What kind of a name is Hugh, anyway?

…um… Germanic, maybe?  It doesn’t sound like a Latin or Greek root.  Google it?

Doing it now.  Hmm; Old French, apparently.

Oh, right; that makes sense.

Ultimately from a Germanic root, though – ‘hug,’ meaning ‘mind’ or ‘spirit.’  And it gets into Mediaeval Latin from there.  Declines as Hugo, Hugonis.

That’s disgusting.

What, ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’?

No, Mediaeval Latin.

Oh, that goes without saying.  It’s an appropriate name at any rate; Hugh certainly isn’t lacking in spirit.

No indeed, burdened with something of an overabundance of it, I would think.  What do you think of him?

I like that his storyline provides a link to the old games, as someone who was personally affected by what happened back then.  He makes the whole thing seem more real, shows us the wider consequences of all that plot.  And he sets up conflict with the ex-Team Plasma guys, Rood’s bunch, which would otherwise fall flat because the player just isn’t going to have the same emotional reaction to them and is going to listen to them with a bit of a more neutral perspective.

Mmm.  I think it’s important to have someone like Hugh in the story, someone uncompromising, because one of the important themes of those games is the idea that recognising that the ideas of people who are opposed to you can be important and valuable – like, the problem with Team Plasma, the way the games present it-

Besides secretly wanting to take over the world.

–well, yes, besides that, their problem isn’t that they want to change the way people relate to Pokémon; their problem is that they’re uncompromising.  They’re zealots.  You see that most clearly in Castelia City, with Burgh, because he actually says explicitly that he wants to incorporate some of their ideas into his training philosophy; he thinks they have a point, and they absolutely do.  They refuse to make that kind of concession to our side, though.  And I think it’s important to have Hugh in the game as someone on the ‘good’ side who is equally uncompromising, just to stress that you can have that kind of problem from both sides of a conflict, because there isn’t really a ‘good’ character like that in the original games.

What about Cheren?  He’s pretty black-and-white, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Oh, I think the pun is entirely appropriate; I think that’s very much a part of what the developers meant by choosing those titles.  But go on.

Well, Cheren is fairly uncompromising in his attitude to Team Plasma; there’s never any question in his mind that they could be anything other than thugs.  He’s still pretty hardline about them by the time Black and White 2 come around.

True, but Cheren in the original games sort of has surprisingly little involvement with the Team Plasma storyline.  Looking back through it, it’s actually really weird how little he does.  He helps you in the really short fight at Wellspring Cave, then again when you corner Zinzolin and a bunch of grunts in Driftveil City, where he actually seems totally dismissive of them – he talks about fighting them for Clay so that he can get stronger, like they’re just target practice for him.  Then he… goes to the Dragonspiral Tower with Brycen, but they don’t show up until the party’s over, and he’s there when you fight Team Plasma in the Relic Castle but doesn’t say or do anything important; likewise at the final showdown with N at the palace of the Elite Four.  I don’t think he ever says a single word to either N or Ghetsis again after you first meet them in Accumula Town.

Whereas Hugh gets involved pretty much every time you meet or fight Team Plasma in Black and White 2 and has lots of dialogue with them; I see your point.  He has personal motivation that Cheren doesn’t, and his emotions ride a lot higher.  Cheren’s much more distanced and logical about the whole thing.  Still, Hugh and Cheren do have a lot in common, aside from Hugh being so much more hot-tempered.  They sort of bond a little, don’t they?

Do they?  As I recall, Hugh is rather prickly towards him.  You remember that scene just after winning your first badge, outside the Gym, where Hugh is waiting to challenge Cheren?  Cheren says he needs to go back inside and get ready, but Hugh get mad and calls him a coward or something because he wanted to have his challenge right then and there, in the street!

Oh, Hugh’s attitude improves later, after his Gym battle.  “Cheren sure knows a lot, and he fought those Team Plasma thugs too;” that’s from the part where Cheren teaches you how dark grass works – Hugh comes to admire his skill and conviction very quickly.  Which sort of makes sense, because Hugh’s a lot like Cheren was in the first games, in the kind of singleminded drive he has.  Cheren doesn’t have any direction, though; he just wants to be stronger for the sake of strength itself, whereas Hugh has a very clearly defined goal; he wants to get his sister’s Purrloin back, or, failing that, avenge its loss.  Actually, when you think of it that way, he sort of combines Cheren and Bianca’s most important personality traits into one character – he’s like Bianca in that he’s enthusiastic and energetic, and wants more out of strength than just being strong, and like Cheren in that he’s determined and focused.

Hmm.  I hadn’t thought of it like that; that’s a neat way of looking at it, structurally.  So, moving on… if you remember when we played Black and White 2 together http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/tagged/b2w2, we had this sort of running joke where we thought Hugh was a bit of a psychopath?  A couple of people were actually a little upset by it, I think.

Ah, it was all in the spirit of fun.  How much of what you write is ever 100% serious?

