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Controversial opinions

Personally, I love XY. It's my favorite series, but I absolutely cannot STAND the fact that I cannot express even the slightest criticism towards it pretty much anywhere without getting attacked, hence why I took my complaints here.

The pokemon fandom in general is very weird. I left a different fandom because of its toxicity but then I come across the "us vs them" arguments in regards to XY which just always manages to make me mad. Not specifically on these forums, per se, but in general. I've yet to have a single positive interaction with an XY fan, which is...weird to say the least. It's hard to enjoy a series you like when the fans give it a negative reputation.

As for something controversial, Journeys is getting absolutely excessive amounts of hate at this point. It's honestly kind of ridiculous, which I'd never thought I'd say because the only things I've had to say positive towards the series were for the two recent episodes and that's it. I still stand with my criticisms towards the series but at some point the constant debates start to get annoying since they never really actually go anywhere. Like I said, I have critisims towards the series as well, but I'm beginning to lay off on expressing some of it because the negativity is getting to me.
 
You mean the Sceptile that beat a Darkrai only because 4 Pokemon beforehand weakened it?

If I remember correctly it was 3 Pokemons Actually Torkoal, Gible and Heracross, btw the last time I checked Torkoal couldn't do anything towards Darkrai and got knocked out with one Dark Pulse, Heracross did a pretty good job against Darkrai but getting hit by Dream Eater probably restored most of the Darkrai's energy, so yeah I don't want to sound like giving Sceptile too much Credit but I think it deserved to have that win.
(Maybe Heracross didn't manage to took out Darkrai but it still showed that it's a good fighter If you ask me)
 
Personally, I love XY. It's my favorite series, but I absolutely cannot STAND the fact that I cannot express even the slightest criticism towards it pretty much anywhere without getting attacked, hence why I took my complaints here

SAME. I didn’t know XY is so hated, it’s legit the most popular series ever and was extremely popular during its run. I love XY way more than any other series combined.
XY>every other series combined
 
SAME. I didn’t know XY is so hated, it’s legit the most popular series ever and was extremely popular during its run. I love XY way more than any other series combined.
XY>every other series combined

Tbh I don't hate XY but I hate how they decided to make a whole season for Greninja, I don't think none of the Ash's mons (maybe even Charizard) got something big like that.
 
If I remember correctly it was 3 Pokemons Actually Torkoal, Gible and Heracross, btw the last time I checked Torkoal couldn't do anything towards Darkrai and got knocked out with one Dark Pulse, Heracross did a pretty good job against Darkrai but getting hit by Dream Eater probably restored most of the Darkrai's energy, so yeah I don't want to sound like giving Sceptile too much Credit but I think it deserved to have that win.
(Maybe Heracross didn't manage to took out Darkrai but it still showed that it's a good fighter If you ask me)

Swellow as well.
 
An actual controversial opinion: XY(Z), let alone overrated, receives a ton of weird vitriol/hate towards it in these forums. There are a thousand posts talking about how hating XY is a controversial opinion, but in reality, most of this forum seems to hate it.

I'm really not sure how you got that impression. While there more discussion on its flaws or the complaints people have about the series compared to when it was on the air, I don't think that most of the people here hate it. Maybe it's hard for me to really see it when it got so much praise during its run and even stuff like the Kalos League or Greninja's release didn't really affect its overall popularity among fans in the long term. I still remember most users here being relatively happy with XY by the end of its run. The only series here that receive consistent hate are BW and Journeys and even the BW hate has gotten less intense over the years. XY still seems to have a pretty positive reception here from what I can tell. The hype for it might have calmed down a bit, but to say that most of the people here hate it seems like an exaggeration to me. Despite feeling like it was a bit too overhyped during its run, XY is either my second or third favorite series. I keep going back and forth on whether I like it more than AG due to a combination of XY's own strengths and the fact that elements in AG haven't aged well for me.

Personally, I love XY. It's my favorite series, but I absolutely cannot STAND the fact that I cannot express even the slightest criticism towards it pretty much anywhere without getting attacked, hence why I took my complaints here.

The pokemon fandom in general is very weird. I left a different fandom because of its toxicity but then I come across the "us vs them" arguments in regards to XY which just always manages to make me mad. Not specifically on these forums, per se, but in general. I've yet to have a single positive interaction with an XY fan, which is...weird to say the least. It's hard to enjoy a series you like when the fans give it a negative reputation.

I've had similar experiences with both this and other fandoms. I've also heard of how there were a lot of arguments between XY and SM fans during SM's run, which probably ties into the "us vs. them" arguments you mentioned. It is annoying and frustrating to say the least.

