#laquium

I feel with how Gibeon and Spinel became so obsessed with it to the point it became the only thing that mattered to them, it potentially had some kind of mental pollution effect. Laquium is basically treated as an allegory towards substance abuse in the story, so I don't think it would work on just Pokemon and plant life.

But they're both shown to be pretty logical people before their exposure. Gibeon gets right in the gas surrounding the cluster, and then gets suspiciously super defensive about his fascination with it in minutes, and when he's attempting to trigger the Laquium later, he's completely ignoring the danger he's putting himself in. Spinel literally hugs it and laughs like a madman as the crystals start consuming him. (That said, Lucius--who was sealed in Laquium for a century--and the heroes/other villains don't really seem affected by the gas.)

I was then shot 57 times.

he so small and tiny awwwwh awwwwh awwwwh

Let me explain:

When you remove any "good" or "bad" judgement from it in every scenario, there's one universal truth about what it does, and that's that it enhances life vitality far beyond its natural limits. It could lead to increased power, longer life, or a "paradise" that's always warm and temperate and never changing, but that's the one throughline. It enhances life's vitality beyond the natural limits of it.

The fact that it led to Laqua around it is interesting because Laquium led to Laqua's environment always being seemingly lush and temperate, something both Gibeon and Friede noticed when studying the nearby soil, but that's the thing: it's constantly like that and never changes. Naturally things go through the four seasons over the years: spring arises and brings things anew, summer arises, then fall comes and the old falls and withers, and then winter comes. And then the cycle repeats. The old dies, but that creates room for the new. Laquium goes against that, especially when trees directly near the Laquium Core grow rapidly then wither, and it creates a cycle of existing life constantly renewing itself, and it looks ideal because death and decay is never resolved but is instead endlessly overwritten. And it leads to a land where everything is constant: no old life dies, nothing new comes, the environment is constant, and overall absolutely nothing changes.

As a power-up it does make Pokemon more powerful because it maximizes vitality, but Mollie speculated that it basically increases biological function and leads to the constant creation of a healthy, renewed body, and for Pokemon this does make them stronger but the reason it causes them pain is because they're basically in constant biological overdrive. On the other hand, Gibeon used it to prolong his lifespan which is how he lived well past 100 years, but he had to keep relying on it more and more the longer he lived, and at 100+ he was already barely capable of doing much and was clearly old. He was already at the point where he should've already died by the rules of nature and that showed in how he became completely dependent on it and it was giving diminishing returns in his later years. In his case, I don't think he even wanted to live forever, the main reason he clung to life for so long was more the idea that he needed to accomplish his life's mission and ensure he left behind a legacy where his life mattered before he could let go. What he was really afraid of was a life where he leaves behind unresolved business and has regrets once it's over. He was able to let go and have no regrets once he reconciled with Lucius, and Amethio changed his point of view by proving that his life mattered through him, as he inherited not just Gibeon's blood but his ideals.

In all cases it represents the idea of eternity and constancy, a world where absolutely nothing changes, everything lasts forever and is an eternal "ideal". The course of nature is that everything is finite and transient: all things change over time and eventually fade away, and the death of the old gives room for new things to arise. The transient nature of life and the world is what allows living in it to be interesting, because nothing lasts forever. Incidentally that natural order of finitude and transience is embodied in Pokemon by the combination of Xerneas, Yveltal, and Zygarde, since Yveltal creates decay and destruction, but that leaves room for new life to grow in its place and things to become even more lush in the beginning of a new cycle through Xerneas' power.

And that's not even just death and new life. Things change over time, things that are here will be different over the course of time from how they are right now. People change, things change, and so on and so forth. Nothing ever remains in stasis forever.

The fact that Friede described its very creation as something that was an astronomically rare occurrence and was from outer space more or less reinforces the artificiality of it too. The "eternity" it creates is something that's pulled out by force, breaking the laws of nature in all situations.