I'm not big on Pokemon lore, what happens to Maxie and why is R/S/E better than OR/AS according to you ?
basically in RSE archie and maxie are interchangable (as in their dialogue is literally the same across the two games with very little changes) and they're pretty flat beyond just like. yknow. typical pokemon villains
and when oras came out they kinda re-tooled them in the hopes of making them more interesting. beyond just giving them more distinct personalities (good choice) it seems like the writers got, like, insecure about those original portrayals and tried to overcorrect by making teams magma and aqua as DIFFERENT AS POSSIBLE?
like team aqua is this big fun party where everyone's shirtless and wearing cutoffs and talking like pirates and archie calls everyone brother and gives grunts noogies in the port. and team magma is this stuffy, sterile, science-obsessed group of nerds and maxie forces them to all congregate in the main hall every morning and listen to him talk for hours. plus their original goals of expanding the ocean vs. expanding the landmass.
the difference that pisses me off the most is that they inexplicably decided that team magma's goal is... only in servitude of human advancement? as opposed to aqua's goal of only serving pokemon's advancement. which is just such an unnecessary, horseshit choice. every single obsessive drawing of lines in these two ideaologies so clearly manipulates the player into siding with team aqua. of course you are more interested in the fun-loving, swashbuckling party cult. of course you are going to take the side of the folks who want to flood the world for the good of these magical creatures you love so much. of course you think the other guys suck shit and have bad politics. like. they really just threw team magma under the bus.
and then they didn't even have the guts to get rid of maxie's fucking crobat. crobat is a friendship evolution. you literally cannot evolve a golbat unless it loves you. they said w their whole chest 'this guy wants to dry the oceans and doesn't care if the pokemon die' and then gave him a little pokemon friend who loves him so much.
it just sucks. also, both of them are way less evil now. in RSE maxie tried to throw rocket fuel into a volcano to make it erupt because he got bored of his base and wanted to demolish it. in pokespe he is literally a drunk transient living in a cave because team aqua controls the media and have turned it into a propaganda circus. there have been many interesting adaptations of these opposing teams and all of them have been so interesting, but oras really falls flat in comparison with how deeply it seems to misunderstand these characters.
the thing that pisses me off the most, though, is that oras and rse are CANONICALLY alternate universes like that is IN THE GAME the delta episode CANONIZES PARALLEL UNIVERSES and more or less implies that every remake is an exploration of one of these universes. so theoretically there is no problem because oras archie & maxie doesn't retcon rse archie and maxie, right?
NO. THE FANDOM JUST IGNORES THAT AND INSISTS ORAS IS THE DEFINITIVE VERSION OF THEM NOW. THEY FREQUENTLY TALK ABOUT THE OLD GUYS LIKE THEY'RE DEAD. MANY PEOPLE GOT LEGITIMATELY ANGRY WHEN THE OTHER GUYS SHOWED UP IN RAINBOW ROCKET.
