It's time now to burn

Note: I mention the possibility of a specific possible diagnosis or specific mental processes, thought patterns, etc. Generally I believe giving specific damaging events or diagnoses to characters is invalidating to real life people. There can be positives if it’s done well and informed. Anything I talk about here are things I know a decent amount about through my social science training, academic studies, specializing experienced therapists, and my own journey with unlearning long-term emotional dissociating. I always hated every ‘Mary Sue’ having a trauma history without people really understanding the effects but using it as a way to make the character more interesting. I think some good can come out of it when not used as a way to just ‘make the character more interesting’ but when showing the full, sometimes devastating effects. It can be informative when done right. I generally stray away from specific damaging events or diagnoses as I’m not trained and don’t wish to invalidate them for people. If doing so helps you in your process and journey- please don’t let me deter you. I would just advise that it be done carefully. This isn’t to say- if you’re not professionally taught, never give mental health headcanons to characters. Just don’t trust any random webpage on Google, or Tiktok, or your friends to give you decent mental health information.

The Diamond and Pearl remakes just came out and it’s probably prime time to post this long winded BS about Cyrus’s character. Take it with a grain of salt- a lot is speculation and a decent amount is projection as I dealt with as one of the roughest things I’ve had to learn in therapy is to be less analytical and learning to accept feelings and emotion and human connection as a positive and important part of healing.

Emotional numbness and being adverse to emotionality isn’t the result of sociopathy. I see a lot of people referring to Cyrus as a sociopath but definitely believe that the way he approaches emotion isn’t just not caring one way or the other for them or being born without them- it’s a disgust of them- which doesn’t come from nowhere. People don’t become so strongly opposed to something without something driving it. Not all that much is shared about his history or past so I can’t make any assumptions as to why he thinks the way he does but life experience taught him that emotion doesn’t bring anything good. Little 6th grade me wholeheartedly agreed with Cyrus’s plan- but, I think in a similar way, I hadn’t really felt much aside from depression, anxiety, and numbness to really understand that emotions did have potential to be good. I’ll try to stray away from my own life anecdotes as this isn’t really what this is about but it does serve as a real world example of why people’s mindsets and thought patterns turn in this way.

The most we know about Cyrus’s childhood is that he was largely isolated from other kids and his parents never felt he did well enough despite everything he tried. You can meet his grandfather in Platinum who laments about not taking him to raise and that he was just continuously damaged under the situation he grew up in. He either already had emotional damage that made him wary of other people from a young age or is potentially autistic and just prefered machinery to people (or a mix of the two). This is really the only exception I make to my general rule of not diagnosing characters with specifics but I think this one isn’t too far of a stretch and could explain some things about him. I don’t remember where but somewhere he states that machines are predictable and easy to understand and people aren’t. If you choose to headcanon this (and the other concepts I’ll talk about), it could serve as a reminder that autistic people are multi-faceted, aren’t emotionless, need to be treated well, are intelligent, and want connection even if they’re on a little different wavelength than what we consider neurotypical. And as we all know- loner or ‘strange’ kids don’t really get treated well. If he was mistreated by peers through life- it would help to explain why he believes that people and high emotional states are unsafe.

The voice we constantly hear from our parents becomes our inner voice in adulthood. Cyrus was constantly trying to be good enough for the adult authority in his life but was never good enough. The grunts in Team Galactic very often mention how brilliant his is. A scientist in their base mentions that he’s been with the company for 5 years. If Cyrus is 27, that means he managed to form Team Galactic at 22 or earlier which is frankly incredible (unless he inherited/bought out a company from someone else and turned it into Team Galactic later.) He wants to form a perfect world where people don’t fall into emotional folly. ‘Perfect’ is repeated a lot in the things he says. For someone that was taught the way he is is never good enough, he still feels inadequate. If he was consistently mistreated, watched world conflicts, and people’s emotional stupidity causing problems, and hasn’t really ever experienced anything positive enough to convince him emotion is good or useful, he would come to see emotion as a human failing and a significant factor in keeping people from perfection.

In the same way we don’t trust that that one friend who constantly insists how much they aren’t gay to actually be not gay, we shouldn’t trust Cyrus’s constant assertions that he doesn’t have emotion. He may have even convinced himself he doesn’t. People can numb themselves without realizing it if what they’re feeling under the surface isn’t really what they’re equipped to handle yet. I lived incredibly numb for years and had no idea of how much I wasn’t feeling and how much I was covering up. I believe Cyrus is the same. At a point, you fail to gauge what it is you are and aren’t feeling and the things that do crop up under the surface aren’t great. He could very well be in a state of complete emotional dissociation when we come to know him in the story. He’s still feeling stuff, he’s just so completely disconnected to it to really know what it is. There are many forms of dissociation so it isn’t a far stretch to say that someone can dissociate from their emotions or even feeling their body at all. (Side ‘fun fact’ many victims of physical trauma can’t feel their bodies much and have an extremely high pain tolerance). Cyrus either lies to the player repeatedly, knowing he fully feels emotions, or has actually partially disconnected from them due to how awful they’ve been to him. People who are dissociating are still feeling something subconsciously but are too disconnected consciously to actually ‘feel’ it properly but all the feelings are still there under it all. If this is the case, there’s likely some form or trauma or PTSD as dissociation is nearly always linked to trauma and I think the level to which he’s adverse to emotions could be indicative of that as well. There isn’t really many other worse feelings that would require emotional dissociation to that degree.

