• A new LGBTQ+ forum is now being trialed and there have been changes made to the Support and Advice forum. To read more about these updates, click here.
  • Hey Trainers! Be sure to check out Corsola Beach, our newest section on the forums, in partnership with our friends at Corsola Cove! At the Beach, you can discuss the competitive side of the games, post your favorite Pokemon memes, and connect with other Pokemon creators!
  • Due to the recent changes with Twitter's API, it is no longer possible for Bulbagarden forum users to login via their Twitter account. If you signed up to Bulbagarden via Twitter and do not have another way to login, please contact us here with your Twitter username so that we can get you sorted.

Pokémon Evolution/Capture/Release Thread

1. Starly was given enough time to process it was being captured, unlike the poor Tailow.
2. Starly ended up being one of the heavy hitters of Ash's team and had a lot to it’s personality, as contrasted by the Tailow who was used to capture Wurmple and never seen again.
1. The goal was the same - to capture. I don't see why it matters how long it took before catching it.
2. It is something that happened after catching it. Ash may have as well let it go or done whatever he felt like. So my point stll stands.

Honestly all the complains and accusations regarding Gou's captures feel overwhelmingly pointless to me. I mean, what was different in the past 20 years when people played the games and caught every species in order to fill the Pokédex, or when they played the Let's Go/Go games and caught the same species several times to gain candies and such. But when an anime character does the same, it suddenly becomes something unacceptable. I never get that exeggerated reaction toward Gou.
 
If you don't want to read the stuff that other people put forward regarding Gou criticism then please don't presume your word is final and then put words in people's mouths.
Haha, okay. I won't express myself ever again then, although my attitude is very clearly stated to be my personal opinion rather than presuming my word is final. Funny that comes from someone who falsely accused me of being Serena hater back then just because I said I wouldn't expect to see a special with Serena involved.

Really mature of you, really.
 
Last edited:
1. The goal was the same - to capture. I don't see why it matters how long it took before catching it.
The journey is as important as the destination. Part of what made the main characters' captures interesting and entertaining are their actual attempts to catch Pokemon, either through battle or by befriending them. There's immediate entertainment and satisfaction to be gained from watching Ash and his travelling companions catch new Pokemon and add them to their party. Meanwhile, most of Gou's captures feel very shallow and pointless, partly due to how quick and easy they happen, and partly because they're mostly just used as tiny stepping stones towards his very distant secondary goal of completing the Pokedex.

As for his primary goal of catching Mew, I daresay that Gou has barely made any progress at all. He almost never tries to battle Pokemon before catching them, and the best tactic he currently has to catch stubborn/powerful Pokemon is to throw as many regular Pokeballs as he can towards them. Considering how powerful Mew is, which Gou has witnessed first-hand in the first episode, simply throwing Pokeballs at that thing definitely won't work. And yet, the writers are making no attempts to actually improve Gou's capturing skills. For now, anyway.

Honestly all the complains and accusations regarding Gou's captures feel overwhelmingly pointless to me. I mean, what was different in the past 20 years when people played the games and caught every species in order to fill the Pokédex, or when they played the Let's Go/Go games and caught the same species several times to gain candies and such. But when an anime character does the same, it suddenly becomes something unacceptable. I never get that exeggerated reaction toward Gou.
Players do a lot of weird stuff in video games just because they can. Even if the game encourages such behavior, that doesn't necessarily mean it makes sense. Especially if you adapt such behavior into an anime.

Yes, the games give me the option of catching the legendary deities that control space and time itself. But if someone actually tries to do that in the anime, you'd probably think they were crazy and up to no good.
 
1. The goal was the same - to capture. I don't see why it matters how long it took before catching it.
My point wasn’t the time before the capture, but rather: Does the Pokémon even know that it’s being captured? Yes/No?

And secondly, the anime's the same one which has been preaching for the past 20 years that a capture is exceedingly notable, is often difficult, takes a Pokemon's personality into account and isn’t supposed to be a dopamine rush quicker than the time it takes to like a Facebook post. If you can’t "get it", there’s enough discourse on this thread and others which you can read on.

