YMMV / Pokemon S 15 E 19 Cilan Takes Flight

• Broken Base: The fanbase has shown to be split in regards to Skyla's personality change from the games. While some fans regard it as a breath of fresh air and think it gives her more depth, others consider it to be an unnecessary change of her character, especially given that she was arguably the nicest of the Unova Gym Leaders in the games.
• Designated Hero: Cilan. See Unintentionally Unsympathetic below.
• Designated Villain: If other trainers were shown feeling let down and insulted by Skyla deciding the match through her Air Battles and giving badges that were not earned through victory in an actual, hard-fought battle, Skyla would come off looking worse. But since the trainers don't seem at all bothered by her practices and she seems like a friendly, if cocky, girl with an understandable (if somewhat selfish) motive behind forgoing real battles in favor of Air Battles (to make more free time to pursue her own hobbies), her being cast in an antagonistic character and the angry reactions she evokes in Ash and especially Cilan seem far from warranted. Plus, we're shown her thought processes and her predictions for how the battles will go down are actually quite reasonable, so her choices seem to have a very high accuracy rate, even if the following episode shows that they're not perfect.
• Strawman Has a Point: Even though Skyla was wrong for her methods of gym leading, she wasn’t wrong to point out the fact to a challenger that bug and grass types weren’t a good match against her bird Pokémon.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Cilan comes off as this for many viewers for a number of reasons:
  • Most trainers and even Skyla's own grandfather, who doesn't agree with it, have accepted Skyla's "Air Battles" as just the way this particular Gym Leader chooses to run her gym. Cilan, however, refuses to let it stand even when it's not really any of his business.
  • Cilan himself is not living up to his responsibilities as a Gym Leader by traveling with Ash, leaving a gym based on the theme of having three elements with just two, which ends up creating a problem for it in one of the last episodes of the Black & White series. And yet he acts like Skyla not living up to her responsibilities is an unforgivable transgression that must be corrected.
  • Lastly, the attitude Cilan displays, that he "cannot stand for this" in regards to someone doing something different from him that he disagrees with, is the exact kind of intolerance that made Team Plasma the bad guys in the Black & White games. And yet Cilan is meant to be seen as the good guy in this situation.