#sm047

Okay seriously what was that? So Gladio doesn’t understand why Satoshi is so special, why does he get missions from legendaries in his dreams, why is he friendly with a supposed Ultra Beast and so on. Satoshi doesn’t understand the problem and just asks Gladio to get to know him by battling him, this was a great character moment, made perfect sense for Satoshi.  So, what does he do in the battle that earns him Gladio’s approval? NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. As far as the actual battle goes he gets completely destroyed, only landing one proper hit with a well timed Accelerock (and doing his “offence is the best defense schtick which was cool I guess”) but that aside there was a perfect opportunity to show how far he’s willing to go for Pokemon when Lycanroc went berserk, he could’ve stepped in between it and Type: Null and gotten hurt, he could’ve desperately held it back despite getting scratched by its collar spike thingies, you know, some Chimchar/Monferno type of thing. But instead everything gets solved by Cosmog. After that they continue the battle to my surprise, but Satoshi just gets trashed immediately even though the scene had a “the real battle starts here” kinda vibe. And Gladio just goes “I see, I know you now” LIKE HOW? He should’ve been disappointed or something, call Satoshi out, give him motivation to improve as a trainer and solve Lycanroc’s anger issue (which I’m not even sure if it’ll be a real issue since it ONLY happened because its fur got dirty and magically disappeared as soon as it got cleaned), like this really isn’t a rivalry of any sort, Gladio doesn’t give a single damn what kinda performance Satoshi puts out and Satoshi just isn’t allowed to feel negative emotions over battling ever, and keeps getting a pass from legendaries, Kahunas and now Gladio despite never actually showing us, the audience anything impressive.  Once again I wanna stress that I love SM most of the time, for the new things it’s brought to the table, but it is consistently failing at living up to my expectations when it comes to serious battles involving Satoshi and at this point I should probably just assume the same from the rest of the series.

Aaah, so the music that has for example appeared during Guzzlord flashback, Lilie's flashback, Necrozma flashback etc debuted in SM047 with Gladio's scene (Pretty sure I found the original version in the game OST a while back as well but I forgot the name for now D:). Interesting. Also, Gladio's always been a good boy, a good big bro, he's just a bit edgy on the Ultra Beasts and such. I do find it a bit sad that his 'I'll destroy Ultra Beasts with Silvuddy hear' never really... came to fruitition? Not fully at least. Shame, but maybe it just says that Gladio's view on them changed after Aether Arc. That'd explain it.