I honestly think the rivals from the past few games have been kind of terrible. For the first few generations, our rivals always learned something from us. In RGB, Blue learned that he isn't invincible, Silver learned to appreciate his Pokemon as more than just tools, in RSE and OR/AS, Wally forced not only his Pokemon but also himself to become stronger and less dependent in order to compete with us (May/Brendan don't count, they're soulless husks of human beings, and in a way symbolic of what's to come in the future. I consider Wally to be the true rival from RSE and OR/AS, or rather, I consider us to be Wally's rival. We're the driving force behind him improving himself.). From there, it kind of breaks down. A lot of people praise Barry as the "ideal" rival, but what does he actually learn from us? What moral is there in his story? Does he actually progress as a character? I see very little progression, if any. He begins as a rash, reckless person and ends exactly the same way. B/W and B2/W2 are my least played games and the Gen 5 rivals were very forgettable in my opinion, but I did notice the same trend and lack of progression in their rivals too. Same goes for X/Y, although they at least gave your rivals personality there, as well as interests that make them seem more like believable humans.
Finally in S/M we get Lillie, another character with actual progression throughout the story and she isn't even your rival in any sense of the word. Hau and Gladion suffer from the same characteristics that the other recent rivals suffer from, no real character progression, no lessons learned from the player, and at least in Hau's case, extremely one dimensional personalities with no real reason to care about them as characters or see them as anything more than plot devices. In fact, I consider these two the worst of the bunch for different reasons. Hau is just... there. He could be entirely axed from the storyline and it wouldn't change much at all. On the other hand, in Gladion's case it seems like they at least tried to make him interesting, given that he actually has a backstory and a unique personality, but they also left way too many loose ends that, at the very least, would have been much more interesting had they tied them up. How did he end up with Team Skull in the first place? How exactly did he get Type:Null to evolve? Why does he have that hand tremor? They could have done so much more with him, and they just didn't. It's wasted potential in my opinion.
Anyways, I don't really care exactly what the Sw/Sh rival is like. They can be nice, they can be a jerk, they can be somewhere in between, they can be both at once. I don't care as long as they actually progress as a character throughout the story. They should learn something along the way. They should be a different person by the end of the story than they were at the start of it. They should be a fully fleshed out character with a unique personality, motivations, quirks, and some backstory, preferably one that's more believable and relatable than always being jerks for the sake of being a jerk, or always being nice for the sake of being nice.
