I really want to add to this because I’ve been thinking a LOT about how Paldea is a capitalist nightmare hellscape and how this specifically doomed Professor Sada and led to the tragic events of the game. Also god I am SO sorry for writing so much but I have a lot of Thoughts.
So I think Sada and by extension Arven are victims of Paldea’s rugged individualism
I bring up Professor Sada specifically because she was a female single parent. She literally gave birth during a crucial point in her career and then her partner fucked off. Arven has no other adult guardians in his life, Sada was literally all on her own. And because of how women are treated like the default parent and how academia and stem are really not kind to women let alone women who have children, I’m gonna say that Sada was having a harder time than Turo in this regard.
One of the themes of Sada’s character is isolation. Being trapped. And Sada was definitely trapped, like literally. She’s been trapped since before the beginning of the game. It’s why her AI is so envious of the player, her son and their friends. How she emphasises that they are free and are able to make choices. Because Sada from the second she chose to study Area Zero had ALL of her choices snatched from her hands and burned in front of her. And it’s because of Paldea’s exploitative working culture.
When I went through the game and poor Arven poured his heart out to me, I kept saying one thing: this kid has been failed by every single adult in his life. But the question is how and WHY? Why is Arven suffering so much? Why is he all alone? Where are the adults like Clavell? Where is his guardian? Why did not a SINGLE adult in Paldea notice that a little boy was starving, wasn’t clean and was being raised by a Pokémon? Well, it’s the same reason why characters like N was raised by Pokémon. It’s the reason why Lillie and Gladion were abused and no one did anything.
It’s the same reason why I personally had no one help me when I was being abused as a teen. Not a single adult noticed that something was deeply wrong, despite knowing that I had a dead parent and had always had difficulties socially since toddlerhood. I was a girl with undiagnosed autism and adhd, I was grieving and being hurt everywhere I went and didn’t have a single friend. And despite all of this being EXTREMELY obvious in retrospect, not a single adult did anything to help me! Not one! Not even people who knew something was going on. Just as no adult had attempted to help Arven.
I was blamed for my suffering. I had a ‘bad attitude’. I wasn’t ‘working hard enough’. I wasn’t good enough, I was a ‘bad child’ so whatever I got I ‘deserved’. Just as Arven was blamed for being behind in classes or having a ‘bad attitude’, even though he isn’t to blame! Adults not helping him is.
Nemona blames herself for her loneliness because she’s ‘too interested’ in battling and ‘too good’ so she scares people off. She’s just ‘too intense’ and ‘too much’, that hit me hard, I heard that a lot as a kid.
Penny and Team Star are blamed for the academy’s bullying problem despite adults just not bothering their arse to look into things. Sada is blamed for her death and the neglect of Arven, despite the fact that Paldea has seemingly no social safety nets! That doesn’t absolve her of wrong-doing but figuring out the Why is so important.
Everywhere in this game’s story individuals are blamed for systemic issues which is a core part of the individualist ideology and of late-stage capitalism.
It’s: shut up, mind your own business, don’t make it your problem. Anyone can change their situation if they choose to, so if people are suffering then that’s clearly their fault isn’t it? And involving people and asking for help is therefore selfish and makes that person who is suffering a bad, lazy person.
And that’s why Clavell and Larry are crucial characters. They challenge Paldea’s status quo, albeit in different ways.
Clavell is an empathetic man who cares deeply. He’s a scientist, he is naturally inquisitive and a problem solver. He puts in so much effort to research and find out the Why behind Team Star because he cares. Something the last headmaster of the Academy just didn’t do! By doing this Clavell rocks the boat, he goes beyond his job description, he does things no other adult would bother to do. And it’s not because he has to but because he wants to!
This is in contrast to Larry’s behaviour. He is someone who rocks the boat via quiet protests. He doesn’t ask questions but instead plants a seed of doubt in the minds of young people, to get them to question things that they have been conditioned to think are normal. He refuses to wear the mask. He, like Clavell, is a responsible, caring adult but Larry has definitely been worn down. He warns the player about being taken advantage of. He does the absolute bare minimum because he knows the consequences of being useful. That going above and beyond for a boss that doesn’t care about you and sees you as a pawn will only break you quicker.
They’ll just keep lumping more and more work on your plate and then blame you when you can’t take it anymore and are at your breaking point. Then you’re told: you’re lazy, you’re selfish! You’re not a ‘team-player’, you ‘don’t care’ and have a ‘bad attitude’. You’re not ‘trying hard enough’, and you’re a bad person for having limits and struggling.
I feel like everyone who will read this, if you’ve even gotten this far in my ramblings, will relate to this. Especially if you’ve worked retail as a teen. I did. I tried my absolute hardest to please everyone and was never rewarded, instead I was just brutally punished the second I hit a roadblock.
Sada is someone who suffered the consequences of being useful. And she couldn’t help it! Everything she did, she did for her son, she truly loved him! I don’t think she wilfully abandoned him. But it didn’t matter what decision Sada made, it was going to end in some sort of misery.
She could either abandon her career and work three jobs like Larry to make ends meet as a single parent and STILL never see her son. In addition to this Arven would have a tough time succeeding in life without coasting off of his mother’s reputation giivng him more room for error.
