X&Y had to nerf Lysandre with an ugly haircut to distract us from the fact that he was presumably born into privilege and raised on stories of royal ancestry, then became a filthy-rich technology CEO near-universally beloved and respected for his philanthropy and genuine improvement of so many individual people's lives, except as a consequence of his naive and privileged billionaire-class perspective, none of his sincerely impassioned attempts to make a more beautiful world ever dismantled the capitalist structure from which he personally benefit, his consequently insufficient impact and predictable "failures" compounding with the mostly self-inflicted personal strain and burnout of seeing himself as a chosen one, genius, and savior, all leading to a severe mental breakdown and even more severe radicalization, in which he convinced both himself and those around him that humanity was inherently greedy and bound to destroy both itself and the world via greed and overpopulation, meaning all of humanity except his accelerating elitist cult must be killed to preserve the beauty and resources of the world, simply because Lysandre, the chosen one, the genius, could not envision a future with them in it, and THEN. when he came a hair's width away from succeeding at complete obliteration of all so-called "filth," when all he had done was about to bury him in a permanent grave, THEN. then of all the things that could've possibly happened next, instead of anything that literally anyone was expecting, it was revealed that precisely One Hundred Worms looked at him, and collectively decided that there is no such thing as inherent vileness, no such thing as inherent greed, and most of all, there is no such thing as too far gone. the ancient embodiment of balance and order, in the form of One Hundred Worms, saw a tiny spark of capacity for change within him, and decided to prove humanity was not inherently greedy by proving Lysandre himself could change, and become his own antithesis by losing all the wealth and privilege he once had, and setting aside his ego. like okay. holy fuck. yeah of course he needed to have the haircut of an obviously evil dipshit, because otherwise he'd be. he'd be way too fucking impactful. and typing this out, i'm not even sure the ugly haircut saved him. Pokémon X&Y, they will never make me hate you.
