Pokemon Battle by Liega1
Simple Question: What are the next gym leaders and Elite Four gym types? There are 18,564 possibilities (18 choose 12). We can narrow this down slightly, with the high probability of Viola (bug) and an unknown person with fairy type. That brings down the possibilities to 8,008. Unless we get another crazy gym combo or Gary/Rival/Blue at a gym near you, maybe we can guess what Game Freak’s got in store for us.
In five generations, we’ve had 56 gyms and elite four participants. Looking at the list of both gym leaders and elite four trainers (from Bulbapedia), we can grab all the types of all the gym leaders ever faced by trainers ready to challenge the establishment. However, in regions where we see two different gym leader types (excluding Red’s rival), we split the weight in half. Therefore, we obtain this:
| Type | Gym | Elite 4 | Total |
| Normal | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Fire | 2.166667 | 1 | 3.166667 |
| Water | 3.666667 | 0 | 3.666667 |
| Electric | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Grass | 2.166667 | 0 | 2.166667 |
| Ice | 2.5 | 1.5 | 4 |
| Fighting | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| Poison | 1.5 | 0.5 | 2 |
| Ground | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Flying | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Psychic | 2 | 2.5 | 4.5 |
| Bug | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Rock | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Ghost | 2 | 2.5 | 4.5 |
| Dragon | 2 | 1.5 | 3.5 |
| Dark | 0 | 2.5 | 2.5 |
| Steel | 2 | 0 | 2 |
Quickly now, we can see that psychics, ghosts, and fighting are over represented, while grass, steel, dark, and poison are underrepresented. Surprised? Perhaps for steel and dark, even though they were excluded for one generation. Psychics and fighting types have strong move sets and provide a competitive fighting arena for trainers compared to grass or poison types, though toxic in Gen I wasn’t a walk in the park. Grass types have type advantages too as we saw in our piece on type choices.
On visual inspection of gym leaders and my attempts to ‘sterotype’ them from the official Pokemon XY website, we can very likely say that Clemont is an electric gym leader. Clemont has a yellow background behind the trainer, and looks like a computer programmer with glasses. Based on visual inspection, Grant will most likely be a rock gym leader (likes: mountain climbing, bike racing, and sports!). The gym badge and the brown aura only suggests ground or fighting if not rock. Korrina loves her roller skates and has a red aura. That points to… absolutely nothing. But if the aura’s red, and not a vampire, then I guess fire.
The fact that fighting, psychic, and ghost types are so highly represented by gym leaders suggests that one or two of the three will make another appearance in X and Y. Out of the four revealed gym leaders, with Viola almost surely confirmed, a rock type would increase its presence in the game. I’m surprised to see another electric gym leader, given that we’ve seen 5 different electric gym leaders in five generations of games (remember, the B/W and B/W2 only count for half each). Fire types may be hard to integrate into the plot and geography, so I’m really only 50/50 on that.
Though the numbers above are true, we have no idea why Game Freak chooses one type over another for its gym leaders. We also are not guaranteed that there’ll be eight gym leaders or 4 elite four. Or that each of these supposed twelve trainers will only have one type. The biggest issue is why. Why are certain types over represent while others are not well represented, like poison. Is it a competitive thing? or is it a plot thing? Chance perhaps. If we hedge our bets, we will most likely see types represented highly again, perhaps at the elite four. Maybe we’ll see a dark and steel gym, especially because there hasn’t been a dark gym yet! My predictions: bug, electric, rock, fire, dark, steel, ghost, grass. Elite four will see a psychic, fighting, dragon, and poison.
