#in which Guzma is terrified of Giovanni for the RIGHT reasons

[leggerefiore]

Hello! I fully blame Pokemon Masters for this, because ever since they put Giovanni in the little friendship room, I've developed a crush. (Which, tbh, isn't too surprising, seeing as I adore Cyrus and Guzma) So I was wondering if you would bless me with some headcanons for the Team Rocket leader. I lean more to NSFW, but I will take what I can get! Please and thank you, my friend!

cw: 18+ content, AFAB reader, mentions of exhibitionism

🚀Giovanni General NSFW HCs🐈

🟥 His familiarity with sex is extremely apparent from the get-go. He never denied himself such carnal pleasures and absolutely will admit openly that he was quite fond of friends with benefits or sporadic one-night stands with basic strangers. There is a certain smugness in him about how well attuned he is to sexual matters, enjoying how easily he used to make his partners cry out from pleasure. That is all put behind him when he falls into something like a relationship with you. Those previous vices do not get him quite like your body does. There is nothing he wants more than you.

🟥 He mostly enjoys the physicality of sex. The pleasure that it erupts from one's body… He admits that he likes to indulge himself where he can. Your sweet cries in the hot air as he ruts into you, Giovanni does not think he can get enough. The erotic way your body contorts from the sensation… He commits everything to his memory to please you even better next time. He also enjoys simply observing how his body makes yours react. When his fingers dig into that place inside of you that makes you cry. Or, when bottoms out and you whine. There is a certain grin that splits his face.

🟥 There are many places that Giovanni will have sex. Obviously, around your home, but the office is a very common one. If work becomes overwhelming or even if it is going well, you may just get a call to come join him. You will quickly find yourself either sitting in his lap or pinned against his desk. Whether it is good or bad reasons that bring you there determines how rough he will be. There are also times he has you tucked under his desk mouthing at his cock while he gives direct orders to both grunts and executives. It is terrifying how well he holds himself together despite the clear pleasure he is getting. He may even get risky and do it in a meeting with a business partner, should you agree. You will be sitting in his lap as he makes direct eye contact with the shaking businessman across from you. His hand slides into your underwear to press between your folds. It takes little longer for them to relent to whatever Giovanni wanted.

🟥 For head… He prefers receiving but does not mind giving depending on the situation. There is a smugness that is obvious when he has you knelt before him, licking up his cock before finally taking the head into your mouth. A low growl while leave him as it does deeper in. His hand is careful as it tangles into your hair and looks down at you. There is a something that he can only get out of power-tripping. When giving, he finds himself preferring to have you splayed out against a surface while he leans in. His tongue pressed between your folds with an almost practised familiarity. He sucks at your clit with a trained pressure and watches as your face twists in pleasure. Your hand comes to hold his short hair when he focuses his attention instead on your entrance. His tongue swirls around for a moment before it dips in. A groan leaves his throat and goes right through you when you tighten your grip on him. He finds your reactions simply delectable.

🟥 He is a top – dominant, whatever other term one might use. Giovanni likes being in control, so even when he lets you take the reins, it is done with the understanding that at any time, you might just find the roles reversed whenever he feels like it. He loves the feeling of you under him most, however. His hands gripping your hips as he ruts into you and the cold metal of his desk counters the heat of your body, or them gripping your wrists together as he fucks you harder into the sheets of your bed. The trainer who had nearly beat him – Look at them now, he would think to himself. It is also easier to just let him have the control he so clearly wants.

🟥 He has a few kinks… A bit of role-play he prefers is either finding a rat in his organisation or teaching a grunt how to get on his good side. Both involve a bit of bondage – a favourite kink of his. It also skews in shibari... A little bit of torment is not above him. Power play, too, and there is a bit of exhibitionism with you. Though, granted, it is all looking and no touching. You belong solely to him, after all. He also may enjoy a bit of impact play or seeing you in Persian ears, too.

