Mantle is a one-off antagonist from the episode "Rotom's Wish!" Best known for being a crook who bullied his way into ownership of the Lost Hotel, he's the kind of villain whose scheme falls apart once someone actually stands up to him.
Ten years before the main story, Mantle rolled into the Lost Hotel's opening day with his crew looking for trouble. He challenged the owner, Weston, to a Pokémon battle with ownership of the hotel on the line. His Krookodile seemed like an easy win—so easy that when Weston's Rotom got spooked and bolted into an air vent, Mantle just claimed victory by default and took over. From there, he basically ran the place into the ground, keeping Weston around as a desk clerk while he battled visitors and claimed their Pokémon whenever he won. Not exactly a legitimate business model.
When Ash and company show up in the present day, Mantle's in the middle of battling some poor visitor and his Pangoro. Ash takes one look at what's going on and loses it, immediately calling Mantle out. Mantle responds by dragging Ash into his own high-stakes match—if Mantle wins, he gets Pikachu. Things get interrupted, though, when Rotom pops out of a trash can and basically whisks everyone away to explain the whole sob story. Rotom then sends them back a decade to fix things.
With a five-minute window, Ash helps Weston get a proper rematch together. Rotom pulls off a clever trick this time around—instead of just running scared, it uses the hotel's appliances to change forms and gain a type advantage over Krookodile. The battle's genuinely close, but Rotom comes out on top. Mantle, being stubborn, refuses to honor his promise and tries to weasel out of it until Rotom and Pikachu give him a shock he won't forget. That's enough to make him surrender and undo the whole mess.
The timeline shifts, and in this corrected present, Mantle's actually a halfway decent employee at the Lost Hotel alongside his former henchmen.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