AnimeJewel246 said:
As for something controversial, Journeys is getting absolutely excessive amounts of hate at this point. It's honestly kind of ridiculous, which I'd never thought I'd say because the only things I've had to say positive towards the series were for the two recent episodes and that's it. I still stand with my criticisms towards the series but at some point the constant debates start to get annoying since they never really actually go anywhere. Like I said, I have critisims towards the series as well, but I'm beginning to lay off on expressing some of it because the negativity is getting to me.

I agree completely. I can understand why the complaints still come up when the issues people have with the series are still present and they don't feel like there's any improvement being made. That kind of frustration/disappointment is understandable, but the hate is just so excessive at this point. There are plenty of issues that I have with the series too that I can and have gone on about, but it can also get too exhausting and draining to focus on just what you don't like about it. Granted, in my case, it probably helps that I disagree on some of the more common complaints, mainly about Goh and the screentime issue, and I do really like Goh as well. Some people may not have anything they really enjoy about the anime now and that is rough, but it just gets tiring to see the same arguments over and over again. Not to mention the negativity quickly can make the discussions more toxic and make people with different opinions feel uncomfortable to express them.
 
While I love XY, still can't stand when they dropped Gekkouga.
That didn't ruin it in any way, but I was very angry.

I recognize that Journeys' hate has grown out of proportion.
But I think that the reasons behind the dislikes are pretty justified.
 
I wish I could talk about Pokémon Adventures with more people, because I keep having potentially controversial opinions about it.
I've previously talked about how I hate the manga's overly flawless protagonists, but no one probably takes it to a greater extreme than Blake, one of the second pair of Unova protagonists. He's an agent of the International Police, who, despite his age, is Looker's superior. He's so flawless that he's even called "Mr. Perfect". Literally. But it doesn't stop there.

At one point, he challenges Looker and his Croagunk to a round of target practice, and after her hits every target the first time around, he makes the second round harder by adding in sandstorm and fire, and then calls him out on not hitting the targets that time around. Overkill much?

It later turns out that he's not calm and collected because he's able to control his emotions well. It's because he has no emotions to begin with. He doesn't understand the concepts such as pity, love, compassion, or hate, or even good and evil. As such, he doesn't see any harm in deliberately causing his Pokémon to get hurt to achieve results, as he can just heal them afterwards. He was orphaned at an early age and taken in by the International Police and raised by them to know what was right and what was wrong. And I know this is not something that can or arguably even should be corrected, but it ticks me off when the Swords of Justice say that Blake's lack of emotions isn't a hinderance in stopping Team Plasma, even when their apprentice, Keldeo, is one of his Pokémon. So basically they're just handwaving the whole "being willing to let his Pokémon get hurt to achieve results" issue, which rubs me the wrong way.

At one point, Blake gets fired from the International Police when he breaks the organization's rules. For a while, I had a hope spot that this could finally expose at least one flaw within him. Him getting rehired back into the organization for his achievements wouldn't have bothered me me, if it wasn't for the simultaneous revelation that the whole discharge thing was nothing more than a test from the start. So basically, he faced no real repercussions of his breaking of the organization's rules after all, whatsoever. Fan-flipping-tastic... Still as overly flawless as always...

But what really inspired me to finally write this post was something that came out in the recent volume release of the chapter. And it's the fact that apparently the leader of the International Police had literally told Blake that it'd be okay, or even encouraged for him to ignore and violate human rights if necessary to apprehend dangerous criminals. And not just the rights of the criminals, but of ordinary citizens too. Yikes. That's messed up.

A bonus fact: for some reason, Blake has had the DNA Splicers as long as he can remember, and they never explain how he got them. An item with very much importance to the plot, possessed by a main character, and its origins are never explained. That's some good storytelling right there...
 
It later turns out that he's not calm and collected because he's able to control his emotions well. It's because he has no emotions to begin with. He doesn't understand the concepts such as pity, love, compassion, or hate, or even good and evil. As such, he doesn't see any harm in deliberately causing his Pokémon to get hurt to achieve results, as he can just heal them afterwards.
This guy sounds like a pretty standard villain, so I'm not...

second pair of Unova protagonists
What.

But what really inspired me to finally write this post was something that came out in the recent volume release of the chapter. And it's the fact that apparently the leader of the International Police had literally told Blake that it'd be okay, or even encouraged for him to ignore and violate human rights if necessary to apprehend dangerous criminals. And not just the rights of the criminals, but of ordinary citizens too. Yikes. That's messed up.
What.
...
There is literally canon Pokémon works more grimdark than my edgy teen fanfiction.
 
They may be the causers of it, but this special transformation seems to have been destined to appear before a great disaster anyway, regardless of the disaster's cause, as seen in the ninja village.
Yes, I get it. My point was that the whole conflict would have had more emotional weight to it, and by extension possibly had made the League loss less contentious, if some form of connection between Greninja and Team Flare had been established, since you can't really make a connection to a generic, vague, and agency-less disaster and make it compelling. That's the entire argument I'm trying to make: yes, Ash-Greninja was meant to be a hero and not necessarily a winner, but the fact still stands that the setup it was given wasn't leaning anywhere near as heavily on the former as it did on the latter (all those battling examples I gave before).

