Got a few more asks regarding Arceus' usage in the series, gonna just compile them all into one post for the sake of simplicity:
@eternal1990 No problem at all! The Pokemon wiki seems to have mislabeled him since I would consider him more of an 'antagonist' during certain parts of the story rather than a villain. He isn't evil, even though he does act a bit...overly aggressive when he's upset. He is my dear boy too though.
@erazon Exactly, and I often see this with Giratina too. People portray him as an evil creature akin to the devil and the distortion world is 'hell' when that's really not the case. Arceus and Giratina may take some inspiration from God and Satan but they're not at all 1:1 recreations.
We may not know much about Arceus but he doesn't seem to be an omnipotent, perfect being. He gets upset, he makes mistakes and he has to make the tough choices for the ultimate greater good. There just seems to be a preconceived notion that because he is the creator deity he must be perfect when he's not. I'd compare him more to a Greek god as far as being a flawed deity.
@clearprincessturtle Big agree, I just think that the way he was written is somewhat...unlikable?
Like, we know he's not evil or anything, but with how intense his anger is and his destruction of the village without regard for the safety of the people he cares about...it may cause some people to not have a lot of sympathy for him.
I'm not one of those people, but I can understand why others may think differently.
@sinoffalsejudgement Yeah you pretty much hit the nail on the head right there with how I feel about Arceus's portrayal in most media he's in (which also is few and far between, so it leaves his motives up to interpretation a Lot).
With the movie in particular, they immediately introduce Arceus as being a vengeful being bent on destruction.
Which like, ok, they did a similar thing with Darkrai before showing how misunderstood it is by humans and how it's really good at heart. M10 does this by showing Darkrai's actions are not to hurt, but to help. And we get a sequence where Darkrai is actually fighting the oncoming threats of Dialga and Palkia, where we get to see its true nature.
But with Arceus he's introduced as a threat, and then shows he's a threat by attacking the city and his children. We get glimpses of Arceus being heroic through flashbacks, but these flashbacks are so short and ultimately don't really help paint Arceus in a better light since we remember how violent he is now.
The whole movie is about getting Arceus to come back to his senses and he really doesn't do anything heroic to redeem himself. Ash and his friends have to be the ones to snap Arceus out of hiss rage. It just doesn't really portray Arceus as being as caring as I think they want the audience to see him as.
I do enjoy M12 as a whole, but man the way Arceus is written just makes him seem very unlikeable, as I said before. And that's just the movie, the games just leave him as being very mysterious with little to no lore about him at all. He's barely in legends and his motives in it are left up to interpretation.
It's no problem, it's something I've wanted to rant about too lmao.
Even with all that being said, I think most people just kinda hate Arceus because he didn't do anything about Ingo getting sent to Hisui. Which I think is really silly and kinda dumb. But I can also admit he isn't really the best portrayed character in general either, so I can understand if people don't really like him that much on that basis.
So that's why I am taking him into my own hands and offering you a nice, well-meaning, somewhat silly dad with a dad bod Arceus for y'all to enjoy 💛