(Not directed at anyone specific)At this point I’ve seen many, many different people going "Whats the issue? What’s the issue?" When there’s been literal tens of very eloquent pages written by the users on here explaining their stance. At this point it feels like talking to a wall and I hope people make enough effort to understand each other instead of digs, name calling from both sides. Or using one users' statement to reflect on everyone's opinions.

It angered me to irrational levels when a troll-ish "Scorbunny’s so weak that it lost to Mightyena" was used as ammunition to discredit everyone who doesn’t support Go. This is when literally everyone who "attacks" Go opposed the post in question.
How would people feel if I say "Everyone who likes Go blindly supports the anime/are anime shills"? I’m sure it won’t be good.

Sorry, but I was just tired of circling back to the same issue for the nth time. This isn’t meant to insult or degrade anyone but is an outlet for my frustrations on the topic.
 
I could tell since my point is already taken out of the context miles away by the end of post with Scorbunny's battle to Mightyena which I am so irrelevant to atm.
I put that up since I meant to separate the two. Maybe even write up under a new post but they’d be merged probably due to double posting.
Ohh... So throwing flames, beams, sharp rocks, thunders, bucket of ice pieces, causing earthquakes, fires, storms, hurricanes while catching a Pokémon are fine, but when it comes to throwing a Poké Ball without the Pokémon noticing it is a problem? If I ever become a Pokémon, I'll carry a sign saying I'd prefer the latter in case someone wants to catch me.
The anime has clearly built up Pokémon as living, breathing creatures with wills of their own though under the Pokémon universe with their own diverse personalities. Being able to do elemental attacks doesn’t remove that trait. If I were a Pokémon I'd at least like to see who was capturing me before I was put in a wildlife sanctuary. And I wouldn’t be instantly subservient to such a capture.

A few Pokémon may be submissive enough for that, but the more Pokémon this happens to, the more unrealistic it’s becoming under the Pokémon universe and anime world building (in case you want to bring up real world here, too). How does every Pokemon Go runs into turn out like that, whereas at least 1/6th of all Ash captures end up with some amount of stubbornness?
 
Sport requires discipline and training. Wild pokemon may or may not train properly but they sure lack enough discipline. That may be accurate trainer vs trainer battles, though.

And trainers that have Pokemon, but don't use them (Which includes battling wild Pokemon before capture) for anything won't train either (Looking at you Scorbunny), so there isn't even a point in having a Pokemon if you are not planning to use them.
 
Sport requires discipline and training. Wild pokemon may or may not train properly but they sure lack enough discipline. That may be accurate trainer vs trainer battles, though.
Not all people train before sports though. Amateur players exist; and many countries like mine have basically every child grow up playing cricket and football without anything but the basic rudimentary rules. Wild Pokemon would be akin to that in such an analogy.
 
Not all people train before sports though. Amateur players exist; and many countries like mine have basically every child grow up playing cricket and football without anything but the basic rudimentary rules. Wild Pokemon would be akin to that in such an analogy.
Amateurs don’t perform dangerous acts like idk breathing fire though or its equivalence. This is pound or growl.
 
This wouldn't normally be a problem... except for the fact that the Wurmple were flat as hell and lacking personalities so them cuddling Gou when he's done nothing beneficial for the three comes off as forced "friendship".

I cannot disagree, but it’s what we have to put up with if he’s catching so manyPokémon. He’s making friends with them, just off screen and forced.
 
Now people are complaining that the Wurmples were too friendly with Go? Wow do some people wake up every morning and plan out how they'll make Go look bad on this forum? There's nothing wrong with his Pokemon liking him even if we haven't seen them bond on screen, because it's already been implied a few times that since all his Pokemon live at the same lab as him, that they at least see each other often. So it's reasonable to think that they interact with each other at several points during their free time.

But even if Go didn't bond with them I can't imagine why the Wurmples cuddling him would be seen as something awful. Maybe his Pokemon just like him, did you guys ever consider that? There doesn't have to be a deeper meaning to it really.
 
