#(but ‘yay space whales’ gets a person very far)

[conscious-naivete]

i like vesta clinic so much i’m listening to the season for the second time and i think it’s gonna be one of those things i can just relisten to whenever

[marithlizard]

First Impressions: RWBY v8c10, “Ultimatum”

How many ultimatums will be delivered and will anyone listen?

(Flashing-lights warning.   I hope this is the "there's no practical way to negate all possible risk so we're being cautious"  kind of warning, and not the "fuck you epileptics bring on the cool strobe effects"  kind. )

Ironwood, entirely alone.  I am reminded that Watts thought Plan Evil could seriously fail if he called on Vacuo for aid.  Could Vacuo seriously have gotten enough forces here in time to help?   Or was it sharing information and alliances, in itself, that would've been an effective defense?  We'll never know because that just isn't how Atlas rolls.

Those soldiers are terrified in that particular “our boss has been casually shooting underlings who disappoint him” way.

Why do you *care* about imprisoning Qrow and Robyn? They're no threat to you, you have a giant Grimm army destroying your kingdom, let them go fight it!  And his focus is on Qrow in particular.   ....Ah.  He must believe Qrow did kill Clover.

"Fuck you epileptics"  it is.  Why do studios do this?  I don't need fancy special effects if they're going to hurt other people, thanks.  

What WAS that???   Slowed down, it looks like....lightning struck the whale and it exploded? what?

The bomb hasn't gone off, there's Winter and the Ace Ops carrying it. oh no.

what?

green in there. Penny?

Are they dead?

It's...like a nuke. A nuke just detonated.

No. Not Penny.  That was Oz green magic.

Everyone can't be dead, we'd have no show.

Something glowing in the ruins.  Someone moving in the smoke, carrying the Lamp.  Neo?

She's *skipping merrily* with her umbrella and the lamp.  What the fuck.  What happened between her and Jinn?

So Winter and the Ace Ops are fine,  the whale is dead, we don't know about anyone inside. Okay. Oookay.

Watts sounds stunned, but only for a second until he pulls his armor together. "She'll come back."

*watching villain infighting with popcorn*

You know, I despise Watts, but it's impossible not to admire that ability to fast talk with melodramatic emoting while seconds from death.  "Presentation!", as Megamind would say.

...on the other hand,  there's a point where melodramatic fast talk stops convincing your subject and just pisses them off. And you have now passed it.  

"You can't just be deserving, you have to be worthy".  He really is a social Darwinist. And what is it he called her? A bloody what?

Oh, wow,  I 100% thought she was going to kill him.

Is she....crying????  Even Watts looks stunned.  And somewhat disbelieving to be alive.

JOYR are okay.  Oscar looks agonized, holding his head,  but quickly gets a grip on himself.  Merge? No merge?

...That's odd.  No one thought to stop and look for the Lamp in the ruins of the whale?  We know it's gone, but they don't know that.  Shouldn't recovering it be really damn important?

YAY FINALLY DISCUSSION and championing from Oscar. I figured Ren would be the one to notice.  And oof, Oz was taking the brunt of the torture after all, without taking control?  Regardless, I'm very relieved that he's still around.

The cane stored kinetic energy? From all the lifetimes he spent carrying it, moving around with it?  That's kind of neat.  Doesn't particularly make sense, but it doesn't have to, it's magic.  

Emerald could've run away while they were stopped to talk about Oz. No one was looking at her. But she didn't move or even lower her hands.  Listening and thinking. Despite what she says, she wants to join the heroes.

Citizens packed into subway tunnels but not allowed to occupy most of the space, lined up in bleachers on the sides under guard.  That doesn't look remotely practical or  sustainable, but it sure looks very military.  (Seriously.  At least a quarter of those people really need to go to the bathroom right now.  Babies need diaper changes.  Children should be having screaming meltdowns.   The writers handwave a lot more than they should sometimes.  )

The whale is gone, but what about all the other Grimm?  Shouldn't they be attacking the tunnels? This is far more of a negative-emotions draw than Mantle, pre-or-post election.

Ironwood why do you have to be SO DUMB.  You ought to know damn well who blew up that whale (perhaps that's why you dropped the subject so abruptly).  And you certainly ought to know Watts "betrayed" you, because you never should've let him near technology to begin with.  Or thought that beating him up would get him to help you.

Still on with the raise-Atlas idea, I see.  It's the only one you have.

What is you thought needed to be done with Qrow,  Ironwood?  He holds no power beyond skill as a Huntsman, no leverage to help you reach your goals.   Is there a plan here, or just nonsensical personal vengeance?   You didn't even care about Clover enough to justify that level of investment in revenge, he was just an operative.  

