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Pokémon Sword and Shield anime speculation thread

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So, are you saying that only reason to add a female character is for eye candy?

I could be wrong with this. But I might read an interview where one of the veteran writers of the anime said, that the reason for switching the girls is really the case to give male viewers always a new sweet eye candy to look at. And with some girls, it could be the case.

  1. Misty literally had no role in the anime, she was just there to look cute.
  2. May had a role, but he wasn't as fleshed out as it could be.
  3. Dawn was so far the only girl that was treated as a co-star to Ash.
  4. Iris also didn't do much. I have to say she was better handled than Misty but was also reduced to be a good-looking background character.
  5. Serena was literally the biggest waifu-fanservice of them all.
  6. Lillie was really well handled I must say.
  7. Lana was handled okay. but also did almost nothing.
  8. And Mallow is really completely unnecessary.

And the once that were handled well like Lillie and Dawn also had a lot of scenes with fanservice. Girls do not have the best reputation in Pokémon or Shonen anime in general.
 
I could be wrong with this. But I might read an interview where one of the veteran writers of the anime said, that the reason for switching the girls is really the case to give male viewers always a new sweet eye candy to look at. And with some girls, it could be the case.

  1. Misty literally had no role in the anime, she was just there to look cute.
  2. May had a role, but he wasn't as fleshed out as it could be.
  3. Dawn was so far the only girl that was treated as a co-star to Ash.
  4. Iris also didn't do much. I have to say she was better handled than Misty but was also reduced to be a good-looking background character.
  5. Serena was literally the biggest waifu-fanservice of them all.
  6. Lillie was really well handled I must say.
  7. Lana was handled okay. but also did almost nothing.
  8. And Mallow is really completely unnecessary.
And the once that were handled well like Lillie and Dawn also had a lot of scenes with fanservice. Girls do not have the best reputation in Pokémon or Shonen anime in general.

I feel like the love for Misty is born from nostalgia more than anything, if she was introduced in Generation Five and Iris was Generation One instead people would probably hate her guts even more than they hate Iris.

I liked May when I was a kid. Wouldn't go around calling her my soulmate as a grown man but I still like her.

Dawn wasn't too bad as far as female companions go, she was snarkier than May from what I remember but seemed genuinely kind otherwise, and she wasn't orbiting him but rather was a deuteragonist.

Iris gets more hate than she really deserves in my view. Yes, she was annoying sometimes, but really she was just like a younger sibling who trolls their family.

Serena felt a little unneeded ... she wasn't really a jerkass like Misty but I feel like the only reason for her character t exist was pure fanservice.

No comments on the other girls.
 
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I feel like the love for Misty is born from nostalgia more than anything, if she was introduced in Generation Five and Iris was Generation One instead people would probably hate her guts even more than they hate Iris.

Very likely that this would be the case. Iris is actually a better-handled version Misty, even if people try to deny this. Misty just has this big nostalgia bonus on her side. I like the fanfics that people create with her and Ash, and she is a very cute looking girl, I admit that but besides that, she was a very, very poorly-handled character: she had no goal, at least, not a real one, she had no backstory, no real chemistry with the other characters that weren't handled like a running-gag, she was just the token girl of this series. Every other girl that came after her was an improvement.

If this new anime gets a female lead, I really hope she will not be another Misty in terms of writing. People crap a lot on Iris, but Iris at least did stuff. It wasn't much but it was something.
 
Misty and Iris are not similar at all. Iris is actually closer to Kanto Ash in terms of personality, she is nothing like Misty outside of bickering with Ash.

Also saying Misty didn't have any backstory is BS.
 
I already said that I myself am very girly, but was interested in the idea of a less feminine girl because we've had so many of them already.
I'm not even sure if any writer on this anime can create another female lead that is very girlish without copying one of the other girls. Almost all of them had cute button-eyed Pokémon and three of the female leads in the anime had en Eevee. Also, three of them had a gial than involved some form of performance art, plus their designs are very similar, especially if you compare them to the males. Gloria would have been most likely to close to either May, Dawn, Serena, or Lilli and another gym leader could be to close ot either Misty or Iris.

Whatever they have I mind, I hope it will turn out good. Personally I'm just getting very tired of the girl characters. I need something fresh, a character type which we haven't seen before. Which is why I think Bea would work, because she is stone cold. A character type we never have seen on a girl before.
 
Also saying Misty didn't have any backstory is BS.
I'm sorry, but Misty really didn't have that much backstory. None of the characters besides TR and Lillie has a backstory, but all of the other characters at least had some background that motivates them to go on a journey: Ash wants to beat the league, Dawn and May want to be coordinates, Iris wants to be a great dragon trainer (which I have to admit could have been handled better), Serena wanted to be with Ash, even Tracey, as boring as he is as a character, at least had the goal in mind to meet Prof. Oak someday.

Misty also had like Iris the goal in becoming great water type trainer, but she barely did anything for that. Misty was sadly a complete waste of animation and time. You could remove her from the anime and it wouldn't change anything.
 
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I'm not even sure if any writer on this anime can create another female lead that is very girlish without copying one of the other girls. Almost all of them had cute button-eyed Pokémon and three of the female leads in the anime had en Eevee. Also, three of them had a gial than involved some form of performance art, plus their designs are very similar, especially if you compare them to the males. Gloria would have been most likely to close to either May, Dawn, Serena, or Lilli and another gym leader could be to close ot either Misty or Iris.

