What requirements need to be met in order for Chloe to be considered a main character?

[Rainbow-Rain]

Oh I forgot May also had Muchlax

Given how they dropped Skitty half way through the Advanced Gen, I wonder if they had been trying to make it the marketable cute Pokémon but gave up when it didn’t catch on.

Yeah I think they definitely wanted Skitty to be a lot more popular than it ended up being.

It's one of the few playable non starter Pokemon in Mystery Dungeon and it also showed up on quite a lot if merchandise. It also had a lot of qualities commonly found in gag comedy relief Pokemon we see nowadays

Also notice how Skitty never evolved despite having no real reason not to?
(I doubt it's that much popular than Delcatty)

They definitely wanted Skitty to be the "Piplup" before Piplup was a thing lol

May had Eevee and Squirtle.

Both evolved

 

[Eitarou]

Yes. After AG had ended and May was no longer a main character. Also, so did Axew, so that's irrelevent.

 

[Hidden Mew]

That's been a mandate forever. Misty's Togepi and Dawn's Piplup are the earliest examples of this even if they battled regularly. They were still relegated to holding a cute pokemon on the sidelines when they weren't being focused on. Same with Axew and Iris.

May and Serena are actually the only main girls who didn't have a cute pokemon out of their ball in every episode and that's probably because the writers felt none of their pokemon were marketable enough.

I think that Togepi only had one proper battle, so it definitely didn't battle regularly. While Piplup was definitely the cute secondary mascot for the girl to hold onto, it feels a bit much to downplay it like that. Not only because of how regularly it battled, but also because Piplup had far more personality and purpose than Togepi, Axew, Snowy, Sandy and Shaymin ever did. Plus, it wasn't like Dawn or Piplup were in the background whenever they weren't the main focus of an episode.

It is kind of strange that May and Serena didn't have a Pokemon out with them all the time though. They had plenty of marketable Pokemon on them, but outside of her starters, I don't think that May had a lot of really popular Pokemon. Even her Eevee was given in the middle of the Battle Frontier arc. Serena having a relatively smaller team might have made it harder to get her own secondary mascot too.

 

[Sai]

May had Eevee and Squirtle.

Back during Gen 3, Eevee wasn't promoted as a mascot pokemon like it is now. It's why May's Eevee got so little screentime to begin with, it was just early set-up for Glaceon. If it was treated like it is now, Eevee probably would have always been out sitting on her shoulder and caught earlier in BF so it could get a lot of focus.

 

[PkmnTrainerV]

That's been a mandate forever. Misty's Togepi and Dawn's Piplup are the earliest examples of this even if they battled regularly. They were still relegated to holding a cute pokemon on the sidelines when they weren't being focused on. Same with Axew and Iris.

I wouldn’t give Piplup that role, because while it matches the description on paper, it actually got meaningful development and didn’t just exist as a glorified hand-warmer. Not to mention it was strong as well. SM is definitely a bigger offender as compared to DP, because the Pokémon in hand, literally did nothing in cases like Shaymin.

 

[Sai]

Oh I forgot May also had Muchlax


Yeah I think they definitely wanted Skitty to be a lot more popular than it ended up being.

It's one of the few playable non starter Pokemon in Mystery Dungeon and it also showed up on quite a lot if merchandise. It also had a lot of qualities commonly found in gag comedy relief Pokemon we see nowadays

Also notice how Skitty never evolved despite having no real reason not to?
(I doubt it's that much popular than Delcatty)

They definitely wanted Skitty to be the "Piplup" before Piplup was a thing lol


Both evolved

I feel like the writers tried to make each one of her pokemon marketable at first, they tried hard with Beautifly at first over her starter even, then Skitty, then a popular Kanto starter like Bulbasaur, then Munchlax, another Kanto starter and Eevee...but none if them really broke into popularity like the other girls main pokemon.

I don't know what it was because in theory all her pokemon had the potential be the usual marketable pokemon due to being cute/feminine but none of them seemed to catch on much. It's why the writers seemed to move on from one pokemon to the next on her team to try and make one stick.

