The name's Ryuki. I'm what you might call a star.
who in the fresh FUCK is ryuki.
that is the question that you, dear viewer, may be asking yourself. the answer is that ryuki is a little known character from gen 7 who barely shows up and does fuck all. but you know what? i love him. hes sick.
Ryuki doesn't do literally anything in sun and moon. he is relegated to being a challenger for the title. thats... thats it. nothing else.
so... not a lot to go off of in sun and moon, eh? in usum, he runs the kantonian gym. nothing else. fuck.
um- hes playable in masters! he was added into the game on july 31, 2020 and was made playable on november 4, 2023. that fucker was in the files barely used for 1192 FUCKING DAYS.
so why do i like ryuki? theres genuinely nothing to go off of. the devs clearly HATE this man. the answer is that i think he looks cool. his eyes are awesome. they went so hard on this design only for it to go almost totally unused... poor ryuki... but the advantage of nobody else caring about ryuki is that i can do whatever i want with him! headcanons galore! i made him a gym leader in my fangame because WHY NOT thats why!
THE RYUKI THEORY.
my good friend on discord who i unfortunately cant name because they dont have any socials came up with this one.
ryuki, at first glance, appears totally disconnected to the rest of pokemon. his design is out there, he does absolutely NOTHING in his games- hes completely off doing his own thing.
however... he actually shares some design elements with a certain unovan gym leader.
both have a similar skin tone- in their sprites, at least. drayden is significantly lighter in his art, but ingame, they have around the same skin tone. they both have white hair- ryuki, partially, while drayden's is fully white. this could be attributed to drayden's age, however, his grandson, drayton, also has naturally white hair. drayton also rules out drayden's darker skin being a spriting error- he has the same skin tone as drayden has in his sprites. they also have some similarities in eye color. in the anime, ryuki's eyes are an olive green- but in masters, they're yellow like drayden's.
another bit to this theory is that ryuki uses exclusively unovan dragon pokemon in the anime. those pokemon are zwelious and druddigon- both pokemon associated with drayden or his family (iris.) in masters, he confirms that he has been through unova, alola, and johto, meaning he is native to either johto or unova. unova seems more likely, given the bit of info i just gave about the anime.
ryuki has not been mentioned ONCE outside of alola- except for in the indigo disk DLC. his gloves are obtainable as a cosmetic item. replica dragon gloves. you know, the dlc that takes place in unova. with draydens grandson as a major character.
the most insane bit to me- there is a gym hidden away in the files of sun and moon. this gym presumably belongs to ryuki- as he is the only "gym leader" in the game. when hacked in, the gym looks like this... it looks a little familiar. sort of has a similar aesthetic to... huh! opelucid city. black. you know, the version where drayden is the gym leader. what in the fresh FUCK were they cooking here.