It's also weird how downplayed anime Lillie is from game Lillie. In the anime the Lusamine arc was breezed through and now she's just kinda there. They could have theoretically promoted her as a major character like May, Dawn or even Serena, but the writers don't seem to want to do that. I guess the large cast of SM characters makes that rather difficult, and she's only 1 of 3 girls this arc too. It also doesn't help that despite being 70+ episodes into SM, all 3 girls only have 1 pokemon each. They wouldn't even let Lana capture that Dewspider even though the whole ep hinted it! And people thought Serena only having 3 pokemon her entire run was weird, the SM girls will probably only have 1 pokemon each the entire saga at this rate.
I'm really not fond of the recent trend of the anime barely giving the girls any pokemon and barely having them battle. We literally haven't had a main girl with a full team since Dawn, and that was 3 gens ago now. Back in the original series they made the mistake of giving Misty/Brock too many pokemon and not having anything to use them for, they more or less got the balance right with May, but now it just feels off.
For all we know the SM anime might end by November too if the new games come out this year, so for all we know this arc might be over already.
Here's the problem: They wanted to make the Sun & Moon anime into a slice of life anime (probably due to how successful the Yokai! Watch anime was at the time). They saw the opportunity of Alola being a region without a Pokemon League to do something different, which they apparently also took to meaning the story of the games.
Being less cynical, they also may have wanted to wait until the third version/second pair games came out before deciding what to do. They only did "plot" episodes because they knew they had to set something up... until they learned what the storyline of USUM was. Since USUM completely changed the ending of SM, they had to wrap up the SM story they started immediately in order to incorporate the story elements from USUM. Thus, they decided to give Nebby to Ash because he's the main character and just rushed through SM's story, unable to really give payoff which includes Lillie's character. I would not be surprise that, with the way Lillie's story was going, she was suppose to get Nebby as the pinnacle moment of her character development. But they wasted too much time on NOTHING SIGNIFICANT FILLER so that plan went down the drain and now they have nothing to do with Lillie. She's just part of the gang, also filled with characters who significance was taken from them because the anime writers are lazy hacks.
Let’s hope for Rainbow Rocket with how Giovanni knows other team bosses. Bad teams unite, then epic team infighting showdown ending it with making Ash Champion as the hero who beat them all, and then gets challenged by Gary for a 21st anniversary battle.
Don't forget they have to also include the Ultra Recon Squad (or not, they never introduced Zinnia into the anime and I doubt we'll see international officer Anabel, not to mention HAU is still MIA). Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised that if they did the Rainbow Rocket story they wouldn't include the other villain bosses. If I were an anime writer forced to deal with this mess, I'd just have the Rainbow Rocket thing being Giovanni taking over Ultra Megalopolis and then trying to take control of the Ultra Beasts worlds.
Lycanroc-Dusk is that new form. It's the whole reason they gave Ash that one as opposed to Lycanroc-Midday. Even though Dusk can breed in-game, it's meant to be special to an extent.
I know, I meant an alternate forme on top of the new forme. Like it changes into a Dusk version of Midnight Lycanroc. But as I said, I think they're just setting up for Splintered Stormshards... hopefully.
Also with the new game rumors I wonder if SM will be cut short in the anime, i guess we'll see...
That's a good question, what IS the end goal for the Island Challenge? Like once Ash beats all the Kahuna, then what?