Rusty (Pokémon Rusty)

**Rusty** is the titular main protagonist of the Dorkly web series *Pokémon Rusty*.

## His Qualities

### What Makes Him Entertaining?

* He is an entirely comedic character who isn't taken remotely seriously. Nearly everything bad he does is played for laughs as black comedy, and his whole character is a parody of the *Pokémon* games and the in-jokes among the fandom.
* Despite the magnitude of his crimes, he is a villain by proxy who never acted out of malice, but instead only committed his crimes out of naivety and stupidity.
* He genuinely tries to be affable with most people that he meets, from Professor Tree to Battlebart to a random bug catcher (with their responses to said friendliness varying).
* He always maintains an upbeat, cheerful demeanor meant to endear him to the audience. The fact that this cheery optimism is usually coupled with various horrible things happening around him also makes his situation funnier.
* Despite generally being an idiot, he came up with the genuinely smart idea to take his father to a Pokécenter.
* In the final episode, even if it's very brief, he does actually feel some slight remorse for what he's done.
* Because time-travel created two Rustys with different histories, his/their ending(s) can be seen as a "best of both worlds" scenario:
	+ The Rusty who *didn't* commit several heinous crimes, but rather stayed behind in the deli, gets to go on adventures with Peanut Butter forever and have a happy ending.
	+ The Rusty who *did* commit several heinous crimes without any remorse is forced to work in a deli for the rest of his life, getting just retribution for his actions.

### What Makes Him Detestable?

* Even if he isn't malicious, he *is* sociopathic. He feels absolutely no empathy for those he incidentally harms or even kills. Though he does briefly feel a sliver of remorse in the final episode, he subverts it later on when he's in the deli by asking "What did I ever do to deserve this?" without irony. In general, whenever he has seen the harm he caused, he never felt any twinge of remorse save for one time (which, again, he subverted anyways).
* He frequently abused his Pokémon team in a variety of ways, such as drowning a Zubat while standing on it, plugging a Tentacool's tentacles into an electrical socket, and throwing rocks at a Kakuka until it evolved. While all of this abuse was accidental and Rusty never meant to harm his Pokémon, he also showed no remorse or even empathy when he realized that they were killed by his recklessness.
* He shows little to no concern for human life, either. One time he accidentally ran over a child with a truck before stealing said child's Pokémon. Another time he didn't care that Peanut Butter killed people to steal badges.
* The sheer depths of his irresponsibility is shown when he travelled back in time to stop his past self from becoming a Pokémon trainer, only to then do all of the exact same things he already did for a second time, thus leading to the exact situation he was sent back in time to stop. It all goes to show how little capacity for self-reflection Rusty has.

## External Links

* Rusty on the Villains Fanon Wiki
* Rusty on the Inconsistently Heinous Wiki