I'M CAPTAIN KIRK

like, the kind of guy to walk past one of his underlings threatening the main gang, stop, and in a low and cold voice go 'Z-moves? Worthless.' before walking away

 

not to mention his motivations seem... well, apparently the backstory is he was one of kahuna hala's students along with younger!kukui, but he 'never wanted to listen to any of the lessons' and one day he had a big old meltdown that the flashback includes him going off about a) how much he hates kukui's perceived 'hero act', b) 'who cares about alola's natural ecosystem', and c) 'i can get strong without z-moves you'll see'

none of which really. make a cohesive motivation at all unless you fill in a lot of blanks that the show doesn't indicate at all (apart from hala going 'i couldn't find a way to reach him' at which point kukui is like 'no no it wasn't your fault') and make him a lot more sympathetic than the show apparently wants him to be, since the show only wants you to see the guy who lets lana's Primarina get partway through Sparkling Aria before using Throat Chop on it, and then promptly poisons it.

 

like. there's insisting a character has Been Hurt and is actually a Sad Boy even though the media-given backstory doesn't indicate that in their motivation at all, and there's looking at a backstory that legitimately doesn't make sense as given but filling in some severe hurt makes it make a lot more

 

ironically loq i was just about to tag you to solicit your opinions on this

 

like i'm kind of struggling how to express that this is different from pokemon's usual smalltime villains who are evil for the sake of being evil and i guess that the difference is that guzma isn't just some one-episode or occasionally-recurring asshole, he's set up a whole gang of malcontents and actively sets out to ruin the pokemon league because he feels so incredibly strongly about all this, and he's being set up as a serious contender in a way the smalltime villains very, very rarely are (it only takes one episode to beat them, after all), and the show seems to be angling to somehow make him a foil to the Good, Pure, Z-Move Expert Professor Kukui. and because, unlike the smalltime villains, he's given backstory and motivation, he's not like Byron who's just a greedy crook with no backstory whatsoever and no personality beyond 'moneygrubbing, unscrupulous and highly tacky'. and when pokemon bothers to give its antagonists backstory it's often quite sad. and, again, he wasn't this much of a dick in the games.

also because... it seems to very much go against what pokemon is about to have a character set up like that and then just. go 'oh they're just sort of an asshole and always have been'. i haven't finished the series so they could obviously have him pull a heel-facer, and they quite likely are going to, but there hasn't been anything hinting at that as yet so if it does happen it'll probably feel a bit ass-pully. god, i don't know. sometimes the writing in this show is amazing and sometimes i'm sitting there going '...what...?'

 

honestly. I vibe with the abused guzma headcanons, esp as a third foil to gladion and lillie-- in Moon at least (I frankly forgot most of UM in my outrage over lillie's plot being hamstrung), he has a strong vibe of protecting His People against all comers, at any cost and by any means, up to and including preemptive strikes. (he mains golisopod for a reason, fight me.) Bulbapedia also mentions that he either headed or was part of a group before team skull that stood against a previous kahuna and was massacred by the tapu for it, but bulbapedia being bulbapedia there's no source linked....... Like, no, he ain't necessarily a Sad Boy™, especially not where anyone can see; therapy doesn't real because this is pokemon, but he's clearly at least fronting like he's moved on if he hasn't in actuality-- he's still perfectly willing to beat up kids(' pokemon), steal shit, work for lusamine, try to capture a Mind Control Jellyfish for himself, etc etc, but imo there are enough hints dropped in the games that Some Shit happened to him, and he's chosen to move forward by Not Letting Shit Happen Anymore, even if that means tearing everything else down around him and his

having not actually, uh, watched the SM anime I can't say how far off the rails that personality has come, but

this feels a lot more, uh, low-key than he's presented in the games, ngl
(also, guzma??? collects Bug Z Crystals???? just bc he thinks the island challenge and the government are bullshit doesn't mean he doesn't respect the strength a trainer-pokemon bond can bring)

 

(AND ANOTHER THING--)
I am also incredibly amused by the thought of baby-er gladion showing up to join team skull like "MY MOM SUCKS I HATE HER I STOLE A POKEMON FROM HER I WANNA DO MORE CRIMES"
and guzma just "ah. mood. welcome to the crew you fucking disaster child, I like your style"

 

gladion: exists
guzma: o fuck he's so pissed at everything, fam say hello to my 24th son this month
plumeria: boss you have to stop or learn to cook one of the two
guzma: ..........................
(i have neither played sunmoon nor watched the anime but that's the vibes i got from team skull from everything i saw)

 

