The Epic Pokémon Post -- PART ONE
OKAY, HERE WE GO!
In splitting this entry into parts, I tried to keep the parts roughly on the same topic... but I didn't change any of the actual text. So I didn't fiddle with transitions or anything. Below the line is just the first chunk of the entry, exactly as it would have appeared. Three... two... one... go!
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What follows is the longest entry I have ever written. It's longer than most of my essays. It's longer than most of my short stories. I have been writing it a little every day since my last entry. And yes, it is all about Pokémon.
If you're not even a little interested, I suggest you don't bother looking behind the cut at all. Just move along and pretend this entry doesn't exist.
If you are interested but you're in a hurry, I suggest you wait until later. This will take you a long time. I've put in pictures and I've embedded videos from youtube, and there's a whole lot of reading. The videos alone are about 30 minutes, total.
Also, a few warnings: Because it was written over such a long period of time, a lot of it is rather disjointed. At various points I assume you know various things that I may not have earlier, or won't later... I did my best to keep it accessible to someone who has no idea what I'm talking about, but I don't know how well I did. Oh, and ignore my horrible grammar in some places. Most glaring is how often I slip into the past tense when I should be using the present... just accept it and move on. I was originally going to go back and edit, but now that I've written so much the task is rather daunting and I frankly just want to be done with this already. Just putting it through livejournals' spell checker was an operation, lemme tell you...
So yeah, now that I'm done giving lots of reasons to not read this entry... I hope you will, but I'll be fine if nobody does. Writing it was a lot of fun.
And I hereby promise to never dedicate an entire entry to Pokémon ever again.
Are you ready?
So if there's going to be any talk about the show, a solid ground must first be established, and that means Ash and Pikachu. They are the only two characters to appear in every episode so far (not counting the spin-off)--though note that I say this not because I have read it (or experienced it) for a fact, but because I'm confident that if they were absent from an episode I would have read that. The closest they come is the first episode of the third series, as they only make a cameo, really, at the very end... but I'll get to that.
The show begins with Ash, newly ten years old, eager to start his journey to become "the greatest Pokémon Master in the world!" He gets off on a great start and ends up not with one of the regular starter pokémon but with Pikachu, who refuses to listen to him. Things happen (hey, I'm not recapping the whole show here) and they end up inseparable best friends--he has, in fact, called Pikachu his best friend far more often than he's used the term on any of his human friends. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
It's a little curious that Ash, who is obviously a huge fan of Pokémon (a look at his room shows that they used the typical shortcut-to-obsession-for-kids: everything in his room is related to Pokémon, from his clock to his bed sheets, et cetera), actually knows very little about being a trainer. He tries to catch a wild Pokémon without battling it first; when his Pokédex (amusingly) points out his error, and when Pikachu refuses to battle for him, he tries to physically assault it himself, only to of course fail, only to end up running for his life from a flock of wild Pokémon...
(I'm not complaining that Ash doesn't know what he's doing, mind you. The show needed an entry point for new viewers (which by default was everyone, as even those familiar with the games would be wondering how the show was going to work), while his goal serves as the entire driving force of the show there at the beginning--faced with so many reasons and opportunities to give up, there had to be a good reason for him not to, and that very lofty goal was it)
...Said running for his life ends rather spectacularly when he, to protect a hurt Pikachu, challenges the flock and I mentioned this part in a past entry, didn't I? Ah well. And remember I'm not recapping the show... anyway, he defends Pikachu, despite having no way at all to follow through on his grandiose claims at the time, and no apparent way to keep both himself and Pikachu safe, so he chooses Pikachu, and that right there--though on one hand it's a convenient way to begin the trust between Ash and Pikachu, on the other it is exactly why the show works.