Whatever they have I mind, I hope it will turn out good. Personally I'm just getting very tired of the girl characters. I need something fresh, a character type which we haven't seen before. Which is why I think Bea would work, because she is stone cold. A character type we never have seen on a girl before.
Though it's likely the new female companion would have Grookey, since that's more towards a girl's Pokemon with the leaf bow on it's head. Also the Pokemon Center logo for Osaka and the Calendar has some indications.
 
I'm sorry, but Misty really didn't have that much backstory. Non of the characters besides TR and Lillie has a backstory, but all of the other characters at least had some background that motivates them to go on a journey: Ash wants to beat the league, Dawn and May want to be coordinates, Iris wants to be a great dragon trainer (which I have to admit could have been handled better), Serena wanted to be with Ash, even Tracey, as boring as he is as a character, at least had the goal in mind to meet Prof. Oak some day.

Misty also had like Iris the goal to become great water type trainer, but she barely did anything for that. Misty was sadly a complete waste of animation and time. You could remove her from the anime and it wouldn't change anything.

Your are conflating goals with backstory (which is pointless since Misty had a goal and her motivations were defined quite early).

Misty's backstory was clear from episode 7. She is the runt of her family and she basically leaves the gym to try to escape the shadows of her more well-known sisters.
 
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I feel like the love for Misty is born from nostalgia more than anything, if she was introduced in Generation Five and Iris was Generation One instead people would probably hate her guts even more than they hate Iris.

That's not really a fair statement. Misty is my favorite character, period; not just out of the Pokemon girls. And nostalgia is really not part of it. Maybe that's true for some people, but with the majority of Misty fans I've interacted with, nostalgia isn't generally a factor.

People like or dislike characters for a variety of different reasons, as you demonstrated, but the female companions seem to get the brunt of it; the sheer anger I see so often over basically all of them is just maddening, honestly. In that respect, I wouldn't mind seeing them take a different approach to it with the new series.
 
His eyelashes are thick because he is black.

The Scorbunny boy is black?

What makes you so sure?

I would say he might be of some Middle Eastern ethnicity but Arabs don't usually have blue eyes so ... then again, May was probably meant to be seen as Asian and yet she really looks more Slavic if you ask me.
 
Your are conflating goals with backstory (which is pointless since Misty had a goal and her motivation were defined quite early).

Misty's backstory was clear from episode 7. She is the runt of her family and she basically leaves the gym to try to escape the shadows of her more well-known sisters.

The problem here is, that they mentioned this once in an episode and that completely dropped it. This conflict with her sister never really played a big role anymore with the rest of her story. The writers just didn't care more for her. They technically dropped her and her development mid-through the Kanto saga. After that, she was just background material.

Which is such a shame, because like many other characters she actually had big potential in been a good character: Her relationship with her sisters, the reason she runaway, the goal in becoming a water expert. If the writers could handle her better, she would have been a great character.
 
Iris isn't really a bully, she just annoys Ash the same way a little sibling would annoy their older sibling, yes, they fight, but she never really hurts him, just irritates him slightly.

Misty would literally hit Ash and other characters. Even if it was played for the comedic effect she'd be more likely to come across as a bully to young kids watching in 2019/2020, times change and societal values have changed since the late 1990s so what was funny at the time would seem rather needlessly meanspirited now.

I think this is the same reason jerkass rivals have become rare in the main series games.
 
The problem here is, that they mentioned this once in an episode and that completely dropped it. This conflict with her sister never really played a big role anymore with the rest of her story. The writers just didn't care more for her. They technically dropped her and her development mid-through the Kanto saga. After that, she was just background material.

They didn't completely drop it all.

Misty's inferiority complex towards her sisters was there through out her time on the show. As for her development, they didn't drop it during Kanto. Her friendships with Ash and Brock helped her mellow out a bit and by the end of Johto, she is ready to go back home (even though she doesn't want to) and step outside of the shadow of her sisters. Since leaving the cast, we have seen her turn the Cerulean Gym into a respectable one (after her sisters nearly ruined it's rep....) and she has developed into quite a good trainer (she is far removed from the days when she threw out Goldeen on land to try to fight Team Rocket).

It is ironic, as generic as Misty's goal was, she is the only girl who actually got written out in a satisfying way.
 
Brace ourselves for more disappointment for tomorrow. Since 2019 (May's Press Conference) has not been that great for Pokemon thus far.
 
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I'm still pretty convinced the new kid's a girl

Personally I think it'd be great if they're nonbinary, but there's like a 0.01% chance the creators would actually do that.

I also think there's really not that much of a point trying to nail down specific ethnicity, considering the world isn't actually Earth, people naturally have impossible hair and eye colors, and they've been moving away from any explicit real-world geography for a while now, in favor of just making places merely based on real places
 
I'm still pretty convinced the new kid's a girl

Personally I think it'd be great if they're nonbinary, but there's like a 0.01% chance the creators would actually do that.

I also think there's really not that much of a point trying to nail down specific ethnicity, considering the world isn't actually Earth, people naturally have impossible hair and eye colors, and they've been moving away from any explicit real-world geography for a while now, in favor of just making places merely based on real places
This twitter speaks otherwise, unless this is fake

View: https://twitter.com/SkippyTheRobot/status/1177755059502886912?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1177755059502886912&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs9e.github.io%2Fiframe%2F2%2Ftwitter.min.html%231177755059502886912
 
Can't help but feel the male companions in each series get less focus and are often there for comic relief

Brock: Flirts with girls
Cilan: Fear of Purrloin, a Connoisseur of practically anything
Clemont: Inventions explode

Would be nice if the Sword and Shield male companion gets a proper goal
 
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