🟥 His libido is pretty average while leaning towards high. It might be getting lower as he ages, but he is more than able to meet the needs of his partner when he has time. Or, well, he will be more than happy to take a break and give them orders on how to masturbate over the phone. When he is home or around, sex is pretty simple to initiate — just ask. If he is not busy, he will usually be up for a round to get out whatever is in his system. Not to mention what a good pick-me-up it is. Wordlessly, you can initiate by sitting in his lap and giving him a pleading look or wearing something revealing enough to catch his eye. That might make him be a little more rough, though.

🟥 His dirty talk can get filthy. Comments about how your body looks overcome with pleasure or genuine praises about how you simply feel so wonderful are the most common. His sharp eyes watch your face twist from how his thumb plays with your clit in time with his thrusts. That grin of his comes across his face as he grips your hips to pull you in more, “My, what an erotic expression you have. What would your old allies think if they saw you like this?” Every word almost is accentuated with hit into the sensitive spot inside you. Or, his stare bore into you while your hips bounce up and down in his cock. Liquid hot pleasure rushes through his with each movement. He blinks slowly. “Just like that. You are remarkable. Keep it up,” his voice is husky as he speaks. It all went right between your legs.

🟥 There are few real “no's” for him. A simple one is a daddy kink. That is something he would not oblige for various reasons, and he cannot be swayed in any way. He likely will not be a fan of any kind of threesome due to how possessive he can get of you, so unless you want someone sitting in a chair watching him go to town on you, maybe do not ask for that.

🟥 His aftercare is lighting up a cigarette and thinking about work… Well, he will order you to drink some water and possibly join you for a bath if you want one. He lacks in this department severely – most of his previous encounters did not really include that. You will have to introduce him to your needs. He will make a slight effort to meet them. Want to cuddle? Sure, he does not exactly have anything else to do right now. Food? Sure, he will order something. Reassurance? He will say a few nice things. It gets better the longer you are together, at least.

[askguzma]

Terrifying 

[crystalelemental]

Let’s start with something my writer friends might yell at me for: In any narrative that’s not entirely visual, there’s going to be exposition.  This happens, and I’m pretty sure it’s unavoidable.  Someone, at some point, is going to just explain something.  “Show, don’t tell” exists to encourage people to actually demonstrate what they’re talking about, rather than just wall of text at people at every turn.  In essence, it’s insisting that you need to show the important parts to make a believable story with any emotional impact.

When we’re talking villain redemption, the critical component of a good redemption arc is the turning point.  A turning point is used either to showcase the exact moment a villain’s motives and goals are called into question by the villain themselves, and serves as the tipping point for them to change their actions, or to emphasize how irredeemable a villain is by having them reject the introspection and continue to act as they have.  The immediate example of this that comes to mind is Kira from JoJo part 4.  Had he kept his head down, he could’ve lived the rest of his life comfortable and quietly with that family.  Instead, he has too go all murderer again, and we’re shown that he’s beyond help.  These turning point moments guide the rest of their development, and is the critical component that needs to be shown to make actions beyond that point believable and meaningful.

Again, examples are better, so let’s take a scenario in which ORAS had gone the alternate story route in the same way as USUM.  In RSE, Maxie and Archie have their villain moments as you chase them around the region, watching them cause problems.  At the end, they use the orbs to awaken the legends, and stare in horror as the sun/rains intensify.  They comment aloud that this isn’t the world they wished for, and that everything is all wrong.  In that moment, we see the introspection and the realization that they done goofed, and they begin to work toward stopping the problem before vanishing, only showing up to return the orb to its proper place.

Then, in ORAS, the same events happen, up until the time of awakening.  When the beast awakens, Maxie/Archie disappear with them.  They’re completely gone, you witness the devastation alone, and you go to battle the beast alone, maybe with Steve/Wallace’s help.  When you return from the cavern, Archie and Maxie are just there, and Steven comes up to you and says “Hey, so I talked it out with them and they decided the ecosystem is probably okay as it is!  They’re good now!”  And the rest of the game, there are hidden scenes they have placed around where they might make statements like “I still wish to find a way to create more habitable land for people, but maybe the oceans are necessary too” or something along the lines of acknowledging the other side.  Which one hits harder?  The first, obviously.  It shows the impact their actions had, the moment they looked within themselves and found their way, and made action to change.  We don’t really see them being good at any point, but if we were told in a game that took place years after this that they were around and good people, we’d buy it.  Because we saw the moment they changed as people.  The second just has them uttering some vacuous nonsense about the other side having a point without really doing anything.

