I need to vent a pokemon-themed idea I was hit with while working my shift yesterday. (Minor warning for swears I dropped in here. They are purely for emphasis.)
What if, instead of being mellow or keeping the usually “Calm collected Professor” schtick, Professor Sycamore had instead lost his shit and lit into Lysandre for the asinine, selfish, and genocidal plan to “fix” Kalos?
We never see any of the professor characters really lose their cool in the series. They’re always beacons of calm or logic in the face of horrible things. The closest we see to them losing their cool is when they’re helping stop a world-ending disaster from happening. But even then, it’s more “We need to hurry and stop this” instead of them getting angry or panicked.
So my first thought was, of all the Professors, who would actually be the most likely to blow their top at their region’s villains?
Firstly, they would have to have some kind of personal connection to the bad guy in question, which knocked the majority of the professors out of the running. Oak, Elm, Birch, Rowan, and Juniper. None of whom had a personal connection to their region’s Villains. Kikui and Magnolia are also out, but their reason is more complicated.
(Guzma isn’t really a villain, though he is an antagonist. While Magnolia seems pretty disconnected from Rose, though they probably know each other through their jobs.)
Then it hit me.
Professor Sycamore is the one professor with a deep, personal connection to the major Big Bad of his region. They were old friends (more than that, in the opinion of many fans), so Lysandre’s plan to nuke the region would have hit way harder and hurt a lot more. And I could absolutely see Sycamore feeling hurt and angry enough to have a go at him.
While hauling stuff inside so we could close, I was struck by the mental image of a viciously (and righteously) furious Sycamore chewing Lysandre up one side and down the other. And, of course, once I had that image, I had to figure out how/why/what had pushed Sycamore over the edge to make him finally lose it.
I mean, the GIANT DEATH WEAPON is obviously a pretty good motive for going ballistic, especially from the angle of the two being Exes.
Now, I like the idea of Lysandre managing to survive but possibly being in a coma that no one is sure when he’ll wake up from (If he wakes up), as that gives plenty of time for Sycamore to be quietly stewing in how to effectively chew him out once he finally does. (And has recovered enough for Sycamore to visit him.) This tongue-lashing is one that’s getting the chance to simmer before it’s unleashed.
(I know a lot of people go for the “I miss how we used to be” angle, but I feel like that almost downplays the horrors of what Lysandre was planning. That was a region-wide genocide that he was planning and, if the damage done by the Weapon while it was “weakened” was anything to go by, I don’t think even Team Flare could have survived the fallout from it. Constantly having them wax poetic about their former relationship feels like it glosses over the whole “Destroying the World” thing that happened.)
(But I feel like Sycamore deserves the chance to be pissed at his ex enough to force said ex to actually soul-search and try to be a better person before he can revitalize their romance.)
BUT, there is also the story stuff from US/UM and the Pokemon Masters game, where they have all kinds of interdimensional shit going down. Including alternate versions of villains getting thrown into other worlds at the moment of them activating their plans/just after kicking things into motion.
And, wonderfully enough, a possibility for Sycamore to have a run-in with a whole and healthy version of Lysandre who had been just getting ready to unleash his death ray on the world before getting unceremoniously dropped into another universe.
AKA a perfect target for Sycamore to go ape-shit on without a scrap of guilt, audience be damned.
And it would be a full tirade! With all kinds of ugly facts, well-thought-out alternatives that his old “friend” could have used to better the world if he’d been willing to tighten his belt, calling the genocide the “coward’s way out” because he decided to give up instead of putting in the work, and a heaping helping of words and french that the clean and friendly professor would normally never use (much less in public) on Lysandre.
Sycamore going ape-shit on him would probably have a very profound effect on Lysandre because I doubt anyone had laid out the flaws (in both his plan and his character) like that. And it’s coming from someone he personally knows. Not just a random cop or a ballsy kid.
And he can tell this isn’t just a bought of random rage. It’s much too well thought out (despite the crude, viscous language thrown in) and deeply personal to be something like that. It’s a boil-over built from stress/anger/fear that his mere presence set off.
And having the fallout that happened thrown in also humanizes the consequences of his plan in a way he probably never thought about before. It’s one thing to talk about faceless masses, it’s something very different to put a face and name to them. (Even if one of those faces was his own.)
Mostly, I just really want someone to finally blow their top and call Pokemon Villains with genocide and/or “world-changing” plans to be called out on their bullshit.
(I also have an OC that I thought of tweaking a bit to add more fuel to the fire, but I can ramble about my XY baby on a later date. Assuming anyone wants to know about them.)