I agree with most of your post, but to be fair, Greninja itself had stomped on a Mega Pokémon that had a 4x resistance to it, and was clearly the main focus point of the league from an audience POV. Ash was the only trainer who did not get stomped by Metagross and Charizard, so that was pretty notable in itself.
True, but we have already seen Greninja beat Sawyer's Sceptile countless times in the past, so that takes away from the achievement somewhat. Sure, Lysandre doesn't know that, but the fact that he still saw Greninja lose to a different Mega means it's still weird that he thinks Bond Phenomenon is the indefinitely superior power. At most he should think the two are equal, no?

Controversial opinion: I think the league would've improved lots more if they didn’t show that literally every competitor lost to Metagross and Charizard alone. I get that they wanted Alain's team to be a secret but they could've used blank grayed out boxes to denote them. That alone would make it much more realistic. Throw in shots of Alain tending to a Pawniard or some other Pokémon in the ME specials.
Yeah, I think that was just done to hype up Charizard as uber powerful, but the ME specials had already done that, so it really was unnecessary. Especially because Alain not using more of his Pokemon makes his non-Charizard team seem less threatening than it could have been: only Bisharp and to a lesser extent Unfezant did well; Tyranitar lost pathetically easily to Pikachu, Weavile only scored a win against Noivern (the youngest and weakest of the Kalos team who had x4 weakness to Ice to boot), and Metagross was the only non-Charizard mon to receive any semblance of pre-establishment but said pre-establishment was entirely dedicated to showing how much better Charizard was. With all of this in mind, it seems fairly clear that Alain's team is severely underpowered compared to Charizard presumably due to a lack of training ...hold on, are we sure Alain isn't just Origins!Red grown up?

I've ranted about Cameron and how his battle with Ash sucked many times, but there's also something else in Unova that had similar flaws.

Cameron's battle was especially stupid because the kid was an idiot who made stupid type matchup choices, brought only five Pokémon to a Full Battle, and still ended up winning because of a lucky evolution. In other words, he was rewarded for acting unwisely and relying on luck over skill. And those are not good lessons to teach to the show's target audience.

The other thing that had the same flaw was Ash's first Unova Gym challenge. He beat Chili with another Fire type, lost to Cress, and beat Cilan with a Water type. Here, Ash was not only rewarded for playing unwisely, but also got punished for the one matchup he played up smart. Ash's battle with Cress should honestly be acknowledged just as much as Ash and Trip's first battle for how badly written it is
On top of these examples there's also the Gym Battle against Elesa, where on top of it being the worst Gym Battle in the anime's history due to how it made Ash dumb even by BW anime standards, the episode more or less had the moral of "never plan ahead, only go with your gut instinct every time". I'm sure it wasn't the intention, but the way it's presented and worded does make it come off that way.
 
Yes, I get it. My point was that the whole conflict would have had more emotional weight to it, and by extension possibly had made the League loss less contentious, if some form of connection between Greninja and Team Flare had been established, since you can't really make a connection to a generic, vague, and agency-less disaster and make it compelling. That's the entire argument I'm trying to make: yes, Ash-Greninja was meant to be a hero and not necessarily a winner, but the fact still stands that the setup it was given wasn't leaning anywhere near as heavily on the former as it did on the latter (all those battling examples I gave before).
That's one of the funniest yet underdiscussed things about the show; Ash gets involved in tons of high level heroics (especially when you consider the movies) but that combined with the marriage to the league status quo was so strong that helping to save the world felt like a consolation prize and comparatively dull to winning a tournament, which got on the news when it happened.
Strangest thing ever, but honestly sort of in line with the games where saving the world is usually before defeating the league.
 
I don't think there is anything wrong with Cameron beating Ash, while I can understand not liking Camerons misplays and having only 5 pokemon, I consider it to be functionally the same as when a character has several of their pokemon taken down, only for another one to come in clutch, a la kalos Pikachu.

In previous series, he tried other activities.
Even took part on Contests.
The marine athletics, iceberg race, eating competition, and raid battles (which are Goh's equivalent of contests), are all things Ash has taken part in and seemingly will continue to take part in.
 
Ooo, are we dunking on XY again? Well, I've got plenty--

Nah, forget it. XY's fine. I enjoyed it up to a point and then dropped out of the show for some reason and never felt compelled to come back. A few things it did never really clicked with me, but it's not all the anime's fault; Gen 6 in general is one of my least favourite generations.

