Character from Pokémon Black & White by Nintendo / Game Freak
The best villain team in the franchise — an organization built on a genuine moral argument about Pokémon liberation, corrupted from within by a man who never believed a word of it.
Team Plasma is the franchise's most complex antagonist organization because their stated ideology — that Pokémon suffer in captivity and should be liberated — has genuine merit. The game takes this argument seriously. NPCs in towns debate it. Gym leaders grapple with it. The player is never given an easy rebuttal. This moral complexity exists because N, the organization's figurehead, genuinely believes it. He's not pretending. His compassion for Pokémon is real. The tragedy is that Ghetsis built Team Plasma around N's sincerity as a cover for his own ambition. The grunts who follow N's ideology are being used by a man who plans to keep his own Pokémon while everyone else releases theirs. After BW, the organization splits: one faction (led by Rood) follows N's genuine idealism and works to atone, while the other (led by Ghetsis as Neo Plasma) drops the pretense entirely and pursues naked conquest. The split is the organization's final commentary: the same ideology can produce saints and monsters, depending on who's leading.
BW: Medieval knight-themed uniforms — grey tabards with the Plasma shield insignia, chainmail-inspired patterns. They look like crusaders, which is the point. BW2 (Neo Plasma): Black uniforms with angular designs, more militaristic, abandoning the knightly pretense for something that looks like what it is — a private army.
Also known as: Team Plasma, Neo Team Plasma, Plasma