Pokemon Violet - 7* Kommo-o the Unrivaled failed run with Espathra
1Before this raid came out, Espathra was brought up as a fun counter in case Kommo-o had Clangorous Soul: copying the five +1 buffs and then countering with Stored Power sounded great!
Once the raid was out, though, I barely saw any mention of Espathra... apart from one person that managed to duo-clear this raid (with a support Brute Bonnet using Clear Smog to remove Kommo-o's buffs). They mentioned that holding a Mirror Herb stacks with Opportunist, allowing Espathra to hit +2 to all five stats. Fun!
...Unfortunately, the sheer number of notifications takes so long that you don't even get a turn before Kommo-o puts up shield, lol. (No Skill Swap to become immune to Boomburst to focus on defense EVs!) And not only that, even though you do have +2 defenses to Kommo-o's +1 attacks, you're still taking so much damage that you crumple within a few turns... and since you hold a mirror herb, you can't use a shell bell for survival, thus requiring Roost or amazing AI NPCs instead.
I didn't bother to lock in NPCs and just kept mashing my face into this raid hoping to get a clear, but unfortunately I just couldn't get it to work. Kommo-o's buffwipe is early enough that you don't have much time to terastallize and burst down Kommo-o, and once you lose your +2 buffs Espathra's basically dead in the water (since you're now outsped and take way more damage). Amusingly, this very final run before I threw in the towel had a Weavile Ice Punch freeze, but even that wasn't enough to break the shield (let alone win).
Oh well. It's probably possible but I won't be the one to do it.
By the way, this was my first video edited with a new program! Previously I used VSDC Free Video Editor, which admittedly works fine... though the gigantic 'AI Art' button on the main menu leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Still, in the middle of a discussion about video editors someone brought up (also free) Lossless Cut, which is basically a GUI wrapper for FFMPEG. I had coincidentally been using FFMPEG for other stuff recently, so just that mention alone sounded good!
It's... certainly awkward. From what I can tell, you can't really load multiple clips into a timeline and then edit them from there; you need to first trim any clips you want edited (in this case the very first one, removing most of the white-screen loading), and then in a second pass actually combine the videos.
Still, it exports shockingly fast and the video itself is effectively the same size as all of the inputs, both due to its (eponymous) lossless editing. For simple stuff like stitching together raid clips (where, at best, I'm only trimming out loading screens at the start/end of raids; no fade-ins/-outs of video/audio of any kind), this seems far faster than VSDC, so I'll probably keep using it.