To be honest, the most scathing thing I could say about XY was that it was far too close to Pokemon fanfiction for my tastes. Examples:
  • Ash was an action hero, diving to his death off towers or into active volcanoes, to show off the depth of his feelings for Pokemon.
  • Serena the lost friend from childhood with a romantic infatuation and tendency to fret and dote over Ash. Bonus points for baking him sweets.
  • The majority of other characters having mad respect for Ash, constantly blowing smoke up his backside. Among which, the Elite Four calibre brooding older guy.
  • The one-in-a-million super frog who he shares everything with, including battle damage for extra edge points.
None of which was inherently bad, but handled far too straight without any interesting twists or deviations on the ideas. For instance, Ash's pedestal being broken, leading to other characters realising he has weaknesses and that his real strength is his ability to bounce back and get better.

But I say this as someone who has seen too much Pokemon. These superficial things would appeal to me a lot if was a decade younger but because it was everything I'd already seen in numerous places, I couldn't connect with it the same way a lot of others could. In general, I thought XY banked on its hype too much when it reached its end game. It relied a lot on a) viewers being excited to see Ash vs Alain for the pure spectacle and b) viewers looking forward to the Team Flare finale for the pure spectacle. Narratively, neither of this things were as strong as, say, Ash vs Paul or the whole Alola League.

I mean, say what you will about Tobias and the utter farce his existence was, but at least we got pay-off for Ash/Paul/Infernape, which was the most important thing. Can't say that about Ash/Alain/Greninja/Charizard. And the Team Flare finale was doomed for me the moment a prophecy was needed to justify Ash's involvement.

We saw what happened when a show makes lofty promises and then doesn't keep them. Fans backlashed hard.

It's funny, because the director's other Pokemon work, The Power of Us, became my favourite Pokemon movie because it told a touching story about multiple characters. Despite my grievances with how XY ended up, I do think he's a good director.

Basically, XY good, but XYZ meh.
 
  • Ash was an action hero, diving to his death off towers or into active volcanoes, to show off the depth of his feelings for Pokemon.
That's not exactly just XY, though. Pokémopolis even had running jokes about him randomly turning into "action hero Ash". Things like jumping into the TRio's balloon, trying to punch Mewtwo in the face, I sort of recall him trying to jump a cliff in DP at one point...

It's funny, because the director's other Pokemon work, The Power of Us, became my favourite Pokemon movie because it told a touching story about multiple characters. Despite my grievances with how XY ended up, I do think he's a good director.
I think he was very ambitious in his ideas but restrained by the nature of a weekly TV show. I believe he said that he wanted to get rid of stock animation but it couldn't be afforded, for instance.
I haven't seen any of the reboot films (actually 8 was the last one I saw at all) but an AU film would have significantly fewer of those sorts of issues.
 
It's funny, because the director's other Pokemon work, The Power of Us, became my favourite Pokemon movie because it told a touching story about multiple characters. Despite my grievances with how XY ended up, I do think he's a good director.
ACK! I LOVE The Power of Us too! It's my favorite movie, with interesting world-building, an interesting cast, an interesting premise, actual developed characters(which is a rarity in the movies), and giving Ash and Pikachu an interesting role by putting them in the backseat(for the most part). Ash does have the hero archetype in this movie as well, but I feel like this version is more lively than XY Ash without feeling too forced, which is why he struck out as interesting here. Plus, the fact that they did such a good "show not tell" of Ash and Pikachu's relationship was squeal-inducing for me. The introduction of every character was just perfect and really showed off their personalities...and their roles are well-established in the film by not forcing them together through some contrived plot! Everything was a domino effect in this movie, every character and incident having an impact on another which led to the climax of the movie and the climax of every character's growth.
 
It's funny, because the director's other Pokemon work, The Power of Us, became my favourite Pokemon movie because it told a touching story about multiple characters. Despite my grievances with how XY ended up, I do think he's a good director.
ACK! I LOVE The Power of Us too! It's my favorite movie, with interesting world-building, an interesting cast, an interesting premise, actual developed characters(which is a rarity in the movies), and giving Ash and Pikachu an interesting role by putting them in the backseat(for the most part). Ash does have the hero archetype in this movie as well, but I feel like this version is more lively than XY Ash without feeling too forced, which is why he struck out as interesting here. Plus, the fact that they did such a good "show not tell" of Ash and Pikachu's relationship was squeal-inducing for me. The introduction of every character was just perfect and really showed off their personalities...and their roles are well-established in the film by not forcing them together through some contrived plot! Everything was a domino effect in this movie, every character and incident having an impact on another which led to the climax of the movie and the climax of every character's growth.
While my favorite Pokémon movie is the first one, mostly out of nostalgia and for how long it eluded me before I could actually see it, I can definitely recognize that M21 is one of the best Pokémon movies out there. It goes to prove how much more freedom in storytelling a Pokémon movie can have when it's not tied down by the main anime.
 
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