Spent my lunch writing a Guzma dissertation, hell yeah good decisions. Spoilers for Gen 7, tl;dr: he was a refreshing take on a villain who was entertaining on the surface with some surprising depth if you look for it.
>>53468144Guzma's a sympathetic thug with some funny lines and physicality, a huge ego, and anger issues. How sympathetic he is depends on your interpretation of details in the game. You can visit his childhood home in the game and find several trophies in his room, but they're bronze and silver. His dad talks about how he once tried to set Guzma straight, but Guzma turned the tables on him and beat him and ran away from home. There is a bag of golf clubs in his home that are visibly bent and described in a text box as being bent and broken. The common interpretation of these details is that Guzma's dad physically beat him with golf clubs, which can explain why Guzma himself frequently reacts to frustration with violence (including directed at himself.) Guzma is described by a Team Skull grunt as trashing their hideout in a rage, his chair in his bedroom there is described as having its arms worn down from repeated pounding by angry fists, and Guzma tells the player that his way of fixing broken machines is to just hit them, but they usually break. Then he wonders if he can fix you. Dude's got a violent temper, and it's common to attribute this to him being an abused child, so there's an element of "aw, I wanna hug him and fix him uwu" that's common. (I don't actually follow this theory because I think beating your kid with golf clubs is fucking insane for a Pokemon game, even if fucked up families was a major theme in the game. But it's very common.)
