Lysandre Labs

On Lysandre's convictions

I remember way back when people would argue Lysandre didn’t actually care about Sycamore because he doesn’t ask him to join Team Flare and is basically planning on killing him, which in my opinion, is a grave misunderstanding of Lysandre’s character, which is weird, because you literally have all the elements in canon to know this is silly.

We can only speculate on the first part (why he never asked Sycamore to join Team Flare; he might even have asked and Sycamore said no, who can say) so I just want to focus on the second, because we actually have canonical info that can shed light on that.

Which is that Lysandre was going to sacrifice all pokémons, including his, even though 1) he’s obviously very much bonded to them (more on that in a second) 2) it obviously pains him to do so (he cries about it… your fave would never.)

One might argue he doesn’t actually care that much and/or is faking, but we actually have canonical proof that he does care a lot about at least one of them for sure: his gyarados.

Gyarados is such an interesting choice for his main pokémon, for many reasons, but the three that interest us in the context of his post are as follows:

• His gyarados can mega-evolve, which canonically means his bond with Lysandre is very strong.
• Not only that, but gyaradoses are known for being very fierce and hard to tame and control, and even worse when mega-evolved, which precludes that you’d need to be a very strong trainer with a very strong bond to get there in the first place.
• This one is more speculative, since we really have no way to know how long Lysandre has had his gyarados and whether he was caught as a magikarp or not, but assuming he was, this means Lysandre cared enough to raise a pokémon collectively known as weak and useless, knowing he’ll only see results in the far future (very interesting...)

What does this mean? It means that, to Lysandre, the cause was more important than the things he cared deeply about. For me, this is a very defining aspect of his character. When I think about pre-canon Sycamore/Lysandre, the idea that Lysandre wasn’t willing to compromise on his ideals even out of love for Sycamore is the most tragic and tastiest aspect of their relationship (assuming we’re going with full canon compliant, of course.)

And honestly? I think Sycamore would agree with that. I think Sycamore admired Lysandre’s unwillingness to surrender his convictions no matter what happened. Obviously, he didn’t agree with the end result, but I genuinely think Lysandre’s uncompromising tendencies were something he looked up to. I think it’s fascinating how this keeps coming up between them (like in the Pokémon Masters event, when Lysandre tells him he won’t change his mind and Sycamore seems unsurprised by this.)

Relatedly, if you really think the guy who literally constantly namedrops Augustine Sycamore and defines the protagonists and their "chosen ones" status through the fact that they were chosen by Augustine Sycamore specifically doesn’t care about him, you’re just bad at reading and understanding characters, sorry.

And if your answer is that "he’s faking," why would he be faking it until the very end while he’s about to self-destruct...

Originally posted on Tumblr,
June 4th 2022.