THEORY TIME: What if Lusamine was designed to be a "true villain" from the start? We could see her physically abuse her children (hitting and kicking them), keep the REAL mother captive, and spread fear throughout the Alola region. The Mother Beast could be her true form (with a human form she could disguise herself as), and towards the end of the original S/M, we see her actually being vanquished. That would've made her a REAL genuinely malicious embodiment of evil! What do you feel about that?
Are you the same dude that sent me that “what if Lusamine was a mass murderer” ask
It is a kid’s game, my dude.
Darker =/= better. You can have stuff that’s super dark that still manages to be about as shallow thematically as any Pokemon game (Joker, Game of Thrones, whatever the fuck Avengers was doing after a while).
Supplementing the second point, that isn’t necessarily what made Lusamine an effective villain. In fact, a lot of this kind of misses the point of it.
Like… what would getting to see Lusamine beating Lillie and Gladion actually add to the story? You’d be mad at her more for being a terrible parent… which you are anyway.
What would Lusamine not being the real mother add? An even evil-er Lusamine? What would that add? What in the world would be the point of usurping someone else’s kids and keeping the mother around?
Lusamine not being the real mother and being an Ultra Beast anyway kind of serves to undermine what made her a great villain in the first place. It wasn’t that she’s done anything extra cruel – in fact, we already have two villains that wanted to kill basically everyone, another that was a G-rated mafia boss, and another that raised a child in isolation to act as a political puppet and then went and kept Pokemon slaves anyway.
Lusamine is a good villain because as far as Pokemon goes, she’s by far both the most human – and by extension, the most realistic. And, I cannot stress enough, realistic villains =/= darker ones.
All through the series “likes Pokemon” is seen as a shorthand for “good person”. It was interesting to see that invoked with Lusamine because it never stops being true with her at any point. She loves Pokemon. She runs an entire conservation effort for Pokemon. We never find out she secretly just wants to raise the Pokemon there to take over the world – it’s a belief she actually holds. The point is that the kind woman that wants to take care of Pokemon is the same person that you find out had been abusing Lillie and Gladion for years, despite being their mother, someone that’s supposed to be taking care of them, regardless of how “worthy” she does or doesn’t think they are of her care, because their worthiness was never the point.
The cruelty comes from the fact that these are her children, and she is a person who is capable of good, but has selected to treat her kids like shit because it suited her. Lusamine and her daughter are the ones we engage with. Lusamine and her daughter are the ones we get to know. And Lillie is the one that gets the catharsis over what she and Gladion were put through, instead of some random trainer that kinda showed up. Lillie is the one that learns she is worthy of love because she is worthy of love, in spite of what her own mother claims.
And like… that’s how abuse works. That’s why I claimed Lusamine was the most realistic villain, not because she’d done anything extra super evil, but because that’s what people are like. They have personalities and also are terrible parents. They don’t beat their kids for the hell of it, just like they don’t “secretly” have good characteristics. Not to mention I feel like regardless of whether or not she was physically abusive towards her children, that’s a bit of a simplification of what abuse is. We’ve already got Guzma’s dad for that anyway.
Lusamine is a person you (and to an extent Lillie) were wrong about, plain and simple, and shifting the blame elsewhere just turns her into another bad guy instead of having to deal with that fact.
I was bummed Lusamine and Lillie weren’t both Ultra Beasts if only because that would’ve been kinda neat, but it turns out Ultra Beats were just more Pokemon so that’s sort of lost its appeal anyway.
A “genuinely malicious embodiment of evil” is exactly what Pokemon does not need, both because it’s a kid’s game but also because this is just another flavour of the flat, uninteresting, evil for shits and giggles with no other traits or motivations villains we’ve been seeing the whole series anyway (on the occasions we weren’t getting “badly-written extremist with good intentions”), but with added edge to seemingly no end.
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