(i am certainly probably going to have Thinks about lillie's plotline in UM once i get there, from what everyone has said, but I kind of want to develop my own opinions so i'll hold off on discussing it until i've, well, got there)

yeah i mean. guzma is still a sticky crime lad. and there's, y'know, more than likely a middle way between team skull anarchy and the island challenge as it stands, if so many people are grouchy about it. (and hey, the tapus have been said to be both touchy and unpredictable; tapu lele in particular is said to not understand the difference between playing and kicking the shit out of someone with her tapu powers)
But so many of the team skull members in the games are presented as quite sympathetic or at least endearingly stupid and honestly? initially in the anime there were only three skull members shown and they were kind of a baby team rocket: antagonists, but useless and funny and a bit dumb. so like the grunts in the games. and then they bring plumeria in and she's pretty much as she was in the games step on me so yeah okay, we all know plumeria's the only one in team skull with any common sense or actual drive, sure.

and then they introduce guzma and i'm suddenly unsure what the fuck they actually want to do with this whole thing. did they just need someone for Ash to beat in the league tournament and guzma was handy? only they wanted to make it Deep so they gave him a confused mashup of a backstory so Kukui could be mad at him? and threw in the bit about not caring about the ecosystem so he sounded more Evil, even if it makes no sense with any of his other anything?
because all they did was make it weirdly class-warfare-ey and hell i know pokemon tends to present all its protagonists as Good Middle-Class Childrens and that's fine, whatever, but it kind of stops being fine once the villains stop wanting to take over the world and start wanting some parity with the privileged Pokemon School kids.
or at the very least it gets like thirty times more uncomfortable

 

NOT WRONG IMO
like, he's definitely a very abrasive dude (and the kind of guy who uses ore-sama in japanese....), but it's very much got familial overtones with team skull
and tbh, even when he's rough at the PC/in their sight, it's not.... that bad...? frankly 90% of the worst things he says are directed at himself

Spoiler: a compilation of game quotes, courtesy of bulbapedia

 

yeah my read on him was that he was one of the most actively disillusioned and well, as the oldest most experienced member of team skull the one who had the most ability to figure out a plan for Revolution tm even if it was a kind of shitty undercooked plan but mostly he seemed like he just. wanted to be a safe haven for kids like himself and give them a place to be safely and sort of productively riled up and young and stupid punks instead of just kind of doing dumb dangerous shit on their own. Like team skull are definitely a menace but there's much more this undercurrent of 'these are people failed by their society acting up out of Genuine Dissatisfaction' than with other Villain Teams who have more cult of personality vibes or radicalized extremist vibes or just. organized crime vibes.
like i feel like team skull as an issue could be solved by a proper youth outreach and education program that targeted the disenfranchised

 

yeah that's a lad with some capital-I Issues and if they're going to redeem lusamine (which i don't even mind them doing, it was far too easy but also it's not like anyone watches pokemon for deep examinations of parental abuse issues and at least they acknowledged that she was kind of an asshole and that lillie and gladion were right to be mad at her) and fucking faba the least they can do is give guzma some love even if it is ass-pully.
like.
SM, darling, as Ivy said team skull isn't like the other villain teams, the leader isn't required to be some bizarre Giovanni Lite. have a heart.

i'm not watching any more episodes tonight, gonna go to sleep soon, but i'm near the end of the series and i'm like. stalking in suspicious circles because this'll either be fine or stupid and i can't tell which.

actually i don't think the very last episode has even aired yet in english, it's still on the pokeflix 'upcoming' page lmao

 

my energy supplier putting the important info in emails about price changes:

 

plumeria: boss, you'd better not underestimate this Ash kid or there could be big trouble
guzma: trouble? Humph... you'd better not forget that I've never been defeated.

and no i didn't use the wrong punctuation marks he definitely said it in a full stop way and not an exclamation point way
whoever this is it sure isn't the guzma from the games

 

we got another flashback, this one to plumeria looking through guzma's apparent Pile of Second Place And Runner Up Trophies and going 'ugh, if you had all been victory trophies i know he wouldn't have been treated this way'

so i guess they are going for Trauma Boy Guzma?

 

'that guzma... he's pretty shrewd'

thank you lana for confirming that this is definitely not the guzma from the games, who whatever else he is cannot really be called 'shrewd'

 

guzma... apparently does not plan for golisopod's Emergency Exit ability, despite knowing that it exists- or at the very least that golisopod runs back to its pokeball when it thinks it's facing an enemy too tough for it- and gets mad when it uses it?

also he had what i can only interpret as a trauma reaction to his scizor being knocked out, since it was all. him against a black background while nanu's voice echoed 'unable to battle' over and over.

 

squints
game guzma remains superior

 

i can't imagine how all the guzma fans from the games who drew and wrote about him loving the shit out of his wimpod and golisopod reacted to him yelling at it for using Emergency Exit and telling it it's all its fault Scizor fainted and to fix it