I'M CAPTAIN KIRK

don't worry cody your eevee hcs will come i have just been stuck in 404 thoughts not found

 

It happens, dw about it!

 

So last night i was playing pokemon as has become my wont at the moment and i got to the bit in Ultra Moon where you go rescue Lillie from the aether foundation and it all comes out about team skull, family relationships, pokemon suspended in glass, all that good stuff.

it's been some while since i played sun, the basic game, so i don't quite remember how that all went down there, but i do remember it being different (i feel like lillie didn't get her Braveness Makeover til... later... and also of course they added all the stuff with the Ultra Recon Squad and Necrozma) and most of all i feel like it for sure didn't have Hau going 'lusamine is trying to bring the light back right? that means she's really a nice person after all i knew it!'

Hau, darling. i know you're an incorrigible optimist. but she verbally abused lillie and gladion right in front of you (i know you missed the really nasty stuff she seemed to be saying to lillie under the assumption they were arguing alone, but...) and has suspended a bunch of pokemon in crystal to keep them perfect forever. i think you might be missing the point.

in general there seems to be a very uncomfortable undercurrent of the game trying to go 'lusamine's not actually that bad right!'. lillie and gladion i can excuse, because they're eleven-year-old abused children and they're clinging to their mother being their mother. but the ultra recon squad go 'wow lusamine's really a selfish bitch? ... but WHAT IF SHE'S ACTUALLY CONSUMED WITH THE NOTION THAT SHE NEEDS TO SAVE EVERYONE HERSELF?' and like. dudes. dudes. you of all people should know that good intentions do not make good behaviour.

having watched the anime, it's like they're trying to be like the anime, where lusamine is actually a good guy. except unlike the anime, which toned her behaviour down c o n s i d e r a b l y (no verbal abuse, no pokemon in crystal, she didn't know about type:null or the worst of faba's nonsense, she was basically a bit neglectful of her kids because she worked too hard and had a tendency to treat them like babies when she did pay attention to them and she had a mildly unhealthy fascination with ultra wormholes, and she was vocally and actively sorry and changed said behaviour once called out on it) and still had lillie and gladion being presented as being justified in being angry with her at the time even if the show then kind of forgot about all that fairly quickly, the game just... still has her doing all the awful shit that she did in the basic games. and it is pretty awful shit.

i've only just got to poni island so i don't know how the plot will actually wrap up beyond the stuff i remember from sun, mind you, but hmm. h m m m

 

Y E A H this was one of my big issues with usum, especially playing them back-to-back

 

honestly the fic i read that had Moon have a terrified PTSD response to seeing Lusamine again after Lillie comes back from her trips abroad is looking more and more valid lmao

 

Spoiler

The chair squeaked softly as it rotated round, and round, and round, and round, each squeak a more drawn-out and vaguely pained echo of the last. This, thought the rotator, was a suitable soundtrack.

Poly-14 was bored.

They were not often bored. The world had a vast amount of things in it, and they considered it their moral right to be able to do more or less whatever they felt like at the time with those things, which made the amount of things they could do at any one time near-infinite. They liked it that way.

But sometimes. Every so often. Every now and again. None of those things in the big wide world sounded interesting. And none of the things in the smaller world of the clan house felt interesting either. And none of the people. And none of the animals. And Poly got... bored.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

They could go and redecorate the living room again, with motifs stolen from Hive this time; someone had painted over the Cabal symbols they'd added last time, after all. They could go and stalk Al, to find the optimum moment to unexpectedly shoot him in the head; it had been a while since their last bout of that game, and Al would either be foolishly relaxed about it or appropriately paranoid. They could go steal Maggie's cooking supplies and lead her on a chase around the Last City to get them back, because why not. They could do inventory of the fuck closet; they were fairly sure someone was getting close to their return date and it never did any harm to go leave a few threatening notes around to ensure timeliness. They could bother ED out of its doze on the windowsill, because they'd not argued properly for at least two days and what kind of behaviour was that?

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

B o r i n g.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeeeeeeeeeeeeekk-

Poly stood up on top of the chair, ignoring the way it wobbled and rolled underneath them. They'd stood on worse, and it was, after all, a small price to pay for safety when the floor had all of a sudden become lava.

They hopped up onto the desk, scattering the mess of pens and brushes and paper and pads and bits of enemy and fragments of rock that usually inhabited it, and saluted the chair's noble sacrifice as it sank beneath the rising tide of boiling rock. Dear me but that lava was rising fast! They'd have to get up higher, onto the wardrobe and the shelving units, probably. Could the shelving units take their weight? There was only one way to find out. Ignoring ED's sleepy, annoyed protests, they leapt.