Ash's dream is just that, a dream. That early on, he was in no way a great trainer. He lost all the time, he fumbled about, everything had to be explained to him, and while a show about some incompetent guy in the world of Pokémon might have been a passable show for a while, I highly doubt it would have lasted twelve years (as of April 1) and running. See, the thing is, although Ash is woefully inexperienced, he does learn--and more importantly, he has something it's probably impossible to learn. He has his instinctive compassion for all Pokémon. Ash is probably the only character on the show who could say something like "Pokémon are people too!" and completely 100% mean it. More, as a trainer, he understands from the very beginning that caring for Pokémon is a huge responsibility, and for his Pokémon in particular he would do whatever it takes to protect them. So Ash isn't incompetent after all. He may not yet have the skill, but he's got the attitude--the incredible determination and the incredible caring. It's easy to see that some day, after a whole lot of growth, he might actually achieve his dream.
All that from a convenient way to get Pikachu (and the viewers) to like Ash. Not bad, writers. Not bad at all.
Perhaps more impressive is that the writers knew exactly what they were doing in showing off this side of Ash. Granted, it was a bit heavy-handed at times ("Look at Ash befriending the Pokémon! He doesn't have to battle because he's got The Right Stuff!") but it was not, say, a fluke, or subjected to "character development" down the line. Ash of course gets plenty of that, but he still has that drive and he still has that compassion. ...Actually, a lot of the development is the drive's transition from arrogance to confidence... also fun things like, for example, the maturity to handle losses a whole lot better, but one thing that never seems to change--if you want to rile Ash up, just insult his abilities as a trainer. Gets to him every time.
...Ironically, whoever came up with the slogan "Gotta Catch 'Em All" was not privy to the inside scoop of Ash's character (I'm really not surprised...), as is apparent from the fact that the concept of catching them all directly conflicts with Ash's training style (once he develops one). Even in the early episodes, when in fact he made it his goal to catch more Pokémon than Gary, he had to be reminded continually to actually go and catch something. Instead of focusing on the catching aspect, he focuses on working with the Pokémon he already has, training them to become the best they can be. (He says pretty much exactly this in a couple of his arguments with Paul in early season ten... so you know I'm not coming up with all of this myself.) Ash doesn't tend to catch anything unless there's an opening on his team of six or there are some mitigating factors. I now turn to the very useful Bulbapedia for some closing statistics:
"Ash has caught 50 different kinds of Pokémon, including evolutions and counting Larvitar, Seaking, Beedrill, Haunter, and Raticate, even though Larvitar and Haunter were not officially his, Beedrill was given away nearly immediately, and Seaking was released as part of contest rules. The original tagline for the dub was "Gotta Catch 'em All!", but Ash has only caught 10.14% of the current number of Pokémon. This line was eventually dropped in 2003, when he only had 8.03% of the then total of 386. "
Anyway. What of Pikachu? After all, Pikachu's been with Ash from the very beginning, as has been stated a few times during... emotional moments. Well... actually the first thing that comes to mind is that Pikachu is one of the few characters with visibly apparent physical development over the course of the show. That is to say, Pikachu gets fit! Compare:
with
Yay! So anyway, Pikachu has been with Ash forever, and is just as loyal to him as Ash is to... ack, pronouns. The loyalty and friendship is mutual! And Pikachu must obviously be incredibly powerful... except somehow he keeps losing! How could it be! ...Actually I'll get more into that later. Mostly I just wanted to comment on Pikachu's fitness.
Next up--so when starting out, Ash knew nothing, but luckily he ran into Misty (got fished up by, actually) and she tagged along, and then he challenged Brock, got his badge (...notice how I didn't say he won), Brock tagged along, and the gang was complete! Because what would a hero be without his tagalong foil and exposition?
Given that Ash and Pikachu are constant (their presence, at least), variation in the main cast comes just from changing around who travels with him. Of these people, the honor of most-constant companion undeniably falls to Brock, who's been with him every single season except the second, when Tracey took his place for a short while.
Brock is--well, bulbapedia loves to call him "maternal," and he is that. He's the one with the medicine (Potions! Just spray them on, and insta-heal!), the cooking, the general maturity and knowledge, and... the irrational and pervasive "love" for every pretty girl they come across. It should be noted that being one of Ash's companions seems to give girls immunity to this--though this could also be just that they're supposed to be ten years old. Brock, on the other hand, is placed at 15 years old when he first shows up, so considering that all of them act rather older than they're supposed to be...
