>>56307895Outside of the meta context of Four Heavenly Kings, I do not understand the purpose of the Elite Four.
Gym Leaders and badges make sense, you need them in order to prove you can make it to the Pokemon League.
Gym Leaders themselves are no slouches with their real teams, best examples of this would be Blue, Wallace, Cheren, Iris and Raihan.
I imagine Victory Road just started out as a place where trainers would do last minute training before formally challenging the Champion.
If you never heard of the Elite Four before, you'd think they were just a friend group made up of people who've entered the Hall of Fame, but no, they're official positions and the only thing they do is put the challenger at a disadvantage so they're less likely to beat the Champion, it's even worse in Alola where the Champion has to beat their own Elite Four in order for them to start accepting challenges from people who've also had to beat the Elite Four, there's simply no need.
I don't think the anime ever talks about them either since they just do tournaments instead because that makes much more sense, but the Elite Four are also still a thing.
Has the manga ever talked about them? I know, vaguely, that Lance was a villain, but I've never looked any deeper into it than that.
What the fuck do the Elite Four even do?