Or, supposed FRLG and HGSS took a different path.  In RBY, Giovanni is fought several times, and at the end he disbands Team Rocket in shame.  In GSC, you get the follow-up on Team Rocket disbanding, and maybe a scene of Giovanni contemplating his history before leaving for good.  Then, in FRLG, you fight Giovanni only as the Gym Leader.  You see him in the villain roles, but he never battles, always passing it off to others.  You beat him, and you get something like “Not bad, kid.”  And that’s it.  You beat the rest of the game, and it ends there.  Then in HGSS, Team Rocket is still disbanded, and you see Giovanni a lot after you beat the admins again, and he’s talking about how “Maybe the caring and love for Pokemon is what makes a trainer strong” but otherwise does nothing.  Again, he’s not evil now, based solely on “he’s not doing anything evil, and he’s commenting on understanding the problem.”  But there’s no justification.  Again, without the moment of introspection on the part of the villain, subsequent actions that show they’re good feel like they came out of nowhere, and there’s no context for the alteration.

That’s what happened this gen.  In SM, Lusamine unleashes the Ultra Beasts on the world to escape to her own paradise with Nihilego.  We see her fuse with this being that she captured, and the beast she is now part of rejects her, nearly kills her, and it's her child that comes to her rescue at the last second.  We see the experiences she had as a villain, and the final line she gets in the game is acknowledging that Lillie is "becoming beautiful."  Similarly, Guzma we see within the world of Nihilego, now freaked out and defeated.  He encountered something that he couldn't touch, much less beat down, and the creature was terrifying to him.  The core of his being as the toughest dude alive is broken down, and we see his reaction to the world while within it.  Because we see these things, we have justification for them to change.  Do they?   Not openly. Lusamine is apparently still having a rough time of it, and Guzma still hasn't internalized what Hala was trying to teach him, but in giving you his "lucky charm," he takes that first step.  We don't see what lies beyond that, but we see the first moments of reform, and the transition is believable because we've gotten justification in the scenes that are shown to us.  Had Lusamine come back late in SM post-game, and talked about how she’s considered changing, I’d buy it.  Had Guzma been shown, later on, to have come to accept his losses and is working toward improvement, I’d buy it.  I have been shown their tipping point, I have had the process shown to me, and we’re making progress.  That is believable and significant to me.

In USUM, they handle it very differently. Let's start Lusamine.  Lusamine's scenes are kept virtually the same, up until the very end of the Aether Paradise Invasion.  They keep the Nihilego thing (and then do nothing with it, oddly enough; what was the point of that now?), and more significantly, they keep her snapping at Lillie that she has no children.  Then, in the immediate scene after this, Lusamine is talking about how they're good kids and she's doing this to protect everything.  Which...okay, that's some strong whiplash.  From "You're both dead to me" to "You're good kids" in the span of under 3 minutes of gameplay.  Incredible.  Honestly I feel like that level of backpedaling on a character is enough to justify my distaste.