That's pretty much all there is to Brock. He's there to cook, heal, dispense wisdom, and contribute his running gag. Of course, the gag has gone through a lot... at first the joke was just that Brock fell "in love" so easily, then it was the reactions of the others, then various characters have been assigned the role of stopping him when he gets going on one of his love rants... including, most recently, one of his Pokémon, who paralyzes him and drags him off... only for him to reappear a few seconds later, making other characters comment on not knowing how he does it. Heh. It's a little amusing, I'll admit. It's also a little annoying, but it's pretty much become the staple of your average episode of Pokémon.
(Watch the whole video. The end is worth it, I think.)
Save the short season two, the reason Brock hasn't been replaced--at least from the character development standpoint, as I'm sure there's a whole lot to casting decisions like that that I don't know about--is probably because his arc isn't done yet... because it's just as open-ended as Ash's, or more so. His stated goal is to be the world's best "Pokémon Breeder," which unlike Ash's goal is not really something the writers can one day have him achieve. That is to say, he may one day be the world's best Pokémon Breeder, but there's no real way for the show to portray that... at least not yet. Ash, on the other hand, could do the battle-the-Elite-Four-and-the-Champion thing, leaving him the Champion, which is pretty close to being a Master... he probably couldn't do it soon, but the possibility is there.
...But anyway, it's okay that Brock's arc has no foreseeable end, because it doesn't really move much. Save for a little character development that consists of the writers emphasizing whichever aspect of Brock fits the story most conveniently at the time, Brock has remained pretty much constant throughout the whole show--which is good, because it gives something for the ever-growing Ash to compare to. Of course, he still spouts exposition, but not at Ash anymore... he gets to talk to the new female companion (wow, that made me think of Doctor Who for a second... anyway) to show off his knowledge. Which, by the way, I have yet to notice decreasing--if he doesn't know something, he doesn't know it, but if he does he knows it in future episodes, too. That's very good.
In second place on Ash's longest-companion scoreboard is, of course, Misty. She's with Ash throughout the entirety of the first series except the first episode (in which she appears, but does not travel with him yet), and the very last, in which she is entirely absent, having already left. After that, she only makes a few cameo appearances... but after five full seasons, it was time for her to go.
Unlike Brock (and of course Ash) she had no real stated goal--she said often that she wanted to be a great water-Pokémon trainer, but it came across as more of a thing to say after the other two recited their ambitions. (That said, no doubt she had a real passion for water Pokémon.) At one point she said instead she was to be the best "of everything"... but really her travels with Ash were pretty much just because of Ash, at first because Pikachu crisped her bike and later just because he was her friend and travelling together was just what they did.
To be honest, I don't have a whole lot to say about Misty. For all that she's the one I've seen most of, she doesn't get a ton of character development in that time... the first season is, understandably, focused pretty heavily on Ash. But one thing I've noticed is that Misty likes to give Ash advice, particularly during tough Pokémon battles. And it's always bad. In fact, if Misty gives Ash a bit of advice, you can almost be sure that not doing it is how Ash is going to pull out ahead. The exception is when Brock seconds her advice, in which case Ash might still ignore it, but bad things might actually happen in that case.
It's not always so much that Misty is bad at Pokémon battle strategy, she just seems to not understand Ash's style at all. (For clarity, I'm going off of the end of the first and second seasons; I have no idea if she gets better at this, but I would not be surprised.) For example, for Ash's match on the water field at the Indigo League, Misty wanted Ash to borrow one of her Pokémon, and he of course refused (repeatedly). His stated reasons were couched in arrogance (he would be fine with just what he had), but really they covered something Misty just couldn't get--that to Ash, to try to win a League match with someone else's Pokémon was unthinkable. He claimed that what he had would be fine because to him, they had to be, or that was it, and it being Ash's first league he didn't really know what he was getting into, so his assumption was he wasn't going to lose. He was of course right (for the time being), but it's kind of telling that Misty at least starts out completely not understanding where he's coming from with these things.
