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Really? I'd love for you to elaborate, if you have time To me, the existence of the Ultra Reckon Squad completely changes the dynamic between Lusamine and her children. Having her be a flat out overbearing and autocratic mother without the influence of Nihilego's poison (if I remember correctly, in the USUM timeline she wasn't poisoned, right?) was a welcomed change. But in return, it lessens Lillie's and Gladion's characters. Lillie's wardrobe symbolism immediately looses meaning, as well as the subsequent agency she gained when she changed in SM.
Well, the problem here is that Lusamine was never said to have been poisoned in either game, at least not the way that fandom usually interprets it. The only time that Lusamine is exposed to Nihilego's toxins in SM is when she merges with it during the climax when they're in Ultra Space. The way that Nihilego affects you is through physical contact, by sitting itself on the head of a host (you can see this in its concept art, where figure #2 is labeled as "a typical example of its parasitic behavior," and in this Daisuki Club artwork). That's why it's shaped like a hat.
So the only way it could have made physical contact with her prior to the events of SM is if she had encountered one sometime before, but we know that isn't the case, because when that first Ultra Wormhole opens up during our first trip to the Aether Paradise, she reacts to Nihilego as if she's never met one before - asking it if it came from another world. Had she encountered one previously, wouldn't she already know that? Furthermore, there's the wormhole experiments themselves - it's that incident, where they are later revealed to have been working with just a sample of Cosmog's gasses (and thus only able to briefly open an unstable wormhole), that causes Lusamine to realize that she will need the full power of Cosmog in order to open a viable path to Ultra Space. She mutters that to herself once Nihilego flees ("So, it's true... I still need that Pokémon. I need to get it back."), so it's hard to claim that maybe she was feigning her unfamiliarity during the incident. That incident that we bore witness to was a breakthrough in her research of Ultra Space. But if she'd only just then figured out that she would need all of Cosmog in order to open a portal, we can't really say she'd been opening up portals at any point prior. And if you were to stretch it to suggest that maybe she was present when Mohn opened a portal and disappeared all those years ago, and maybe a Nihilego hopped out, tagged her, and then left (which, A) is really the kind of thing the writers should probably make explicit through a flashback or something rather than leaving the audience to imagine wholecloth, and B) isn't as far as we know a way that Nihilego's poisons can work; we don't know if the host's behavior is still altered even without a Nihilego latching onto their head), then you'd have to explain why she didn't know that she would need all of Cosmog's power in order to open a wormhole, because we know that Mohn used Cosmog to open his wormhole.
What first sent Lusamine on a downward spiral was losing Mohn. There were not extradimensional alien branwashing toxins involved in that - just the grief of someone whose innate ego and saviour complex caused them to fold inward without seeing the pressure it was causing her to put on her loved ones, and then lashing out and refusing to take responsibility when those loved ones said they'd had enough. Lusamine became obsessed with the Ultra Beasts, Gladion suspects, because she ultimately wanted to find a way back to him, but over time, with no meaningful progress being made in her efforts, that deteriorated. Gladion left her, a wake-up call that she ignored because she viewed it as a rejection of her love. This made her even more suffocating toward Lillie. From Lusamine's point of view, her overbearing authority was compensating for her fear of losing more of her family. The way she came to think was that by clutching her charges ever tighter, they wouldn't leave her. But since she only focused on how this made herself feel, it caused real damage to Lillie and Gladion that she couldn't acknowledge. And then, in SM's version of events, once Lillie left, Lusamine had no one to turn to. Left to her own devices, she just began to wallow in her own misery. The only thing she had left was her research into the Ultra Beasts, and so with no family left to speak of, she said, "Fine - if this world rejects me, then I reject this world", and attempted to simply leave to a place where she could act out her obsessions.
In USUM, on the other hand, the Ultra Recon Squad happen to step in and inform her of the looming threat of Necrozma. This gives her something productive to focus on instead of just running away, and whets her saviour complex. She sees it as an opportunity to prove that she's worthy of love and gratitude by taking it upon herself to save everyone. If they don't even ask for it, then all the better, in her eyes.
As for Lillie's outfit, it's a very rough approximation of Nihilego's form. I don't think the idea there is that Lusamine ever saw a Nihilego herself and then actively chose to make Lillie cosplay as one. If we keep in mind what I said about the first incident at Aether Paradise, we know that Lusamine cannot have encountered a Nihilego before. However, we are told by Gladion in the post-game that what Mohn left behind was a weakened Cosmog and papers about Nihilego. Lusamine was probably just being subconsciously influenced by descriptions of the creature in those papers, as she grew more and more obsessed with researching Ultra Space. Conspicuously, we are also told that only two kinds of Ultra Beasts had been seen in Alola prior to Lusamine opening up wormholes all over the region - those two being Guzzlord, with the International Police mission ten years before, and Nihilego, which Wicke tells us has been "sighted in Alola's past." Since Mohn came to Alola to research the Ultra Wormholes, there's a pretty good chance that he looked into these records and jotted down what they had to say, which could have included a vague description of what emerged from the hole in the sky way back when.
The symbolism is still just as effective - it still communicates the same idea about Lusamine putting her wants before the needs of her children, and smothering any of Lillie's own identity in the process. If anything, I'd argue that it's stronger for not being some direct influence on the part of a Nihilego, because if Lusamine was brainwashed and acting under and alien influence the whole time, then she can't really be held responsible for her actions. But Lillie tells us at the end of SM that she's been helping the recovering Lusamine to understand what she did wrong. And Lusamine's decision to let Mohn go at the end of USUM, too, I think is stronger if it's read as an acknowledgement of where she went wrong in her willful choices before.
As for Lillie's agency, I do think that's a point of USUM that is worth criticizing, because she does take something of a backseat. My charitable reading of this is that it's meant to reframe the narrative to be more about the player's exploits and good-doings, as a contrast to how SM were, I think, by-and-large Lillie's story, but more cynically I think there's just maybe not a lot to be done about it since they likely wanted to make the game's story play out differently so that more people would be inclined to buy it, and the biggest and most obvious way of doing that is by reducing the Lillie scenes in favor of other things. Granted, we do get to see a slightly more finished portrait of how she and Lusamine might go about reconciling their relationship, as well as seeing Lillie's first efforts as a Trainer (they are, of course, admirably pitiful), but ultimately it still just makes me wish we'd gotten Kanto sequels instead, to more fully explore those ideas.
As for Gladion, fleeing the Aether Paradise with a Type: Null because of a much generic motivation severely weakens their partnership... In my SM headcanon, that weird hand twitch hints at PTSD; one can only imagine what kind of twisted, gruesome experiments he ran into in the AF laboratories. Watching him balance trauma and anxiety with kindness and determination was amazing.
That's interesting, because to me, I'm not really sure what Gladion's motivation was in the original SM. All he ever says is that he feels a need to become stronger. But USUM actually tell us why - because the loss of his father made him want to become capable of protecting the people he cares about. He is like his mother, but is informed by her mistakes and tries to carry out her noble intentions in a more empathetic, albeit still flawed, way.