I'm sorry, are we having this discussion?
Do you guys mean you're actually serious in considering that this:
and this:
have any kind of commonality that could be born out of a previous stage? I know they're both psychic (because psychic encompasses cosmic things for GF) and GF has "exaggerated" their evolution logic every now and then, but it seems like too much of a stretch.
Besides, they break
some rules, not all; mega evolution is not evolution; no pokemon can actually evolve past the third stage, they only change form for a while if they sacrifice their held item. Gyms, let's be honest, gyms were never what made pokemon pokemon, perhaps that was the notion of "progressive challenges that involve battling against stronger trainers that allow you to move forward in the game", but that could be from trainer battles, to gyms, to totem pokemon, to evil team admins, anything, it only depends on the story; I'd say that gyms were kind of holding them back, if anything.
Ultra beasts are, perhaps, the thing where they most seem to have deviated from their implied rule of "nothing but pokemon and humans here", but we really don't know enough about them, I feel; it could be that they're just pan-dimensional pokemon or something? or, god forbid, that theory of them being experiments or... hybrids. *shudders*
Off the top of my head, the only times I remember them breaking actual rules are the exceptions for the eeveelutions, heatran's inexplicable gender (when meloetta doesn't have any), alolan raichu's description amounting to a shrug, pikachu having a signature move it only gets as a baby, manaphy breeding a different species that doesn't evolve into it but has almost the exact same moves, and I'm sure there are more, but never big changes, just localized exceptions for certain pokemon, never too important pokemon, too.
That said, Lusamine being Lillie's mother (or sister?) makes a scary amount of sense; Lillie's style seems to be as classy, if less sexy, than Lusamine's, her emphasis on pokemon not fighting mirrors the foundation's alleged goal, and the whole "UB-01 is lillie" theory could be explained if UB-01 was the first ultra beast they caught, Lillie "released" it and it's taking care of it.
Also, we haven't gotten bad guy family drama since black and white; it's about time they bring it back.