As much as I don’t really want to speculate much on the type of trauma a Pokemon character endured, I think there’s a couple possibilities that could be implied and there is some importance in pointing out that the possibilities are hugely impactful and important in people’s lives, even if they’re seen overlooked or minimized in comparison to other traumas. Many ‘smaller’ traumatic events build up and show the same effects as someone with a single sudden horrific traumatic event and neither should ever be discounted as being hugely impactful to someone. Ongoing bullying and torment from peers can very very easily be traumatizing. It’s possible his disconnection from others and being seen as strange as a child could hint at this. In the manga, his statement that if he had known someone kind in his youth, things may have gone differently for him, indicating that he never really experienced positive connection with others. Very little is known about his parents except for they had high expectations he could never reach and his Grandfather thought he would have done better had he been raised away from them. We could speculate that his parents potentially caused some sort of trauma as well. For the parents, it really could be anything from neglect or emotional abuse but we don’t know enough to say and it’s a Pokemon game so we’re never going to. That’s as far as I’ll go into speculation about possible trauma as it’s a very personal and impactful subject and I don’t want to do real life survivors a disservice by going into more specifics or speculating more on it- especially for anything that isn’t hinted at in canon.

People in his emotional state too see shoving down emotion and being stoic as a positive trait, which he clearly does. He’s generally skilled at shoving things down and boasts about his ability to do so repeatedly. The last interaction you have with him in Platinum, he admits to being angry and finds himself frustrated that he wasn’t able to shove it down properly. In moments like this, and I think this is very far from the only time he’s felt something against his will, he hasn’t reached his own expectations of himself and is still inadequate. Humans have emotions, and for someone who feels shoving them down is best, having them show up is a sign of not being good enough. This happening repeatedly through his life would leave him more and more desperate to get at his perfect world where he doesn’t feel inadequate.

He hasn’t experienced or seen anything significant shows of emotion being positive and frankly just doesn’t understand the concept. His own world view is projected and he doesn’t understand why others would want to retain an emotional world when in his eyes, all it’s done is caused pain. His world view is deluded enough to believe he’s doing everyone a favor and recusing everyone from themselves and a world in which emotion people cause pain to one another. He’s not evil in the way other Pokemon villains are- some others don’t care about harm done by the world and potential good brought through their plan. In Pokemon Masters, he states that he isn’t much for conversation but if you’re against the evil team in that game, he’s interested in what you have to say. He’s against what he views as evil for self gain and needless harm which seems strange considering the great amount of harm he caused while trying to complete his goal.

But- if he had completed his goal, and he was so set on it and didn’t really see failure as an option, the pain he caused wouldn’t matter to anyone. If he had succeeded, the pain would be wiped from people. In his mind, the pain was only very temporary vs them later being unharmed by strife and emotion in the future. The end justified the means and even further- the strife from the ‘means’ would be completely erased. When he failed and has to face himself and the things he’s done, I think the pain he inflicted it without erasing it would be an incredible difficult thing for him to grapple with.

With many emotionally damaged to the point he is, the way out of that thinking is being in an emotional situation that proves you wrong which happens in the manga. Both manga have him switch sides when shown the first experience he has with witnessing friendship. A lot of people might see it as too fast or sudden of a change but this is how people change their minds and it can happen with a sudden realization. He got a glimpse of the positives of human connection and emotion and realized what he had been missing and what people had been trying to tell him. And trying to explain something like that doesn’t work- they would have to feel or experience it for it to sink in. At one point, he realizes his plan has failed but he caused enough danger that could destroy the world with nothing to replace it and he’s devastated. His intent wasn’t to erase everything with nothing better to replace it. He joins the protagonist team in helping to keep the world the way it was vs. it being completely gone. I’m unsure how much the manga can be taken into canon but he goes as far as admitting that he let his logic and own incompleteness get the better of him and saying he may have turned out differently had he met someone kind to him young. After it’s all said and done, he’s pleased to be met with gratitude. In my opinion, he’s by far the most redeemable Pokemon villain.

There’s an unused scene in Diamond and Pearl where he’ll greet you and admire your poketch and advises that you try your best. With all the other evidence around Cyrus, I don’t think this is out of character for him to say. I think it was deleted to make him less confusing for kids. Kids don’t quite understand the nuance of someone insisting that they’re numb and hints of severe emotional distress. The people who made the games aren’t unintelligent and saying they would be able to make a character like the one I’m describing isn’t a far stretch. For anyone that’d dealt with some difficulty in accepting their own emotional pain or been dealt an unfair hand in life, his character wouldn’t be too difficult to come up with. Masters has some weird unused voice clips that further illustrate my point that he isn’t just evil and emotionless; including a very strange one of him telling you to rest if your body needs it.

I always find myself frustrated with people taking him at his word that he’s unemotional or even maybe sociopathic cause we’ve been shown a lot of evidence that this isn’t the case but it takes a bit to piece everything together. He’s been a favorite character of mine since Diamond and Pearl came out. I found something very relatable in him being so emotionally adverse. Through my own therapy and learning to be less numb and face some of the stuff I’ve experience and felt, I’ve learned a decent amount about why I’m drawn to a character that was in a similar emotional state and each form of media that gives more hints of who he is leads me to believe there’s some complexity to the character and maybe the things he tells you in game about himself shouldn’t be taken at face value. I’ve come to feel that people who believe he’s sociopathic or an emotional robot are lucky in that they’ve never had a relationship with emotions that caused their brain to decide they’re better not felt. My last bit of personal experience- the healing from this mindset is an immense, horrific, undertaking- but survivable and worth it. His would be incredibly difficult when also facing learning to trust and let people in for the first time and the weight of what he’s done towards his eventual failed goal and I’m all the way bummed that we don’t get anything further with his character in the remakes.