Champion Olympian Alain @alainisbae-blog - Tumblr Blog

kalosstarters

:’)

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“Alain, let’s dance!”

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Ash & Alain handshake for @sato-arans

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Chespie finally safely in the loving arms of his trainer :’)

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Sons getting the medals they deserve

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Pokeani 25 Day Challenge, day 3: Favorite rival

Alan/Alain

I could write a long post about Alain. He fascinated me from the moment one, but it wasn’t until the Kalos league that I truly, truly became as fond of him as I am now. I saw his first XY&Z episodes (13, 14 and possibly 23 too) before TSME, which made me wonder where his loyalties lied, but TSME obviously clarified a lot of things and made me like him. What particularly fascinated me was his relationship with Mairin. They are like night and day, yet they learn to enjoy each other’s company and become important to each other (more about that in tomorrow’s post).

Alain’s such a complex character and for his complexity (or maybe just because he dared to win the Kalos league) he also managed to get the fandom’s hate. But to be honest? Alain deserved his victory (now, of course Ash would have deserved it too, but to say that Alain cheated or that he won in a wrong way because _he_ had a mega pokemon is wrong), and his moment of happiness before everything got even worse than he could have imagined, and I’m happy he won. Yes, he made some mistakes/bad choices, but he was manipulated, emotionally abused, and also depressed so you can’t blame him for reacting to certain things the way he did. What did he do when he found out what Lysandre was actually doing? At first he was shocked to the point he couldn’t do anything. Then he got a mental breakdown (and also hurt his hands in the process). And then he got himself together thanks to Ash, and helped everyone to save the world. Is that what a bad person would do? No, and Ash saw that too. In XY&Z episode 44 he finally started to see some light in his future, and what I’m hoping to see in the last episode of XY&Z is that he’s going to continue recovering with the help of his friends and found family.

Funny enough, this post should be about a favorite rival, yet I haven’t really said anything about his and Ash’s rivalry. The reason for that is that Alain is so much more than just a trainer who faced Ash in the league finals (and a couple of times before that). He has his own backstory, his own goals, etc. If I was looking for a more “traditional” type of rival, this post would be about Paul, but Alain is still a rival too, so I’m gonna have him in this category.

And here’s a random gif of Alain with the lab Pokemon, to finish this post :’)