Ohhh, he does think Qrow has leverage over Penny.  I suppose it's true too, through Ruby.  But it's still a dumb plan.  And Winter isn't on board with it in the slightest. She needs to get the hell out of there.

Harriet, you backstabber.  That isn't even remotely accurate. Is that going to pay off for you, Bree, sending your homicidally unhinged CO into an even greater rage?  Now you'll get to be the leader of the Ace Ops, so I guess so.

...ships?  Allies?  Cavalry, now?  Oh, the evacuation dropships!  Ugh, he's going to order them shot down isn't he. He’s just spotted his point of leverage.  Someone get this man a white cat to pet while he sits at his desk.

NEO I LOVE YOU

Oho!  Did she not ask a question, after all the fan debate over whether or not she can?   She certainly could have - no one will know until Jinn is summoned again.    And the Lamp is still a powerful bargaining chip either way.

Aww Oscar was offering to hug Ruby there for a moment.  See, Nora, that's what someone who actually wants hugs looks like.

Ah, fuck, Ironwood's going to straight up threaten to massacre everyone in Mantle.  Winter, Marrow, your time to defect is NOW.

"If there is no Mantle then there is no reason for you  not to work with me" uh yeah, buddy, no one but you thinks it works like that.

Only one ultimatum, but it was certainly a doozy.  (EDIT:  Well, maybe two. Does Neo’s count? She didn’t make any threats.) 

Well! I did like the episode, though I continue to be greatly annoyed at the lack of any lines or screen time for my favorite characters. I’d never have expected Salem and the whale to be wiped out mid-season just like that.  A lot of people are going to call it bad writing, but I think it’s very much in line with how these writers like to subvert traditional story structure.  It would be awful writing if Salem were destroyed this way, but they took pains last episode to show us that isn’t the case. 

(How long will it take Salem to revive?  Hazel said a few hours at most, when he killed her.  Ozma’s magic blew her into atoms and that will probably take significantly longer. But I’m sure she’ll be Voldemorting her way back by the end of this volume.) 

[frederator-studios]

Adrian Thatcher: The Frederator Interview

From Nelvana’s studio in Toronto, Adrian Thatcher has been expertly steering the Bravest Warriors Space Whale from the Director’s chair. We here at Frederator have had as much fun watching Adrian’s work, as he's had creating it! Here, Adrian discusses his windy path toward directing animated TV, and the many awesome shows and films he’s contributed to along the way. I’ve gotta echo Adrian on one BIG point: bring Clone High back!!

Did you go to school to study animation, or anything else?

I went to Sheridan College in Ontario. I applied for almost every artistic course I could think of: Illustration, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, and of course Classical Animation. I ended up taking one year of Illustration before switching to Classical Animation. 

When did you know you wanted to work in cartoons, and what inspired that choice?

Like a lot of people in animation, I didn’t even realize that working in cartoons could be an actual career. Drawing was pretty much the only thing I did as a child, so I knew that I’d have a career in something creative. But animation probably would have been very far down the list—I really enjoyed graphic design and advertising in high school. I didn’t make a conscious choice to pursue animation professionally until about halfway through my first year of college. The industry was booming and it was in the news a lot. Jurassic Park, Toy Story, The Mask. It didn’t take long to discover that many Sheridan graduates were key players in some of these films. These were people that went to the exact same school I did; I thought, “I can do that!” 

So that was my first concrete inspiration, from a career perspective. But I had early brushes with animation as a kid. My big brother showed me how to make flip books. The subject of which mainly consisted of a little stick-man skateboarder doing tricks before falling off of cliffs, smashing into walls or onto a bed of spikes. Inspiring stuff as a kid, seeing your drawings move, but not exactly something that I thought I could turn into a career.

What shape did your path through animation take, position to position?

Great question! Let’s see, a walk down memory lane. My first job was at Walt Disney Animation Canada. Yes, they had a Canadian studio. Two actually: one in Vancouver, one in Toronto. I was hired onto the pre-production crew for Hercules II after my second year at Sheridan. The first job I did was inbetweening for Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) on development animation for a new Hercules villain. I enjoyed that but also wanted to explore my options, and pre-production was great for that. I did a little character, location, and prop design, as well as storyboarding. After Hercules II, we began Peter Pan: Return to Neverland; by then I’d narrowed my focus to location/prop design. I learned a ton from lead designers Ted Collyer and Dermot Walshe. From there I moved into production layout on Little Mermaid II, Lady and the Tramp II, Jungle Book II and a few smaller projects. For those films, I moved to Walt Disney Animation Australia for two years. Sydney was awesome and I learned a lot from the people down there, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

