Hot Take: Ash's story should have ended in Johto, him defeating Gary in the Johto league finals and that earns him a battle with Lance.
>>59074512Cold take that’s nearly 30 years old lmao
>>59074512Are you me? I have this exact same opinion.Besides, if they wanted to continue milking the franchise that bad, they could have had him visit other regions while still winning leagues. His goal is to be a Pokemon MASTER, not regional champion
>>59074512Then would future seasons of the anime use the protagonist from the games they were adapting?
>>59074512It would have been better if the anime swapped protagonists like the games do, instead of Ash all the timeImagine if by Johto there was a time skip, and we see that Ash had become a much more seasoned Trainer compared to the shitshow of a run he had back in Kanto, all to build him up as the final opponent for the current protagonist
>>59074512it should have ended when he defeated brock with a sprinkler system
>>59074512I feel like he should've got mogged by Gary. Or Giovanni. Real men.
>>59074523If it were cold then ash's story wouldn't have gone as along as it did.
>>59074645Ash got extremely lucky and didn't battle Giovanni in Kanto, since he absolutely would have been destroyed, since Giovanni was using Mewtwo at the time, but they had a falling out right as Ash was about to battle them, so Gary ate shit, and he got to fight Jessie and James instead for an easy victory
>>59074593Why are americans so obsessed with aging cartoon characters? the fuck... stop already.
>>59074675The series literally does it already, the anime is the only place it doesn't, that's why
>>59074671At least Giovanni's Persian one shotted Pikachump with Power Gem lmao.
>>59074683The ashnime is the only media he consumed.
>>59074512Ash should've ended up as Sabrina's shrunken footslave gimp after losing to her.
>>59074675why are the japanese so obsessed with peter pan syndrome when it comes to ash?
>>59074675Tell that to the Simpsons writers.Bart has been 10 since the '80s.
>>59074512ash should've ended in sinnoh, the last full japanese region, felt like that is where ash truly culminated as a character, then each region afterwards being it's own country would have it's own new protag, ash could still come back from time to time to help shill remakes of the jap regions, and kitakami
>>59074739The scam already settled in by that point.
>>59074512Ash should have ended with the orange islands.Johto should've off had Ethan as protag
>>59074675Nigga that ain't some slice of life animeIt's an anime about a journey and yearly league championshipsOf course the characters should age and grow
>>59074512You mean kanto? Gary should not be eliminated offscreen neither ash being beat by that lama oc
>>59075022Nah, Ash didn't even deserve to make it out of qualifying rounds in Kanto.Humiliating losses for both him and Gary should have shattered Ash's entire worldview and inspired actual character growth. Show him that the world is a bigger place than he thought, and that he needs to get serious about Pokemon training or quit.
>>59075115>Ash didn't even deserve to make it out of qualifying rounds in Kanto.Well yeah, that's the true issue.
>>59075142I like the realism of that outcome. Of course some kid from a hick town wouldn't become the champion on his first try.
>>59074512Why it's Dragonite hiding behind Lance?
>>59074512Lance at home
I don't think the anime did a good job at utilizing game characters. Lorelei appeared in like one episode an arc after the Pokémon League. Bruno appeared before the League at least, but also in like one episode. Lance didn't even appear until Gen II in the anime, and Agatha didn't appear until after Hoenn. Giovanni left the Gym? Why? What does it matter? It's not like Ash really battled him in any meaningful way.We don't even know what happens with the victor of the League. Do they face the Elite Four and Champion? Or are they the Champion by virtue of beating the League? What purpose do the Elite Four serve then? Lance was only used in Hoenn doing his Gen II role because FRLG had come out, but what was the point? What was the point of introducing Steven if they were going to take the Emerald route and say Wallace was the Champion? What about the Hoenn Elite Four other than Drake? It took until the XY anime for them to bring back Steven, and I don't think I felt anything at Ash beating him because he was just so underutilized.But it was Gary that felt so mishandled to me. In the Gen I, your rival is your best friend, but your relationship has soured a bit by him becoming more full of himself. The anime did little to establish that Ash and Gary were ever friends, at least not until their final showdown. Why did Gary have a car and a bunch of cheerleaders? Just came off as the local bigshot through nepotism while Ash was some kid who knew him. And the constant presence of Brock and Misty dilute whatever dynamic Ash has with Gary, he's not their rival and the cheerleaders certainly don't equate to them. And then Gary mellows out and just becomes this very infrequent traveling figure that hardly gets utilized. The final battle happens because it just needs to be resolved. Compare to Paul who is a much more frequent figure in DP and adequately built up as a rival.
>>59075971>We don't even know what happens with the victor of the League.We do, League victors still have to challenge the Elite Four and the Champion for the title.They don't really explain this until the DP season.
>>59074512Ash's story should have never begun. Liko proved that the anime could have always had a perfectly fine MC, it's mindboggling that they wasted 26 YEARS on this bum instead.
>>59075994I doubt they really had it completely thought out even back then. I don't think Shudo was interested in what was established within the games. Instead, he saw it more as a springboard for the world he could create and the human melodrama that could stem from it. He's the type of person who would be more interested in the history of a town and the environment people produced by such a history. He'll come up with his own background for Pallet Town and how its small size and lack of many relevant figures outside of Oak's family led to it putting all its hopes on aspiring Trainers. Mr. Fuji from the games is a kindly old man with a few threads connecting him to Cinnabar Island as a scientist with Blaine, which connects him to the cloning done to create Mewtwo. The anime has a Dr. Fuji who lacks the Lavender Town role and is instead a geneticist trying to obsessively bring back his dead daughter through cloning and he just needs Team Rocket's funding for his research. He's so obsessed that his wife leaves him, and he's ultimately killed by creation. His design is basically Dr. Tenma from Astro Boy who recreated his own dead child as a robot.And people who fail as Trainers have their dreams crushed and become deadbeats. It's a society that functions on gambling on people making it big as a means of economy. I somehow think that Shudo just couldn't give a shit about the structure of the League leading to the Elite Four because that was never in his plans to begin with for Ash. That wasn't human melodrama. And even if he came up with something, he gradually moved away from the anime and the whole background he had gradually got rewritten by other staff over time. Ash now lives in a world with casual GO-style raid battles against Legendaries. It's a floating timeline in a fictional world, and the game structure gradually became more important, at least up to Kalos, while vestiges of Shudo's structure (traveling companions, League tournaments) remained.
>>59074661you're assuming the showrunners listened to popular opinion. you assume wrong.
Not awful for AI at a glance but you notice more and more mistakes as you look
>>59076048That's just the Japanese mindset of 改善 kaizen, of sticking to one thing that works and refining it over and over and over. Optimally it comes out better than when it started, but Pokémon resulted in many of its interesting edges sanded down and an extremely formulaic structure for long-term running. But in spite of every Pokémon game being a soft reset back to being a new Trainer working their way up to Champion, the individual games contain marked progression with evolution and the badge/League system. This was completely at odds with the perpetual summer thing they were trying to make it into, so it resulted in jarring resets. The Pokémon anime wanted to be Doraemon, but Doraemon isn't bound to progression.
