the personal touch cements him as one of the most solidly awful main bad guys in the series. Child abuse is sort of a running theme in this franchise, and I oddly appreciate much of the way it’s featured- I mean, I don’t like it, but it’s a literary appreciation. In the case of Black and White, framing an ethical struggle of how to do right by your Pokémon against someone brutally exploiting that struggle for the sake of a power grab was effective.

(as an aside, I didn’t much care for the reveal that N wasn’t Ghetsis’s biological son. I feel like the game sort of treated the reveal as a “Guess what? Ghetsis wasn’t your legitimate father all along!” which isn’t great, since whether or not a child has blood relationship to their caretaker doesn’t actually have any bearing on said caretaker’s impact and moral responsibility as a guardian, and pretending otherwise reinforces a harmful message that adoptive parents aren’t somehow “real” parents. Not super important but it’s just a little thing that bothers me)

Team Plasma’s second appearance is honestly less memorable to me than the first, but I dig the whole team evolution and split between Ghetsis’s power grabby followers and N’s good-hearted followers. It gives the saga of Team Plasma a legacy development we’ve really only seen otherwise with Neo Team Rocket in Johto, albeit with a more epic bent.

The big unanswered questions- how the hell did Team Plasma end up a weird religious monarchy? (And who the hell are Anthea and Concordia?) I feel like demanding more practical details of the running of all these evil organizations than a game for children is realistically going to give us is a running theme in this ranking, but I care about these things, dammit.

1. Team Skull/Aether Foundation

When I first made this ranking about a year ago, I gave first place to the Sun and Moon antagonists then too, but I wondered if it was recency bias speaking. But after a year of being less wrapped up in Gen VII than I was then, I can look back and say that these guys are the definitive #1 villainous Pokémon team. I make this announcement seriously and with perfect objectivity on the matter. No questioning or dissenting opinions will be tolerated in this house, silly nit.

I kid, of course. This is just an opinion-based list I wrote for my own amusement. But that said, I do think the antagonists this game gave us are easily a cut above everyone else on this list, just with what speaks to me.

Team Skull, to begin with, is everything. Everything from their designs to their dialogue to the way Alola treats them like a giant joke really feels like these guys were crafted with a lot of affection for them. They’re perfect for the Gen VII games because, like much else, it’s goofy and self-aware and just plain fun. I’ve seen footage of the grunt reacting in horror over you getting to say you don’t remember who they are several times now and it’s still hilarious.

But also like much of Gen VII in general, it swings back around with a surprising amount of depth. The more time you spend talking with grunts, you get more and more of the sense of a lost and displaced group of people turning with their comrades on a society that doesn’t have a place for them. A lot of this is framed around the failure in the Island Challenge, but really, it’s not hard to read more into all the possible reasons the Skull kids could have turned to crime than that, right? (and even if you just leave it at that, I do sort of wonder sometimes about how much value the Pokémon world puts on someone’s strength as a trainer. It seems like it might be a somewhat limiting way to run things, to say the least, but that’s a discussion for another day)

Anyways, Team Skull resonates with me for the same reasons that Magma and Rocket do- it’s a not inaccurate depiction of what kind of evil organizations would appear in a world that resembles our own. What many of the Skullsters describe reflects real life gang psychology remarkably well. The world doesn’t want you, because the normal standards (the Island Challenge) are too high, perhaps on top of not having food or money or being shut out socially for any number of bullshit reasons. But the gang has your back, and it’s gonna provide AND stand with you against the world. Hence the perpetuation of crime culture even when “better” life choices are there, and the emphasis on belonging and group loyalty. The way the story frames Team Skull along those lines gives you another totally plausible villainous group, but unlike Rocket or Magma, it does it in a way that frequently plays on your empathy.

Don’t get me wrong here, I definitely do not mean to paint Team Skull as a bunch of poor lil’ woobies who turned to crime because they had no agency to be better people. They’re still the villains here, after all. We see plenty in game of all the ways they’re earnestly terrible to Alolans, from generally being obnoxious punkasses who get in your way to vandalizing to stealing children’s pets to taking over Po Town. As funny as it is, I’m not totally sure why the denizens of Alola are as unconcerned with Team Skull as they are; taking over an entire goddamn town is nothing to sneeze at.

It’s just… surprisingly nuanced, is all. Team Skull can be a bunch of weenies, genuinely threatening, and have a kind of a tragic reality underneath it all at the same time. Walking through the barricaded ruins of Po Town, across all the belligerent patrollers or members just sitting in the rain, is eerie for more reasons than one.

