Champions of the Pokémon League, Part 5: Cynthia

Just to prove that the Pokémon League is an equal-opportunity employer, here’s the series’ only female Champion to date: Cynthia, master of the Sinnoh League.  Of all the Champions across all the different versions of the game, Cynthia is dearest to my heart, because, as of her debut in Diamond and Pearl, she was quite possibly the only halfway legitimate archaeologist in the entire Pokémon universe.  She seems to think of herself as a Pokémon trainer first and a historian second, but her research is clearly important to her and she spends every free moment studying the history and mythology of ancient ruins around Sinnoh, like the Spear Pillar.  If Cynthia’s glorious trench coat and its luxuriant fur trim represent what qualifies as casual attire for her, she has probably not spent a full day on a dig site in a very long time.  Nonetheless, I can scarcely put into words how refreshing it was to meet someone in these games who was genuinely interested in the Pokémon world’s ruins for their historical significance and not because of the obsession with ancient treasure that drove the Ruin Maniacs of Ruby and Sapphire.  Cynthia’s function in the plot is mainly to provide hints and exposition about the ruins you encounter, but she also has an inexplicable tendency to give you things at random for her own impenetrable reasons, like the HM for Cut when you first meet her in Eterna City, along with (only on Platinum) a Togepi egg, which is a remarkably silly thing for a Pokémon master to give to a total stranger (then again, it’s well-established that Pokémon masters can recognise, or think they can recognise, talented trainers by sight).  Later she turns up again and gives you a few doses of Secretpotion to allow you to clear one of the most absurd obstacles in video game history: a blockade of Psyduck whose chronic headaches have rooted them to the spot on the road to Celestic Town.  These headaches are not going to get better on their own, there is no other way to move the Psyduck, and Cynthia definitely isn’t going to give them the medicine herself; her research is far too important for her to waste time with such trivialities.  This is doubly inexplicable because as soon as you give them the Secretpotion, Cynthia shows up to congratulate you and gives you your next assignment: to return a necklace (some kind of artefact she’s been studying) to her grandmother in Celestic Town.  Wouldn’t this sequence have made far more sense if she’d given you the Secretpotion and the necklace at the same time?  As far as Diamond and Pearl go, Cynthia fades into the background after that – almost to the point that meeting her again at the Pokémon League creates the same reaction as Steven does; you remember that you used to know who she was, but you’re not sure why you ever cared.

Cynthia is similar to Steven, in some ways; although a tremendously adept and unfailingly noble Pokémon trainer, she’s almost more concerned with her own studies and interests, in contrast to characters like Lance and Alder, for whom Pokémon are very much the centre of their personal worldviews.  Again like Steven, Cynthia isn’t a notably vibrant or excitable person either.  The difference is that in Cynthia’s case (in Platinum, anyway; Diamond and Pearl do nearly as bad a job with her as Ruby and Sapphire do with Steven) it actually works because her personal research is directly related to what’s going on in the plot – Dialga and Palkia, the legendary Pokémon summoned by Cyrus to end the world, feature in the myths Cynthia studies, as do Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf, the spirit Pokémon that try to stop him.  She’s the one who figures out what’s going on when Giratina appears on Mount Coronet and drags Cyrus into hell, the one who explains why you need to follow them (the portal into Giratina’s freaky chaos dimension is apparently destabilising the real world, and needs to be closed), and the one who goes through the portal with you.  Finally, she manages to understand something of the nature of the other dimension where Cyrus fails; Cyrus believes that defeating Giratina will destroy its world, which, as our world’s twin, was the only thing keeping it stable as Dialga and Palkia attempted to dissolve it.  After you defeat him, he encourages you to go on and fight Giratina, which was what he’d planned to do anyway.  Cynthia also encourages you to fight Giratina, believing that if you can master it, you will calm it down and repair the damage done to the connection between the worlds (why she doesn’t deal with it herself will have to remain a mystery for the ages); she turns out to be right.  In short, she does a heck of a lot more than Steven (again, at least she does in Platinum).  There’s also an interesting scene with her in the Celestic Ruins if you return there after the epilogue, in which Cynthia discusses her theories on the meaning of the designs in the ruins, and how the appearance of Giratina at the Spear Pillar has altered her interpretation, hinting at the existence of Arceus, the Original One.  I would be concerned that all of this makes Cynthia less a character and more a vehicle for exposition, if not for one thing: she doesn’t actually know anything.  She’s speculating, just like we do all the time when we think about the nature and role of legendary Pokémon; Cynthia presumably has the benefit of a great deal of background knowledge on the beliefs and worldview of the ancients of Sinnoh, but in the end, her interpretations are just that – interpretations – and that’s a lot more interesting than just being told how something is and expected to go along with it.

