Rival Speculation

[prog rocker]

As the new trailer has shown, Hop's league number is 189. I wonder if that's significant in the way it is for the gym leaders and Leon.

@geebraprint answered that question a while ago when I asked the same thing:

Hiyaku, or leaping. Saw it on Reddit a little after the trailer came out.

 

[Sakuraa]

@geebraprint answered that question a while ago when I asked the same thing:

Thanks, that's great to know. I wonder why "leaping" tho, maybe it'll have something to do with his personality.

 

[TechSkylander1518]

Seems like it's just because it's similar to hopping, which is his name.

 

[Knightwolf09]

I came up with a cool idea. I doubt Bede and Marnie will get a starter but somebody has to oppose it. So I thought of a pokemon for Bede's ace. A pokemon who'd ability is to change into the opposing type of whatever it faces. I call it Predator. It'd be why Bede is so strong cause he always has the advantage.

 

[Sheep40]

There is a fourth "rival" I have theorized about (rival in quotation marks because she's a bit unconventional and similar to N). Her name is Norene. She's a wandering "trainer of little consequence" in her own terms, who doesn't seem interested in the Gym challenge and appears critical of it. She tips the player off to Rose's corrupt syndicate early on. However, Norene is not what she seems. She is an ancient for a lack of a better term revenant and a former member of eternatus' monastic order, whom she betrayed after an Ideological falling out. Her (tragically) long life has seen so much strife (and she views her current state as the result of a faustian bargain) because of the pursuit of power endemic to the pokemon world that she's decided that everyone needs to know just how empty the pursuit of power truly is. To this end, she's provided Raihan and a few like-minded indiviuals a corrupted, sickly-green colored dynamax (Norene developed the original dynamax technique), and they have taken the name of The Armigers of Sorrow, to show all that the path of power is the path of sorrow. However, what she truly wants is to be released from her undeath, believing that the world is simply too unstable for her to feel any happiness in t

Like N, she's fought repeatedly, and is the game's semi-final boss (the fourth of the main armigers in that stretch, akin to a villanous mockery of the elite four).