Boss Guzma encapsulates all of it pretty well. He’ll gloriously ham things up every time he’s on screen, and he’ll bully anyone in his way, but the game also gives him some backstory and, eventually, room to express his standards and prove that he’s really not beyond redemption here. Because getting caught up in Lusamine’s sinister plots really always came down to wanting personal validation and what’s best for his Skull kids, more than a core desire to watch the world burn from Ultra Space. (I might just be a sucker for the Even Evil Has Standards trope, but even so)

I also love the moment where Plumeria decides to help you. It’s not a moment of redemption in the sense that she’s seen the light and decided to stop being a punk. Her MO doesn’t ever change at all; she fights you because she wants to protect her kids, and she comes to your side because she wants to protect her kids.

I love everything about Team Skull, but they’re only half the equation. Sun and Moon also gave us the Aether Foundation. Hoo boy.

Lusamine is my favorite main antagonist in the series. For my money, she’s easily the scariest. And not just because she fucking froze her favorite Pokémon in ice to admire them at her leisure forever. I mean holy fuck what was that and was anyone expecting a scene that horrifying in a game like this. But anyways… (shudders)

Lusamine is intimidating first because of the way she wraps herself in a veneer of civility and benevolence. I mean, it’s true that she gives off creepy vibes from the introduction, just like Lysandre, but the difference lies in just how much the Aether Foundation embodies the qualities of Pokémon Good Guys we know so well at this point. They want to protect the ecosystem and, for Lusamine, it comes from a place of love. But it takes a while to figure out just how messed up that understanding of love is.

Lusamine’s love bubble is about what she can control, and when what she loves deviates from her expectations, she reacts with physical and emotional violence. Because underneath it all, she’s an astonishingly selfish person who puts her loved ones in danger by association. She treats her love for vulnerable parties as a tactic to mold them into whatever she wants, even to horrifying ends (permafreezing Pokémon who probably loved and trusted their trainer), and treats love as a commodity that can be withheld as a punishment and an excuse for doing whatever she wants in retribution. She can take advantage of Team Skull, and more horrifically, Nebby and her children, and eventually end up at critical self-indulgence in Ultra Space because all the world has failed to meet her impossible standards for love and therefore deserves to be razed by her deadly interdimensional pet jellyfish.

I mentioned in the last entry how child abuse is something of a running theme in the Pokémon franchise, and Lusamine brings the most intimate and thoughtful depiction of it yet. It winds up with Gladion lost and caught up with criminals he doesn’t even like associating with and turns cold. Lillie ends up working very hard, by way of new positive social bonds, to overcome the complexes association with her mother forced into her. In the end, both get to symbolically save themselves and stand up to Lusamine’s abuse. It touched me in a place I would have never expected a series like Pokémon to reach.

Lusamine is the fucking worst, but… I appreciated how the games even gave her backstory and space for empathy, too. The lady had a hard deal herself, and after losing your partner that way, it’s understandable that someone would end up obsessed with control and selective about love. She’s still terrible, mind you, but it’s worth seeing where something like that is coming from. And also, I really appreciated that even when her kids are breaking free and standing up, how they still sort of love each other. I loved Lillie’s monologue on Exeggutor Island about how her mother wasn’t all bad all the time, and they have good memories. It’s a realistic outcome for abuse victims to think that way, really. Lusamine’s concept of love is horrifying and unconstructive, and the fact Lillie loves her isn’t going to stop her from resisting her mother’s mind games, and the mere existence of familial love between them isn’t going to come close to fixing just how much in the wrong Lusamine is, but it’s there. It’s more unexpected thoughtfulness it would have been easy not to include, and I’m very glad it’s there.

I also love how Lusamine, like N, addresses in a meta sense some of the moral quandaries the format of Pokémon lends itself to. Because yeah, realistically, the average player is going to be kind of similar to Lusamine- we see Pokémon as ideally under our control and as decorative collectibles to be frozen in the game file indefinitely when we don’t need them anymore. And just like Lusamine, our reaction to seeing a brand new interdimensional jellyfish of doom (or the like) is going to be “I’ve got to get that.” The value of an antagonist like Lusamine is to show how this way of playing Pokémon absolutely cannot be extended to your living, real life relationships.

If I have one criticism of the Skull/Aether coalition as bad guys, it’s probably that the rest of the Aether Foundation is rather opaque. One minute they’ll be serving the wholesome environmentalist mission, and the next they’ll be attacking you with evil grins under Lusamine’s orders. Exactly how much the members knew about and were chill with Lusamine’s secret agendas or how this was dealt with after her downfall was never something that was really addressed.