When I returned to Toronto, I started my 16+ year career with Nelvana as a location/prop designer on Clone High. A couple production layout gigs at Nelvana followed and then I was given my first art direction job on a show called 6teen after doing the development location designs in full colour. I loved the job even though I’d never planned on being an Art Director. I don’t think I even knew what an Art Director did until I started! I remember going home after being offered the job and searching the Internet for information about being an Art Director. I must have found the right stuff, because after that, I art directed Ruby Gloom, Willa’s Wild Life, and Scaredy Squirrel before getting my first directing job on The Adventures of Chuck and Friends. I even managed to win an Emmy award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Art Direction on Willa’s Wild Life. After Chuck and Friends I went on to direct Oh No! It’s an Alien Invasion, Ranger Rob and then….wait for it... BRAVEST WARRIORS!

Ahh ye-ah! Since you've done everything from layout to design to art directing, do you have a favorite role? Was directing your goal?

I think that my favorite job has to be directing - it’s definitely where I’m happiest. At times it almost feels like that first week on the job at Disney, where I could choose what I wanted to do. Directing allows me to have a hand in many areas of the production. I still design some characters and locations, like the Slumber Sisters (BW, “Chained to Your Side”) and the Techno-Cavern (BW, “Whispers in the Morning”). I’ve even storyboarded a little! Ted Collyer and I teamed up to board the new Bravest opening. My favorite part of directing is working closely with, and having the support of, so many great people. People like my Assistant Director Campbell Bryer, who can step in and handle production details when my schedule gets crazy—and it often does. Marc Sevier, who keeps an eagle eye on the animation; Davian Bobrowska’s amazing art direction. Everyone on the team, really. I never chased directing: I just focused on learning as much as I could in the role I was in. Once I felt I’d learned enough in the role I was doing, I wanted to learn more, and that’s what really led me to directing. I’m still learning more every day.

What qualities are most important for a Director in animation to have?

Wow, there are so many and they all feel of equal importance. But a few in no particular order: I think that you need to remain humble. Having a big head as a Director will not serve you well. The ability to listen to the ideas of others and to collaborate is paramount. And having a sense of humor, of course!

If you weren't a Director of animated TV, what would you be?

That’s easy. I’d be a general contractor. For some reason I really like mudding and taping and I can cut in with a paint brush like a pro… I kinda wish I was kidding. Either that or a very low paid singer/songwriter. Yeah, I play a little guitar. No, not a ukulele. I mean I play guitar a little.

Do you have a favorite project ever, and why?

I’d have to say that I’m currently experiencing it! Directing Bravest Warriors here at Nelvana and getting to know all the great people at Frederator over the last year and a half has me in a permanent state of happy. 

Aww, yay! What do you like best about the show?

Making Bravest is a blast. I get the biggest pleasure from the writing and humor. It has a great balance of weirdness and intellect. Benjamin Townsend (Story Editor) has done a fantastic job of guiding the writers through the Bravest Multiverse. He’s very well read and a student of culture - it shows through in every script. We’re lucky to have him on the team.

Who is your favorite character on Bravest, and why? Do you have a favorite episode of the current season, so far?

My favorite character changes every day. I think it might be Danny…or Wallow…but then there’s Beth. Arrgh, this is tough. I think I have to say Danny. John (Omohundro) brings so much to the role. He’s a super funny dude! And my favorite episode? That’s even tougher. So far, I’d have to say it’s episode 416 “Nothin’ Stays the Same” by Ryan North. It’s a great Beth episode with a Groundhog Day theme. I really like the fast pace of that one.

How was it to work on Clone High - do people still tell you how much they love it? (I love it, so that counts as one).

HA! Clone High. I still love it. Yes, I still drop that name and get great reactions. Even now we quote Clone High on a daily basis here at Nelvana. Interesting fact: when I got the Bravest Warriors job, the very first person I contacted was Ted Collyer (Director of Clone High) to be part of the Bravest storyboard team. Lucky for us, Ted was just finishing up another series and accepted. Ted has been a huge part of Bravest; he was my teammate in boarding the opening. Clone High definitely deserves a reboot! Bring it back! Bring it back!

What were your favorite cartoons growing up, and what are your favorite animated shows or movies?

My absolute favorite cartoon growing up was the Bugs Bunny Road Runner Show. Sooo many iconic characters, and I loved the short formats. I think a show of the same format and structure would do well today. Of course The Simpsons. For animated movies, I’m a bit of a Disneyphile. My favorite of all is Aladdin. Toy Story II is right up there too. And, even though it’s not animated: Back to the Future. I’ve watched that movie too many times to count.

Thank you for the interview Adrian, and the awesome work on Bravest Warriors! Which everybody can catch up on riiiiiiight here :)

- Cooper

[wobblyfet]

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!