Svavel

"Arceus, are you desperate for a fight."

Svavel is Alex's Blaziken and starter Pokémon.

Details

Gender: Male

Age: Around 8

Birthday: Unknown

Nature: Naughty

Ability: Blaze

Met: Rustboro City, Hoenn

Name Origin: Swedish for "brimstone"

Ball: Poke

Favorite Move: High Jump Kick

Likes: Combat, making snide comments

Dislikes: Boredom, being reminded of his past

Personality

Svavel is sarcastic, cynical and somewhat abrasive, with a seemingly endless supply of snarky quips at his disposal. It's much easier to make him exhibit a strong negative reaction to something than a strong positive one, as those who were around for his earliest experiences with J-Team weirdness can testify. What he loves more than verbal combat, though, is physical combat - nothing makes Svavel feel better than the thrill of the fight, or the rush he gets from proving himself superior to his opponents.

Prior to the post-game of the Orre arc, Svavel was much, much worse in every regard. Obsessed with combat above all else, he held everything else, even his own trainer and teammates, in deep disdain, seeking only to find new opponents to fight. His quips, too, were less merely snarky and more outright cruel. Following a worldview-shattering experience that involved the ghost of Ivy Amarin, followed by some important discoveries regarding his own origins, Svavel pledged to change his ways for the better and has mostly succeeded.

Backstory

Svavel was raised almost from birth in the training facilities of Torman's Pedigree Pokémon, a breeding organisation marketed at professional battlers and other "hardcore" trainers. About a year after Svavel was sold off, the borderline eugenicist techniques Torman's used to condition its "products" were revealed to the wider world in an exposé, drawing widespread condemnation and quickly forcing the organisation's disbandment, followed by many of its higher-ups being tried and sentenced for severe Pokémon rights abuses. When Svavel was young, however, Torman's was still mostly seen as a typical breeding group, though suspicions over the universally vicious, asocial character of the mons it produced were already being raised. Like all Torman's mons, Svavel was raised to be a perfect combatant, spending all day locked in a dingy cell and forced to battle other mons raised by the company in brutal unregulated bouts if he wished to receive food, drink and other basic necessities.

Once he was deemed well-trained enough to be sold on, Svavel was shipped off to Hoenn, where he ended up for sale in a pet shop in Rustboro. It was here that he caught the eye of one Alexander Mikael Jakobsson, for whom the idea of a perfectly reared pedigree Starter held considerable appeal. Purchasing Svavel for a frankly absurd fee, Alex set off on his journey, his intensely cantankerous new Torchic in tow.

Up until the tail-end of the Orre arc, Svavel believed Torman's Pedigree Pokémon were never punished for what they did to him and countless other mons, leading to a great deal of bitterness on his part. It was the discovery that they had, in fact, suffered the consequences of their actions that led directly to Svavel vowing to become a better mon, though he's never lost the cynical worldview such an upbringing gave him.

Abilities in Battle

Svavel is a raw physical fighter, neglecting any hint of subtlety in favour of pummeling anything that gets within kicking distance into submission. He's also surprisingly hardy for such a purely offense-oriented combatant, capable of taking a fair few hits before going down. Svavel's favoured move is High Jump Kick, which he will generally spam endlessly unless something else would produce better results.

Relationships

Svavel's relationship with the other members of Alex's team, and with Alex himself, used to be strained due to his vicious temper. Ever since he calmed down, Svavel has made mostly successful efforts to foster better relationships with the others while making sure not to repeat his old mistakes with the new team members.

Surprisingly, Svavel gets on fairly well with Joseph despite being, in many ways, his complete opposite. Captain kind of weirds him out, though.

Svavel also had friendly interactions with Pakhet and Montu, particularly the latter.