Lysandre Labs

On Team Flare (and Lysandre)'s goals

To me, Team Flare has three layers of goals/motivations:

• Making the world beautiful in the sense of getting rid of perceived ugliness, like people who are deemed “unworthy” due to factors outside their control, i.e. Team Flare grunts talking about how Team Flare is going to get rid of ugly poor people who are polluting the world by being poor and cringe and unfashionable.
• Making the world beautiful in the sense of ensuring that it won’t succumb to the negative aspects of human nature and will be preserved for people who are deemed "worthy" due to factors that are mostly "Lysandre said so" (There is some intricacy to that I think but for the sake of this argument this is enough.) i.e. Lysandre talking about well. More or less exactly that, honestly.
• Lysandre wanting to make a difference and be remembered as the person who’s made the world better/more beautiful/less likely to be corrupted by others/war etc. In a "triumphant hero" sense, mostly, though I do think his enthusiasm at the protagonist & friends hints at him also being willing to be inspiring as a villainous figure also.

Now, there is reason to believe, based on things Lysandre says and his notes, that that third reason was inspired by AZ and AZ’s legend/story, where AZ is remembered as the king who, yes, killed millions, but also ended the great war and made it so that Kalos could prosper and thrive in the future.

I always idly wondered why Lysandre doesn’t recognize AZ; it’s kind of a silly, inconsequential thing that I guess serves to highlight the fact that he’s so blinded by what he’s undertaking that he doesn’t even make the connection that the inhumanly gigantic man in possession of the key to the ultimate weapon must be AZ.

But actually, now that I’ve thought about it (in a tangent about something completely unrelated, which is hilarious) the dramatic irony of it is that... Lysandre, who wants more than anything to make an impact on history, who wants to be recognized as the man who changed the world for the better... couldn’t even recognize his own ancestor, the nearly mythological figure he was likely inspired by.

Originally posted on Tumblr,
January 25th 2023.