Should Pokemon have darker and darker themes?

[Joeno]

Counter-idea: Pokemon hasn't necessarily gotten darker, it's just gotten more obvious about it.

I mean, compare Team Rocket and Team Plasma. The effect of what they're doing to an average Pokemon trainer are similar: take them away. With Team Plasma, that's just as much through propaganda as convincing them, but there's some noble goals and little direct damage. Team Rocket, instead, just steals all these Pokemon, mutilates them for profit (remember GSC's Slowpoketails?), causes random destruction through its evolution beams and such, and generally causes as much harm as long as it leads them to profit.

Follow-up Team Plasma in B2W2 is slightly different, but its plans arguably leads to as much damage as Team Rocket's, with at least occasional remorse shown. They're still not using dead Pokemon or kill or mutilate them (as Team Rocket is referenced to do). To quote Jessie from recent anime "We do want we want because we can."

The reason you notice it more might partially because you're paying more attention, but also because the game spends more and more time to point it out to us. B2W2 is probably worst for this, considering its use of white Team Plasma to point this all out to us, but look at the length of any of the bad guys' speeches in the last two generations. Cyrus in Platinum is prone to this as well.

The other part of this is that we're getting developer commentary now. We've gotten very little, to no, background on any of this for Team Rocket and that's been kept even in the remakes. On the other hand, we've had these detailed commentaries on N (including the reveal of his ridiculous name) and it takes away most ambiguity in favour of explaining what's going on. It's not my favourite way of working - some subtext works far better than a writer spelling out everything that's gong on and especially in the case of N it turned an ambigious character with a more interesting redemption arc that actually required some thought into the how and why into just another hero whose power level seems quite Mary Sue-ish on behalf of some of Pokemon's writers.

[Joe_Pokemon2015- MEGA RAYQUAZA!]

I mean, compare Team Rocket and Team Plasma. The effect of what they're doing to an average Pokemon trainer are similar: take them away. With Team Plasma, that's just as much through propaganda as convincing them, but there's some noble goals and little direct damage. Team Rocket, instead, just steals all these Pokemon, mutilates them for profit (remember GSC's Slowpoketails?), causes random destruction through its evolution beams and such, and generally causes as much harm as long as it leads them to profit.

Consider the idea that Pokémon gets more obvious about the dark themes. Because Team Rocket cut tails of Slowpokes, was the 2nd Generation darker than the 5th Generation?

The reason you notice it more might partially because you're paying more attention, but also because the game spends more and more time to point it out to us. B2W2 is probably worst for this, considering its use of white Team Plasma to point this all out to us, but look at the length of any of the bad guys' speeches in the last two generations. Cyrus in Platinum is prone to this as well.

I guess the next game will point out Team Flair like that even more than that. But still, will they be crueller? Who knows? And as for the antagonists giving speeches to the grunts- is there some link between this and how dictators past and present give long speeches to rally the whole society aside from being coincidental?

[Spriter]

*Max Revive*

Well, Team Plasma are the scariest of the teams we've had so far, because they were trying to take away the one thing that the Pokemon world couldn't do without. If Pokemon went, it'd take time for the world to adapt to not using them for transport of cargo or people (Lapras and Machamp, for example). It's not exactly "dark", but it's quite powerful. Ghetsis raised N for one purpose, so that's pretty bad.

Maybe the teams have tried to make a powerful effect on society as they've gone through the generations.

[Joe_Pokemon2015- MEGA RAYQUAZA!]

Well, Team Plasma are the scariest of the teams we've had so far, because they were trying to take away the one thing that the Pokemon world couldn't do without. If Pokemon went, it'd take time for the world to adapt to not using them for transport of cargo or people (Lapras and Machamp, for example). It's not exactly "dark", but it's quite powerful. Ghetsis raised N for one purpose, so that's pretty bad.

Right, point taken. Indeed, Team Plasma is the most scariest of the teams.

Anyway, despite Plasma's evil motives and dark themes scattering Generation V, Team Galactic of Generation IV gets some brownie points for being scary in the way that they wish to destroy the entire Pokémon universe and replace it with their own.