>>58165256Blame Masuda. The games mention stuff like this going on in the background, but it never comes up in the real world, so the antagonists just look like they’re fighting ghosts. Cyrus is said to have had strict/emotionally neglectful parents who pushed him to succeed as an unfeeling robot, leading him to conclude that sentiment is a societal evil, but literally everyone else in the game world is nice and altruistic. Lysandre is said to have been a philanthropist giving resources to those who had none, and growing misanthropic by their greed over free handouts, but in the actual game we do not see a single person suffering in poverty from unfair resource distribution. Masuda wants to have his cake and eat it too, using the villains he creates to address societal issues and extremist viewpoints, but also wanting the Pokemon universe to reflect his idealized reality anyway- something he hasn’t been shy on in interviews.
It only really works (believably) for N, because he was literally raised in an underground cell by a psychopath who was showing him exclusively abused pokemon which were in all likelihood abused by said psychopath in the first place. Ghetsis isn’t portrayed as anything other than a raving lunatic, which conveys N well as a cult baby.