I kinda did mean it, though!  Well, some of it, anyway.  The stuff his own damn parents say about him in Aspertia City-

Wait, he has parents?

Yes!  Hang on, I quoted them in the entry; let me just find it… here http://pokemaniacal.tumblr.com/post/39827151998/white-2-playthrough-journal-episode-1-where-the.  Yeah, when you talk to his mother she says that she hopes you’ll keep Hugh on the right path and stop him from getting into trouble because he’s – and here I quote – “the sort of person who lets his rage build up inside him.”  And his father starts to say “his goal is…” and then just trails off ominously.  I mean, really, how the hell was I supposed to take that?

…well, after lines like that I think everything else you said was entirely justified.  Doesn’t he kind of blow up at someone early on for being careless with their Pokémon?

Yeah, outside Floccesy Town when the farmer’s Herdier wanders off and he screams at them because it could be lost or dead or whatever.  And there’s that whole obsession he has with his own rage…

Don’t forget his ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ attitude towards all Team Plasma, including Rood’s guys.  Kid does have his ‘ticking time bomb’ moments from time to time.

In fairness, Hugh’s attitude does make a certain amount of sense eventually, once you get his backstory.  Even his outburst against the farmer in Floccesy Town – I mean, I still don’t think that was reasonable, but coming from someone with his particular background, it’s understandable that he might feel that way.  And, like, to be completely fair to him, there actually was a Team Plasma operative skulking around when that Herdier got lost!  I mean… kind of a low percentage contingency there, but still…

And he gets better, too.

Mmm.  That’s basically his whole character development right there – learning to take a more nuanced perspective on everything that’s happening in Unova while still retaining his core ideals.  And that kind of culminates when he does his Inspiring Speech at the… y’know, the meteor crater, where Kyurem lives…

The Giant Chasm.

That’s the one.  You know, when Rood shows up with a bunch of Team Plasma separatists to… I guess, like… stage a peaceful protest or something similarly useless, and Hugh encourages them to fight for their beliefs, recognising now that they’re fundamentally on the same side as him despite their past actions.

I remember.  I think what I got from that mostly sounded like “you may be a vegetarian, but the time to eat meat is NOW!”  They’re pacifists in the first place because their Pokémon are ones that they stole as part of Team Plasma and they think they have a duty to help and protect them now.  The ideals that Hugh asks them to sacrifice are… literally what separates them from the people they’d be fighting.

Mmm.

And what good does it do, anyway?  You and Hugh are both there, and who are you fighting anyway?  A bunch of grunts?  And Rood just has a bunch of his own grunts.  Are they really going to be all that helpful?

Well, I think the idea is more that there are a lot of Ghetsis’ minions around, and it would take you a while to deal with all of them.  Rood’s forces can help you to push through more quickly.  And I would imagine that Rood himself is probably comparable in skill to Zinzolin, so he’s not exactly a pushover.  Besides, however much we pick at the rhetoric, it does work.

Well, yeah, but Team Plasma grunts aren’t exactly hard to influence.  He asks them “why do you have Pokémon by your sides?” and if actually you think about that for a minute, the answer is… well… because they stole the lot of them two years ago, haven’t been able to return them to their original trainers for one reason or another, and feel responsible for taking care of them.  The idea is there, the spirit is there, the eloquence…

Is wanting.

It doesn’t really help that Hugh doesn’t quite seem to know what the word ‘ideals’ actually means.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone in the entire fifth generation knows what the word ‘ideals’ means, not even Zekrom.  Or ‘truth’ for that matter.

Oh, they definitely don’t know what ‘truth’ means.  But back to Hugh.  Is his head a durian?

A… durian?

Yeah, the fruit.  His hair looks like a big blue durian.

I always placed him as more of a hedgehog, actually.  Sorta reminds me of Sonic, now that I think of it.  So, uh… does this mean we’re running out of things to say?

Well, I think that whether Hugh’s head is a durian is a very important question, but I suppose we could wrap it up.

I guess if I had to sum up Hugh in one phrase, really at any point in the story, it would be “the ends justify the means” – which, again, is interesting because it’s the same kind of attitude that typifies Team Plasma, and a lot of other Pokémon villains as well, actually, particularly Maxie and Archie.

He puts his own ideals ahead of those of others.

Exactly.

At the same time though, he’s one of the most ‘complete’ people at the end of the story.  The games leave him in a place that makes sense; he’s learned a lot and he’s more of a whole and happy person.  He even gets Purrloin back in the end – well, Liepard now, but still – and in the process he’s managed to find it in himself to forgive the ex-Team Plasma guys in Rood’s faction.

Yeah.  I still think he’s a bit nuts, but I really like the perspective he adds to the game and how he shows us someone who was personally affected by Team Plasma’s past actions – and gives context to Rood and the separatists’ desire to atone for their crimes.  I think people tend to regard Black and White as better games than the sequels, but the sequels do a lot of things right too, and Hugh is one of them, more or less!