Or Sada could continue working as a researcher, doing everything that the Pokémon League and Geeta wanted and hopefully build a viable life for her and her child. And I can see Geeta just REALLY liking the results of Sada’s work and how much money it was making her. So she just kept pushing her to her limit and never letting her go home.
“What’s the problem? Aren’t you supposed to be a genius Sada? Don’t your care about your reputation? Your son? About Paldea? You’re doing good things for this region, don’t start complaining now. We’re all in this together and you agreed to do your part, so finish your work.”
But, there was no ‘finishing’. Her team slowly dwindled and left. Arven tells you that all Sada did was work, it was her entire life, he can’t recall a single memory of his mother playing with him. Eventually she couldn’t work from home anymore, she was forced to go back to the Crater and was never seen again. She had to make her own assistant to preserve her mind and help with her impossible work load. I can imagine her being sleep deprived, hallucinating, shaking from lack of rest. Utterly exhausted. Depressed from a lack of sunlight and human contact and her guilt eating her alive as she was forced to leave her child.
There was just always just one more task that kept Sada shackled down there while the world on the surface ignored the suffering of her neglected child and the Legendary Pokemon in the Crater’s depths swiftly melted and twisted her mind. All the while Geeta uses her creation for her own personal gain with Sada and Arven seeing none of that reward.
We see with Geeta that she absolutely takes advantage of people and strong-arms them into doing work for her, even if they don’t want to. She is adept at manipulating and trapping people and I don’t think the professors are an exception to this. They were single parents, especially Sada as a woman. They were in no position to refuse work from her.
Geeta strikes me as an allegory for the Paldean Emperor who drove his empire to ruin over his own manic addiction to pursuing treasure he thought he was entitled to. Geeta uses people ALL of the time! She uses the player immediately after you receive your Champion status to do work her work for her without compensation. She has Nemona do paperwork for the Academy Ace Tournament when that’s Geeta’s job! To the point where Nemona can’t even enjoy her own event!
Geeta uses Penny for unpaid labour to patch her glaring cybersecurity issues. Yes, Penny owes a hefty LP debt but she’s also now shackled to Geeta who very well might work her WAY beyond what Penny owes. Penny is also like 15 years old. And Geeta just discards Arven, not even expressing her condolences, she doesn’t see him as useful to her, so she just ignores him. It’s played for a joke but it’s really sad.
And finally, I honestly think that Nemona is a window to what Sada/Turo wanted Arven’s life to be. To create something profitable and live off of passive income, to raise their son who will be known not as “Arven the screw-up with a single mother” but rather the son of the Great Professor Sada who is a genius. Just as Nemona is the daughter of the inventor of Rotom phone technology, and that will undoubtedly open doors for her when she wants to start building a career.
I think that Sada/Turo’s ‘paradise’ in the beginning was just having a life where they’re successful. Secure enough that nothing will come along to ruin it and that goal gradually got warped the longer they stayed down in Area Zero. It’s highly implied that the 3rd legendary IS the time machine and that it can warp the minds of humans who are near it, like how the old Paldean Emperor was driven insane with his greed. Like how Heath had no memory of writing down the instructions and design for the time machine but has a memory of speaking to… someone in a place he couldn’t name.
It’s not a huge leap to suggest that Sada/Turo began to loose their minds in isolation all the while being not allowed to leave. This is also probably why Sada/Turo built an AI to preserve their mind, they knew this was going to happen but knew it was too late to leave. That explains their urgency, their AI being the voice of reason and feeling more like what the professor *should* be like and how their AI was completely blindsided by the Paradise Protection Protocol even though they absolutely should have anticipated it.
So yeah, Geeta is probably the reason why Arven can’t catch a fucking break and why his parent died horribly. Sada/Turo worked until they died. Their entire worth as a human being was based on how much capital their hard work could generate for Paldea, specifically Geeta. How ‘useful’ they were.
And in the end Geeta just didn’t give a fuck! It was “ah pity” but it didn’t matter, she had already drained everything she could from Sada/Turo! Their death was blamed on them. It was a ‘personal’ problem, they got ‘too invested’, a tragic and freak accident. But no one is questioning how that even happened in the first place! Why were there no workplace protections! Why was no one checking on them or Arven for that matter? Of course Geeta wouldn’t bring that up, because she wants to evade responsibility even at the expense of others!
Just as she ignored the rampaging titan Pokémon that could have easily killed someone! She doesn’t acknowledge them at all yet she MUST know! She’s in charge of everything! The well-being of the people who work for Geeta is part of her responsibility as a boss! She didn’t send anyone to check up on Sada/Turo eventhough Area Zero is known to be deadly. She didn’t hire more researchers when the others began leaving or terminate the project entirely when it proved to be way too much for their Professor to handle on their own.
She didn’t make sure their child was taken care of or give them mandatory time off to spend with their child. She didn’t order them to come back to the surface when their working conditions proved to be way too dangerous. She even had NO security measures in place to make sure their desperately lonely child didn’t go wandering into the crater to go looking for their parent and end up being mauled by a dangerous Pokémon! Area Zero is supposed to be extremely off-limits, how could she be so… incompetent?
So yeah Geeta is a shitty boss and basically a dictator, I love how this game criticises capitalism and brings up like… very real problems. Also god I love/hate how tragic Arven, Sada and Turo are as characters. Fuck ugh! The angst is so good!
Anyways lmao I hope you enjoyed, I have no idea how to end this.
