>>38340231More often than not it's because they ARE angsty teenagers, who chances are don't read books or consume a lot of media to have a nuanced enough opinion to write a genuinely mature story.
>>38341540There's a fangame called Pokemon Insurgence that tries to do something different. You're just a guy who happened to get stuck in the crossfire of a multi-faceted holy war.
I'm fascinated by the idea of exploring various religions in the Pokemon world, but Insurgence presents religion in a vapid & ham-handed type of manner, painting zealots and followers as saturday morning mustache twirling "heh, I just love bein' bad" team rocket stand-ins. Somehow, despite the game having like five separate evil teams (referred to as cults), they all have a completely identical goal of summoning a legendary to remake the world in their image.
I'd love to see a spiritual remake where the cultists are depicted as lost & struggling individuals, perhaps there could be a cult led by a conman who found himself in too deep, maybe have NPCs that are ill-informed and consider joining a cult, or maybe have one or two cults in the story be operating with genuine good intentions... But let's be real here, Pokemon fans don't have a single interesting or original thing to say regarding any topic that isn't directly related to Pokemon.
