I miss douchebag rivals like blue and silver. Why dont they make more characters like that? Do you think they should?
Hmm. Well, it sort of depends what you mean by “douchebag rivals.”
I think rival characters should say something interesting about what it means to be a Pokémon trainer, and sometimes characters with major negative qualities can be good ways to do that. “Nice” rivals like Bianca can do the same thing in different ways, though. Blue was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate what a good trainer is not; Silver was a douchebag because he was supposed to illustrate how being a trainer changes you. The closest thing we’ve had to that since Silver is Hugh, who isn’t really a douchebag but does have his troubling anger issues, but he’s sort of doing something different because the point of him is to reframe the Team Plasma conflict with a new perspective. So I suppose I think it’s a matter of whether you can do something clever with it, and what kind of message you can use the character to create.
Pokémaniacal 