 

[Rainbow-Rain]

I feel like the writers tried to make each one of her pokemon marketable at first, they tried hard with Beautifly at first over her starter even, then Skitty, then a popular Kanto starter like Bulbasaur, then Munchlax, another Kanto starter and Eevee...but none if them really broke into popularity like the other girls main pokemon.

I don't know what it was because in theory all her pokemon had the potential be the usual marketable pokemon due to being cute/feminine but none of them seemed to catch on much. It's why the writers seemed to move on from one pokemon to the next on her team to try and make one stick.

Yeah May's team was weird. There was no Pokemon who really stood out

Yeah Blaziken is extremely popular but her Combusken didn't even evolve until the tail end of the series so it didn't have any time to stand out.

And nobody on her Team was a small cutesy mascot like Rowlet or Snowy

Yeah she had Eevee but it wasn't anywhere near as popular back then as it is now.

 

[Hidden Mew]

I don't think it helped that May's team quickly went from promoting R/S to being more focused on FR/GR with Bulbasaur and Squirtle and hinting at D/P with Munchlax and Eevee. It didn't really make her team stand out as much when she didn't have a lot of Pokemon from the third generation itself. Dawn got a Cyndaquil to tie in with HG/SS, but her team was still pretty heavily tied in with the fourth generation.

 

[Ghost Diplocaulus]

I think another thing that really limited May's team was that the writers clearly wanted her to have a fire/grass/water trio of mons like Ash, but seemingly didn't think any of the Hoenn Wayer-types were a fit for May so she gets the other Kanto starter to fill that role. Thankfully it seems they learned their lesson because literally no other companion girl has tried to follow that setup: Dawn had no Grass-types on her team, Iris and the Alola girls were type specialists like Misty, Serena didn't have any Waters OR Grasses, and it's obvious that Chloe's not gonna catch anything besides Eevee until maybe the end of Journeys but even that's a big maybe.

 

[Sai]

I watched Hoenn about 2 years ago and what stood out to me also is May's pokemon tended not to get much screentime outside of their specific contest battles or the eps leading up to them almost similar to the way Journies handled Ash's Pokémon.

Beautifly barely appeared in mid/late Hoenn for example. Skitty was used for a bit then got overshadowed by her Bulbasaur, and then all 3 of her Hoenn pokemon were dropped after Hoenn ended. Munchlax didn't do much till the middle of BF despite being captured before the Hoenn Grand Festival and Eevee hardly did anything of note outside the one contest it had against Brock. And of course Torchic was barely used for the first 80 episodes of Hoenn till it evolved.

May's pokemon were handled a bit better than Misty/Brock's pokemon from the OS (with the exception of Psyduck maybe) but never really got featured as much as Dawn or the later girls, despite the later female leads only having small teams or in some only 1 pokemon. Lol

 

[Rainbow-Rain]

Kinda amusing how a thread about Chloe garnered more talk about May than anything lol

 

[Burakku]

Chloe just doesn't have much going for her.

 

[marshiyanmisuta]

Appearing in every month, at least.

 

[Weddingbells]

Appearing in every month, at least.

Having more than one pokemon would also help too

 

[marshiyanmisuta]

Having more than one pokemon would also help too

Not really.

 

[Weddingbells]

Not really.

I mean she doesn't need a full team of six. But her having at least two can help a bit. Like Serena (before she got evee)

 

[Rainbow-Rain]

I mean she doesn't need a full team of six. But her having at least two can help a bit. Like Serena (before she got evee)

Mallow

 

[Kurolegacy]

Mallow

To be fair, SM had about 6 humans to balance. Them giving them too many Pokémon overall would have created a small scale Go problem where a number of them wouldn’t be able to get much focus due to sheer number.

Now if they were to increase Koharu’s roster, at very least they gotta give her Yamper and G. Ponyta. There’s just no reason not to.

 

[Weddingbells]

Mallow

Not a good example, mallow was the most underdeveloped of the crew. That was a common complaint of SM

 

[Rainbow-Rain]

Lillie and Lana also only had Snowy and Popplio for 90% of the Saga