Amateurs don’t perform dangerous acts like idk breathing fire though or its equivalence. This is pound or growl.
And amateurs sports players don’t usually have powers to manipulate the events. Why are you trying to compare the abilities of real world humans, and Pokémon universe Pokémon? Pokemon clearly have a different physiology and tolerate a higher amount of stress, more than what humans consider dangerous or even fatal (even this isn’t proven in the anime universe since humans have survived otherwise lethal-in-real-world attacks.

The anime universe clearly has a different view of what’s fatal and what isn’t. The Pokémon moves are hardly dangerous to a Pokémon except in exceptional conditions.

Now people are complaining that the Wurmples were too friendly with Go? Wow do some people wake up every morning and plan out how they'll make Go look bad on this forum? There's nothing wrong with his Pokemon liking him even if we haven't seen them bond on screen, because it's already been implied a few times that since all his Pokemon live at the same lab as him, that they at least see each other often. So it's reasonable to think that they interact with each other at several points during their free time.

But even if Go didn't bond with them I can't imagine why the Wurmples cuddling him would be seen as something awful. Maybe his Pokemon just like him, did you guys ever consider that? There doesn't have to be a deeper meaning to it really.
I don’t have no issue with his Pokémon liking him, but my issue is that somehow every Pokemon Go comes across has the singular personality trait of being friendly to their trainer to almost subservient levels, specially when some of them didn’t even know who wanted to capture them. A Pokeball throw, and poof! Go has an army of Pokémon who're nothing but friendly to him.

It gets a tad bit unrealistic when every capture is as convenient as that.
 
Among Ash's "missed Pokemons" (exclude Riolu), Larvitar is the most likely to be caught because at least the writers still remember it with that flashback in SM anime.
 
Amateur (wild pokémon) vs. professional (trained pokémon) is a different case, though.
What’s your point? Wild Pokemon have access to elemental moves, trained Pokemon have an access to elemental moves, they’ve got enough resilience not to die if they get hit by moves spewed by other Pokemon. And many wild Pokemon like to battle.

If you’re talking about the power gap in case of wild Pokemon vs trained ones, the wild Pokemon are resilient enough to take the moves. At most they’ll faint. Hardly damaging “living, breathing creatures”. Pokemon recover relatively easily from even the harshest of battles, and many enjoy that.
 
Do people really not remember how Ash caught his Caterpie, or Krabby, or Starly, or Brock his Zubat? Even though it's annoying that Gou does this basically every episode, it's unfair to completely bash him for doing something that other main characters did previously and got away with.
 
Do people really not remember how Ash caught his Caterpie, or Krabby, or Starly, or Brock his Zubat? Even though it's annoying that Gou does this basically every episode, it's unfair to completely bash him for doing something that other main characters did previously and got away with.
Most of those cases were Early Installment Weirdness, and with Starly, Ash ended up bonding with it and proving that he was a good Trainer for it.
 
Do people really not remember how Ash caught his Caterpie, or Krabby, or Starly, or Brock his Zubat? Even though it's annoying that Gou does this basically every episode, it's unfair to completely bash him for doing something that other main characters did previously and got away with.
The fact that you could only recall 4 previous examples from the entirety of the show's history of something that Gou has done with almost every single one of his 20+ captures in the span of only 13 episodes shows why this is a problem. I'm fine with Gou catching Pokemon without battling them every now and then (especially if they're Pokemon that are generally weak), but the fact that he's consistently doing it with almost all of his captures and refuses to battle the Pokemon when he faces difficulty in catching it (except in the bug-catching episode) is what frustrates me the most.
 
The fact that you could only recall 4 previous examples from the entirety of the show's history of something that Gou has done with almost every single one of his 20+ captures in the span of only 13 episodes shows why this is a problem. I'm fine with Gou catching Pokemon without battling them every now and then (especially if they're Pokemon that are generally weak), but the fact that he's consistently doing it with almost all of his captures and refuses to battle the Pokemon when he faces difficulty in catching it (except in the bug-catching episode) is what frustrates me the most.

Only 3 actually, since Zubat doesn't count, since Brock caught it off-screen, so we don't know if he fought it or not.
 
Back
Top Bottom