A sharp crack and the loss of quite a few valuable books and interesting bits of wood and metal to the hungering liquid below said no, but that was all right, because the basic framework was still standing and the vent was just above it. Maybe Al's room or Aegis' room or Matt's room had sturdier shelves.

Shame it took a sudden incursion of lava to make life interesting again, but if that was what it took to stop being bored, Poly would accept it. The others would understand. It was that or get boiled to death, after all.

 

feel like lillie came with to exeggutor island in the basic game

little narked she didn't get to this time, even though i'm less shipping her and daisy, my pc, and more shipping her and hapu this time around

 

at least lillie's still calling lusamine the fuck out on being selfish and doing only what she thinks other people need, when talking to plumeria.

thoughtfully considers shipping daisy with plumeria and guzma both

 

plumeria says that guzma loves lusamine so much because 'she was the only grown-up who seemed to notice how strong he was'

which has interesting implications in its wording for a) how lusamine groomed him into being her lackey and b) how guzma sees himself, since if he's supposed to be kukui's contemporary he, too, is a grown-up. or maybe it just says something about when she started to groom him?

 

out of curiosity i went and looked to see if bulbapedia had a canon age for him, which they do not, but there is this interesting section:

'Throughout the game, the player can discover hints about Guzma's past and motivations. He once earned many trophies for Pokémon battling that are still on display in his parents' home, but at some point after taking on his island challenge, he ran away from home. He apparently aspired to become a captain, but was unable to. At some point, he was part of a group centered around a previous kahuna, but after it was struck down by the wrath of one of the guardian deities, Team Skull would rise from its ashes. Guzma wants to fight back against Alola's traditions and assert his own strength. He ultimately fell under Lusamine's influence because she was the only adult who ever acknowledged his strength as a Trainer, inspiring his loyalty to her until the events in Ultra Space'

all of which i kind of knew but also hadn't quite put together properly. i also don't think i ever twigged in sun that you can go to his parents' house, i should load that up and do that.

also this paragraph and the one before it about what happens to him after the events of the basic games really hammers home how very different they made him in the anime and i can't help wondering why. did they feel like they needed to make him worse because they made lusamine better? ...probably.

 

trips and accidentally falls headfirst into stanning guzma

 

...actually the games never really say he's kukui's contemporary the way the anime did; the closest it really gets is guzma addressing kukui as a fellow loser who never became a trial captain, which implies some level of similar age but doesn't actually... require it...

 

... i love the juxtaposition between 'got a lot of trophies' and 'lusamine is the only adult who ever acknowledged his strength as a trainer'
like. you'd think those are contradictory. and yet i feel guzma on a deep level.

 

the anime at least said they were all second-place and runner-up trophies though i forget if the games did. but also: yes.

also it's quite possible lusamine was the first adult to praise him for being strong while not also giving him a lecture about respecting his opponent's strength, since that's what hala yanks him up on in the postgame of SM.

 

i spoke to guzma in his parents' house with hibiscus, my sun protag, and he starts out with 'You little brat! I don't know what you think you're doing here but i actually needed to talk to you' and yeah that's p much guzma isn't it.

 

also his mum says he won contests, although the actual colouration of the trophies in his room is mostly bronze with like one silver, so i'm not sure if that's indicating anything or not.

 

'this is to make up for when i had to disband team skull! just so you know, i'll never change!'
suuureeee

 

'how come i can't crush you????'
you nearly did there boy actually you were packing quite a fucking punch

 

'you're still acting like you're my master, huh? i gave up on you a long time ago!'

so hala was guzma's teacher for a bit, like in the anime. hmmhm.

 

WELL I GUESS LUSAMINE'S A GOOD GUY NOW SHE AND LILLIE HAD A TALK AND NOW SHE'S LIKE 'WELL LILLIE YOU WERE RIGHT TO RUN AWAY WITH COSMOG I GUESS LET ME TAKE LUNALA BACK TO THE PARADISE'

[fart noise]

checking on bulbapedia she doesn't even get to become a weird jellyfish woman and what even is the POINT. apparently later once you become champion she's like 'MAN I SURE HAVE TURNED A NEW LEAF'

they really did just... try and do what happened in the anime but without actually toning down any of the shit she did like the anime did. gosh. that's balls.