Misty is, of course, the last of Ash's female companions to justifiably try to give him advice (at least in the "I've been doing this longer so listen to what I say" sense), as the later ones are both new. But we'll get to them when... oh hey, wait, we've gotten to one of them, at least.
Going down the list in descending order of time spent with Ash, next comes May. I will disclaim here and now that I've barely seen any of May. I watched her introduction and far enough into her first season to know I didn't like her terribly much, and I watched her last episodes...
So May, when she's introduced at the very beginning of the second series, is about to pick up her own starter Pokémon to begin her journey as a Pokémon trainer. And yet, as she tells the audience through a narrative voice-over, she doesn't actually like Pokémon. And as is made clear later, she knows even less about it than Ash did at the beginning. Her chosen starter, Torchic, matches her well in that sense; for a Pokémon, it's pretty helpless. She has no strong desire to better herself, attempting mostly only when pushed by Ash and Brock, until the three of them discover Pokémon Contests. Now, Contests are something that really confused me until I sat down and read about them (and watched an episode with one...) so why don't you go ahead and read about what it is here so I don't have to explain it, kay? ...Actually that's not the best explanation ever, but...
May gains a goal: Pokémon Coordinator. Her quest for ribbons fits in nicely with Ash's quest for gym badges, and this was actually really smart of the writers, because Ash has done the badge thing three times already at this point, and something new is something newly interesting! Also, having a second main character who can further their goals specifically by travelling and collecting things like Ash, they can have twice as many progress-enhancing episodes without speeding the plot to twice as fast!
...Anyway, that's what May does, and what I have yet to have seen. I'll get to it, it'll just... take me a while. In any case, when she leaves, it's because she's spent the last four seasons with Ash, and she wants find her own way from there on out--understandable, really; she grew past the point of needing Ash and Brock to look over her shoulder all the time, and she wanted to go to Johto--someplace Ash had already been--so they couldn't even have the excuse of travelling together for convenience.
Continuing down the list is Max, who's just a couple of episodes below May; the both of them were with Ash for all of the second series, but Max joined the group a few episodes down the line. Max was an... interesting character addition. He's too young to be a Pokémon trainer himself, but he's rather fanatical about them. (He actually recognizes Ash from watching the Johto League on TV, which is rather amusing even before the related gag running through his first episode.) So he knows a lot more about Pokémon than May, but can't have any of his own, so... he serves basically as an extra source of exposition plus potential character development catalyst for May. All in all, I can't see how he would be a terribly useful character. But again, I skipped over the majority of the second series, so I honestly do not know.
And that brings us to Dawn! Here's where I admit that of the three girls--Misty. May, and Dawn--I like Dawn the best, at least so far. Unlike May, she knows from the start what she wants to do, though like May her goal is with the Pokémon Contests. Also from the start, she's marked as special, because she gets something neither Misty nor May got--an episode all to herself, with Ash appearing only in the coda. Even her second episode, she's by herself--it's not until her third episode that she even meets Ash. And in the meantime, she saves Pikachu from Team Rocket. Not bad.
Dawn is remarkably optimistic about pretty much everything. She has good reason to be--given the examples of Ash and May, Dawn has the strongest start as a trainer, because while she doesn't manage to catch the first two Pokémon she tries to catch, at least she battles them properly with her starter, Piplup. (It helps that Piplup is a whole lot more capable than Torchic was.) Technically, she also fails to capture the third she tries to catch, but seeing as that's Pikachu it doesn't really count. (In her defense, Pikachu had been separated from Ash and she thought it was wild.) She easily shrugs off her mistakes and presses on in a way that would probably be foolhardy if she didn't also learn from her mistakes. She's still terribly inexperienced, though, and it shows. Her confidence is still a very uncertain confidence.
Comparing here gets a little tricky, because I skipped so much of May and Misty, but I have noticed that Ash and Dawn have taken to working together more strongly than Ash did with either of the previous--at least in what I've seen of them. I think this is because with Misty, she had that superior dynamic, and with May, he had it, but Dawn is good enough from the start that when you ignore the difference in experience, the two of them are roughly equal. It helps, of course, that Ash starts in Sinnoh with only two of his old Pokémon, one of which he caught at the end of the previous season--meaning Ash is training new Pokémon just like Dawn is. He did the same going to Hoenn, of course, and so did the same with May, but May was far more clueless about Pokémon training and I certainly didn't get far enough to see her start coming into her own...