The next time you see her, she's being thrown back to your world by Necrozma and urges you to run.  You do not do this, and instead go to fight Necrozma. When you return, Lillie tells you she talked it out with her mom, and they're on good terms now.  Guzma gets the same problem.  They come back from their Necrozma trip, which we don't see, and he just states he gets what's going on and bam, reformed.  There's no struggle, no sense of reality to it. Essentially, there’s no follow-up.  The turning point is critical to show, but it’s also pretty important to show an act of good.  Maxie and Archie are a good example.  They return the orb.  It’s small, but it’s an act showing their change.  Imagine if they’d kept that and had the fossilized legend in their basement, and you all have a good laugh about something with another character while they held the orb and the legend was right behind them.  That’s what happened with Lusamine and the frozen Pokemon.  Her “thinking about letting them go” is not action; the problem still persists, and nothing she does at any point shows her to be any different.  She tells you she’s different.  She tells you she might let things go, or that she’s not going to control Lillie and Gladion’s life.  But there’s no presented action behind it.  SM may not have shown us the end of that process, but it leads us through the first steps in a way that's far more believable than what USUM presents.  USUM wants us to believe that they're beaten up, and suddenly now they're good.  For reasons!  If SM issue is "I don't see her change at the end," then USUM's problem is "I don't buy that she's actually changed."

To cap this off: "show, don't tell," as a concept, exists to state that the important details of your story need to be explicitly shown, rather than implicitly stated.  If we're told a major event happened but don't see it, it feels like we're cheated.  If a major change in a character occurred but we don't see it, it doesn't feel believable.  The critical aspect of a redemption arc isn't that they get to be good. That's the outcome at the end of the road.  The critical component is seeing the turning point.  When we see the turning point, it's easy to accept that a redemption has occurred or will occur, (ie, "when did you start becoming beautiful?").  In fact, stories sometimes use the demonstration of this turning point, followed by the villain not accepting it, in order to show how irredeemable someone is.  It's important to have that moment to establish the impact of a change, or the impact of a refusal to change.  Without being shown a turning point, a villain's redemption is now implicit.  We're left to just believe that the turning point occurred and that it was justifiable (ie, "We talked it out and it's fine now!").  One presents a situation in which, regardless of the villain's choice, that choice has meaning.  The other presents a situation in which no choice was made, things just happened.  I don't think I need to explain which one carries the emotional impact.

As a few miscellaneous points for the responses on the other posts, because I can’t not:

I commented that Lusamine is one of the most villainous villains not based on global impact, but on emotional impact.  It’s the same deal as the old Voldemort/Umbridge dichotomy.  Voldemort’s bad and a problem for everyone, but Umbridge is the evil you know all too well, so its portrayal is familiar and powerful.  Lusamine hits home in a way that most world-ending villains don’t, so I count her as one of the best villains in the series in that regard.

My problem with Rainbow Rocket isn’t that Giovanni leads, it’s that Giovanni is the only one with a point being there.  The others have no story influence.  Archie and Maxie literally state that Giovanni is just letting them stay there, and Cyrus just wants to go home.  Only Ghetsis has an alternate plan, but his is just jumping on Giovanni’s plan and hoping he can control Giovanni.  Everything hinges on Giovanni.  If you want a celebration of all villain teams, you could’ve easily made a post-game where Looker and Anabel team up with you to take down the Rainbow versions of each organization, which all have their own motives and stories.  Instead, they’re pushed into Giovanni’s without purpose and they all seriously feel neglected.

Necrozma is a problem for the same Voldemort/Umbridge reason above.  Necrozma has a more global impact, but no emotional impact.  It’s just a force of nature that’s a threat in its current state that you have to stop.  Going from a villain that is entirely emotional impact to something that’s just a nebulous enemy with no bearing on the people present feels like a downgrade.

Lusamine is 100% a damsel in distress in the post-game.  She’s unconscious, Giovanni’s trying to turn her into a mindless puppet, and your entire involvement is going in to save her.  She is, by literal definition, a damsel in distress.  And for your first female villain in the series, that’s...really bad.  Especially following SM.

However, I will concede that I hadn’t considered Guzma wanting to fight and beat down UBs as his own reward for tagging along with Lusamine.  So that was an interesting point to read.  I also can’t argue that many of their traits are different across games, but the issue isn’t the traits, it’s utilization of those characters that causes problems for me.

I will also concede that not getting to fight Mother Beast is the greatest disappointment of the century.  I was hoping they’d fix that by having Lusamine fuse with Nihilego to fist-fight Necrozma, but alas, they did not do that.