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hoenn-hakase · 4 months ago

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Okay but these tags have me rolling in feels because hnnngggg yes.

I know I haven't played a pokemon game in a while but god DAMN is the Scarlet/Violet final boss cool.

Like, you've known since like minute two that something is up with Professor Sada / Turo, but you get down to the bottom of this huge canyon expecting oh, the professor made a robot clone of their mind but it went cRaZy and the real professor is tied up somewhere. No.

The robot professor, it turns out, was the rational one of the two of them, watching as the person in whose image it was created slips further and further into obsession. It turns out that everything good you've seen in the AI Professor, THAT was the machine. The real Professor has been deeply bitter and increasingly misanthropic, extending way, way back into Arven's childhood, and maybe even before.

Said real professor is dead. Like, dead-dead. Real human dead. Not only that, they were murdered trying to protect one -raidon from another, one that attacked with full intent to kill. Was this a last, selfless act? Or was the professor so devoted to their work that they would die to protect it? We never get that context. It's gone. Have fun in therapy, Arven.

So then the AI Professor leads you to the time machine, looks you straight in the eye, and says, "Can I say 'you have to kill me' in a pokemon game? No? Aight, cool, so to shut down the time machine, I need you to 'not' kill me. Because I'm gonna try to 'not kill' you first."

And then they get lifted 200 feet into the air on a spire of glowing onyx beneath what I can only describe as a technological halo of malice, and they just start breaking the rules of pokemon. Like, they don't get down there and challenge you, ooh, I'm gonna fight ya for the future of poketmans. They stand on the prow of a pitch black heaven and drop living paradoxes on you. You typically get 1, maybe 2 master balls per game; Sada/Turo has an unending supply, perpetually pouring from the godseye above them. They don't even throw them. They just open their hand and let this rain of high-level pokemon fall out.

This is not a pokemon battle. This is you, an insect, being crushed by an uncaring god.

You get the feeling that, were it not hardcoded in by some earlier version of the professor who still had some respect for pokemon tradition, there's no way the possessed AI Professor would respect the 'only 6 pokemon' rule. And they don't! You somehow beat the odds, and you get all of five seconds to think you did something before the Paradise Protection Protocol kicks in and starts the battle right back up again.

And locks your pokeballs shut.

And sends out the -raidon that, as was previously established, has killed a human being before.

This is my favorite part of this fight, because up until now, we've been acclimating to the twist that the real Professor was deeply selfish, to the point of all but abandoning their own child.

Right before the fight, the AI Professor explains that they're going to get overpowered by the security system when you try to shut down the machine. Given the real Professor's obsessive nature, you're led to associate the security system with some remnant of the real professor, and once it takes over, the game starts getting fucky about the identity of the mind in the robot. Is this AI Turo/Sada, but with their free will turned off? Turo/Sada's mind imprinted over the robot's? Some weird emergent mind from the main computer?

Right after you beat the first fight, the 'fair' fight, you get this moment where the roboprofessor is glitching out hard, and its name changes from "AI Sada / AI Turo" to "Professor Sada / Turo?" RIGHT as it starts to express feelings, real feelings toward Arven, look how tall he's gotten, how proud of him they are. We can't know how the real professor felt about their son, but its all the things Arven always wanted to hear. Is it the robot, trying to be kind? Confused? Or is this a fragment of the real professor's mind bleeding through?

But at the same time, the Paradise Protection Protocol kicks in, which is also implied to be some sort of mind-imprint from the Professor, and tries to kill all four of the main kids to ensure the safety of the Professor's machine.

So, we've got two machines, both of incomprehensible power, fighting over the fate of time itself, and each one set up to be a reflection of a person we will never meet.

Which one do you think the professor was most like?

#pokemon #I think about that dynamic a lot #How in some sense the AI may have been afraid to see the professor spiralling #And wonder if they were looking at their own fate being made in their god's image #Desperately reaching out to the player to stop them before the madness takes over #Knowing it's not IF but WHEN the machine they're guarding and the Pokemon they're trying to contain will destroy the whole region #And what will they do when that time comes? It's what their creator wanted #In a subconscious way it's what they want too #But it's wrong and dangerous and please stop them #ScVi definitely wanted to Do Things and wonder how this may have been if this much care and attention was given to the other two plotlines #Because there are a LOT of mysteries and hanging threads in ScVi that reminds me of Kalos #Here's hoping the next Legends game gets to wow us in the same way #pokemon scarlet and violet #Professor Sada and Turo #AI professors

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lilac-knight · 7 months ago

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