(Also, screw Wicke. That woman was clearly aware of both how Lusamine was abusing her kids and the shady things the foundation was up to, and why it was wrong, but she still supported it all by working as an Aether executive. I would have hoped you’d get to kick her oily butt like you do with Faba to teach her a lesson about passive complacency in evil activities, or at least see her get a verbal slap on the wrist, but apparently not)

Overall, though, I have a hard time nitpicking when the good parts are so thoughtful and meaningful to me. It’s with this that I’m proud to declare these the top baddies! Woo!

Anyways, that’s it for the definitive ranking! I had fun with this. Will Rainbow Rocket be more or less the sum of its parts? I can’t wait to find out!

#pokemon #lusamine #guzma #giovanni #cyrus #archie #maxie #holocaust reference//#genocide reference//#child abuse//

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effablyso · 7 years

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Credit where it is due

I dont put a whole lot of weight on sporting events anymore. I used to think that professional athletes were the most physically superior specimens alive. And while it is true that there training has afforded them certain abilities and luxuries, they are not superior in every way. I watched most of the football game tonight, with about the least amount of vested interest as anyone watching. I didnt have any loyalties to either team, and Atlanta had my cheer only because I think matt ryan deserves a ring. He didnt get one, and tom brady did...for the fifth time in his professional career. He will be remembered as the greatest QB to ever play the game. And with the records he holds, its really not up for debate. Of course you will always be able to debate it if you want, he hasnt played with a spotless resume’. there is spygate and deflategate to name a couple of talking points. But however you shake it, he has won more when it mattered than any other to play the position. We are living in a wonderful time to be a sports fans. The Cubs won for the first time in over 100 years, we get to witness Brady at the height of his career, and the NBA has two super teams, one of which has the greatest/second greatest basketball player of all time. Not to mention that Tiger Woods guy. Say what you may about his personal life, but the man can flat out play golf. Or could anyway. We are seeing the pinnacle in every major sport. Every major American sport that is.

This led me to think about all the non professional athletes that may never be mentioned outside their immediate sphere of influence. Lets think outside the box for this one. Because it is easy to think of athletes as sports figures, and rightly so, but let us not forget those men and women who will never play a sport in any relevant capacity. Im talking of course about the men and women who spend their lives, or a good portion of it, in the service of man. Soldiers, Firefighters, Police Officers, Paramedics. Of course, these professions are not without the marginal, or even less than desirable, but that does little to tarnish the names of the elite. Is Brady looked at less because a minuscule percentage of college athletes ever play professionally? Quite the opposite. I have had the privilege of serving among some of the finest men this country has to offer. And I mean that literally. My deployment to Iraq transpired in such a way that I was able to work in direct contact with members of both the private, and public sectors. Men who were among the most elite soldiers available to America, and members from other countries as well. Ill let that sink in for a second...Ok good. Now let me start of by saying that I know why a great many people view our military in a bad light, and they have good reason to. Soldiers are the face of a conglomerate of men at the very top of the food chain who need an army to do their bidding. To see a man or woman in uniform, is to put a face on wars, conflicts, or policies that you may not agree with. But the soldier that you see, the soldier that most likely has a wife or husband, kids of their own, or at the very least parents and/or siblings that care greatly for them, has sworn under oath to sacrifice their life in the name of freedom. They did so willingly, and 99% of them did, and will do so, with the greatest amount of pride they will likely ever feel. I know I did. Soldiers, particularly those who deploy, have the weight of a country on their shoulders. And the elite men that I was privy to working with took this responsibility to another level. They had a work ethic that was unrelenting. As though they were chosen to be set apart and were programmed differently than others. I have seen them, and all soldiers, carry more weight, further distances, through harsher terrain than most people would think possible. We have dragged comrades to safety through enemy fire. These men in particular were almost always ahead of the front lines, under cover of darkness, gathering information to benefit the larger forces behind them. They did not view situations in three dimensions like anyone else would, they had access to a fourth dimension for processing the needs of others in such a way that the only time their personal needs were thought of, was for the success of a mission. These men were tactical savants, physical specimens, and ambassadors for freedom.

These men, and most all soldiers, have put down their personal needs on more than one occasion. Missed holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, funerals, first steps and just about any other meaningful milestone you can think of...and here is the best part, the part that still blows my mind...they have done, and continue to do this to protect your freedom to spit in their faces, to call them murderers, baby killers, genocide soldiers. They...we...took an oath to protect, with our lives, your right to hate us. It amazes me that this aspect of freedom is so often glossed over. Maybe I am in the minority, but before I served, I never gave much thought to the fact that my way of life was made possible by men and women giving their lives to protect America. Say what you will about our Government, I have opinions of my own, most of which are not in high regards. But the military, the actual people, are pretty bad ass.

C.A.

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