Character Spotlight: Giovanni

Codraroll

To kick it off with the lowlights first, I think Giovanni's weakest point may be his design. He is a very generic man in a very generic suit. The designers were probably not going for an iconic look, making Giovanni like an ordinary Yakuza boss. A face without distinguishing features, hair whose cut and color are remarkably ordinary, and a plain suit whose most extravagant feature is the logo on his chest. On the other hand, this ironically makes him stand out in the gallery of Pokémon villains. Next to recent villains such as Lysandre, Ghetsis, or the updated looks of Maxie and Archie, Giovanni may actually be the most striking. The others are dressed up with fancy hairstyles and clothes to the point that they resemble Christmas trees. Their appearance is as outlandish as their goals. Giovanni, however, is an ordinary guy. A sort of man you'd see reading a newspaper on the subway, working in the grocery store, or a random face you pass on the street. But despite lacking any tell-tale signs of villainy, he is no less diabolical and no less threatening than the others. Ghetsis, Lysandre, Cyrus, or the others, you can tell they are evil at a glance from a hundred meters away. In a blizzard. At night. Giovanni, however, does not flaunt his cruelty with silly clothes, hairstyles or over-the-top mannerisms. He lets his results speak for him and keeps up a respectable facade when doing day-to-day business. This actually makes him scarier than the others, because he is much more relatable to real life. The others maintain a style comparable only to birthday clowns or stage actors in real life, whereas Giovanni would fit right into a history book on organized crime.

Giovanni's personality is as down to earth as his design. A pragmatist to the bone. No fretting with drying up the oceans, creating a new universe, or threatening to freeze the world using a dragon mounted in the belly of a flying sailship. Giovanni leads an organization that steals Pokémon for profit. With great success, I might add. He does not mess with the supernatural or make his methods any more lofty and complicated than they need to be. Steal Pokémon, sell for money, launder money through a casino. Do some burglary and extortion on the side. Straightforward and simple. Giovanni's eventual plan might be to take over the world, but it seems to be done through shady business acquisitions and corruption over many decades rather than trying the quick, dirty, and highly unreliable way of capturing and trying to control ancient legendary Pokémon. If he really was involved with the creation of Mewtwo (in the games, that connection is never made clear), he doesn't disclose it. It's presumably irrelevant to the conversations you have with him, and in either case he seems to be doing well without it. Even in the Anime, he uses Mewtwo to make his Pokémon stealing more efficient, instead of threatening world leaders or bringing forth some catastrophe.

In face-to-face conversation, Giovanni does not come across as unrealistic either. He casually threatens the player with violence, brags a little about his success, and keeps the nonsense to a minimum. Again, ever the pragmatist. Another important trait of his is stepping down rather than making any last stands. He knows that he can't rule his organization if his underlings regard him as weak, and it's better to be away before the cops arrive than backing oneself into a corner. If a plain fails, there's always the possibility of starting over in the future, perhaps trying a different angle. None of the other villains come even close to the pragmatic villainy displayed by Giovanni, which again makes him the most believable of the gang.

At the beginning of Pokémon Red and Blue, Giovanni had already achieved success. He was where he needed to be, making bucketloads of money off his business, having infiltrated the Pokémon League, and holding most of Kanto in an iron grip. Team Rocket had some presence in most towns and cities in Kanto, their name was sPokén in hushed tones, and the police were powerless to stop them. Basically, Giovanni had already won. Your task as the hero was not to stop an apocalyptic scenario from unfolding (as it has been in every game since), it was simply to loosen the grip Team Rocket had on Kanto, one finger at a time. You stopped their recruitment campaign in Cerulean, drove them out of Lavender's Pokémon Tower, uncovered their base in Celadon, ended their takeover of Silph Co., and finally disbanded the organization by shaming its leader in defeat (ending the infiltration of the Pokémon League at the same time). You weren't witnessing a mad plot to take over/destroy the world and heroically thwartening it at the crucial moment, you were fighting organized crime by gradually weakening it until the finishing blow could be dealt. That's a much more heroic story to me than what has been presented in the series since, even though it doesn't involve any climax with spectacular moments of world-at-stake heroism.

Giovanni's quotes from his brief appearance in HeartGold and SoulSilver provide some insight to his mode of operations. He stresses that a strong organization is needed to achieve success. Not making yourself a god, unearthing an ancient superweapon, or capturing a legendary dragon. A group of people working towards the same goal, effectively executing the well-laid plans of its leader, is all that's needed. It is his failure to uphold this organization that causes Giovanni to disband Team Rocket. Giovanni was pushed back into a string of failures Team Rocket couldn't immediately recover from, and he had to disband the organization once his underlings lost faith in him. But Giovanni presumably left the games a rich man with new plans for the future, as no police were ever shown apprehending him. Interestingly enough, he is only finally defeated in HeartGold and SoulSilver when another defeat at the hands of a child robs him of the final remains of his confidence, and he gives up the plan to resurrect Team Rocket. But he is still a free man with his wealth intact, so presumably he went on to enjoy an early retirement. Perhaps he's still out there somewhere, writing his memoirs on organization management.

So here's to Giovanni. Ever successful, realistic enough to be believeable, and providing us with a much more intriguing and relatable story than the bonanza of legendary Pokémon abuse we've seen from Gen III onwards. Here's hoping there will be more villains like him in the future!