Aonik (http://aonik.deviantart.com/) has here shown Cynthia with her partner Pokémon, Garchomp,
taking some time out to watch the sunset from a beach.

In a return to tradition Cynthia, like Blue (and Red), has no specialty element, which makes her that much more difficult to fight.  She doesn’t seem to have a particularly pronounced theme either, but she tends to like Pokémon that belong to the game’s élite, particularly ones that are hard to hit for super-effective damage.  For instance, in all of Cynthia’s appearances, she begins the match with her Spiritomb, an extremely rare and ancient Ghost Pokémon that is best known for having no weaknesses at all and being harder to kill than a cockroach in a bomb shelter.  Spiritomb can only be found at an ancient ruined shrine in Sinnoh by using an item called an Odd Keystone after talking to other players in the Sinnoh Underground thirty-two times; similarly, her Lucario is a Pokémon that doesn’t exist in the wild and has to be hatched from an egg as a Riolu, while Milotic’s juvenile form, Feebas, can only be caught on four randomly-assigned squares of a large pool inside Mount Coronet, comprising several hundred squares.  As a Steel-type and a Water-type, respectively, Lucario and Milotic also have relatively few weaknesses.  The sea slug Gastrodon and the flower sprite Roserade are the least outlandish of her Pokémon, but they’re both powerful and have a wide variety of attacks at their disposal, and Gastrodon has only one weakness (Grass attacks).  On Platinum, Cynthia replaces her Gastrodon with a Togekiss, the final evolution of Togepi, another fantastically rare upper-echelon Pokémon, while in her appearance on Black and White, both Togekiss and Roserade go in favour of Eelektross and Braviary – again, Pokémon that are hard to find and naturally quite powerful (and Eelektross, like Spiritomb, has no weaknesses).  Then, of course, there’s her signature Pokémon: Garchomp.  Garchomp is commonly held to be Diamond and Pearl’s answer to Dragonite, but this is a malicious lie put about by Nintendo; he is in fact Diamond and Pearl’s answer to the entire damn Pokédex, being arguably the most powerful Pokémon Game Freak have ever created, outside of the high-tier legendary beasties like Mewtwo.  Then again, he is a cross between nature’s most perfectly-evolved hunter, the shark, and the most feared creature of high fantasy, the dragon, so when you think about it, he’s exactly the sort of thing you would come up with if you wanted to murder the universe and had a over-developed sense of flair.  With the exception of Spiritomb, none of Cynthia’s Pokémon have any connection to the particulars of her character; for this one, the designers seem to have been mostly interested in giving you a fight to remember – which is precisely what Cynthia does.

Cynthia’s extra characterisation is one of those little things that get added to the third game of each set that really, if we’re being honest, should have been in the first two.  Cynthia as Champion is not that interesting (although she does, one must admit, look pretty badass in that trench coat); Cynthia as a companion to Giratina’s world makes the whole experience a lot more fascinating, precisely because she finds it so fascinating – that, incidentally, is one thing that Platinum needed more of, because the Distortion World as it stands is more a vehicle for fancy 3D graphics than anything else.  She’s just a really good person to have around, and it’s a shame she doesn’t do anything in Black and White, where she likes to spend Spring and Summer at Caitlin’s villa in Undella Town checking out the Abyssal Ruins and sunbathing... mostly sunbathing... then again, she is on holiday.  Speaking of Black and White, I’m up to the last one now: the series’ newest Champion, Alder of Unova.  How does he compare?

The suspense is killing me.