One of the things that all female companions must do, of course, is argue with Ash, because Brock basically never does it and otherwise there would be no internal conflict in the group! Or something. Misty was prone to suddenly shouting and then going back to normal, and I have no idea what May did, but with Dawn it seems to be that while she's certainly capable of snapping at Ash, she keeps it in check until they have themselves a little confrontation, after which they're friends again. I think the only time she's pulled a Misty-like brief rant out of nowhere was when, heh, a news crew was filming so she ducked off to the side to fix her hair and Ash said that it looked the same to him. Well, there was the time she got furious at Paul, but Paul is not Ash so that doesn't really count...
Something else about Dawn is that she's actually smart. She has multiple times been the one to pull together a bunch of strands of information and figure out what it all means, and she once conceived and pulled off a trap for Team Rocket. It's kind of refreshing to have a character capable of higher mental functions... which is a little mean to Ash and Brock (and Misty and May, I guess), but they all have to be fairly slow on the uptake because the writers don't want to dash ahead of any kids watching... maybe with Dawn they've realized that kids aren't actually that stupid? Hey, it's a possibility. Now all Dawn has to do is realize, just once, "Hmm, something odd going on, there's something suspicious about those three people--hey! They must be Team Rocket!" She's come really close, but has not yet managed that... of course, she won't, because Team Rocket has Patented Plot Protection that keeps them from being discovered too early. But you know what I would accept instead? After Team Rocket reveals itself, maybe a "Wow, that was obvious," instead of "Gasp! Team Rocket!" (Again, close, not but quite.)
After Dawn, who's only so low on the list because she didn't join Ash very long ago (not in the grand scheme of things, anyway--a little over a hundred episodes), there's only Tracey, who was Brock's replacement for the short second season. Considering how little I've watched of that season, I don't have a whole lot to say about Tracey. He's a "Pokémon Watcher" (which, okay, is a little ridiculous; I'll accept Pokémon Trainer and Pokémon Breeder and Pokémon Coordinator but "Pokémon Watcher"? Really?) which means basically that he goes around drawing Pokémon. Yeah. He exists basically because the writers (or whoever told the writers to create him) didn't believe people actually liked Brock; when they discovered that oops, they did, Tracey got shunted aside to occasional appearance and Brock came back. Yay!
In splitting this entry into parts, I tried to keep the parts roughly on the same topic... but I didn't change any of the actual text. So I didn't fiddle with transitions or anything. Below the line is just the first chunk of the entry, exactly as it would have appeared. Three... two... one... go!
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What follows is the longest entry I have ever written. It's longer than most of my essays. It's longer than most of my short stories. I have been writing it a little every day since my last entry. And yes, it is all about Pokémon.
If you're not even a little interested, I suggest you don't bother looking behind the cut at all. Just move along and pretend this entry doesn't exist.
If you are interested but you're in a hurry, I suggest you wait until later. This will take you a long time. I've put in pictures and I've embedded videos from youtube, and there's a whole lot of reading. The videos alone are about 30 minutes, total.
Also, a few warnings: Because it was written over such a long period of time, a lot of it is rather disjointed. At various points I assume you know various things that I may not have earlier, or won't later... I did my best to keep it accessible to someone who has no idea what I'm talking about, but I don't know how well I did. Oh, and ignore my horrible grammar in some places. Most glaring is how often I slip into the past tense when I should be using the present... just accept it and move on. I was originally going to go back and edit, but now that I've written so much the task is rather daunting and I frankly just want to be done with this already. Just putting it through livejournals' spell checker was an operation, lemme tell you...
So yeah, now that I'm done giving lots of reasons to not read this entry... I hope you will, but I'll be fine if nobody does. Writing it was a lot of fun.
And I hereby promise to never dedicate an entire entry to Pokémon ever again.
Are you ready?
So if there's going to be any talk about the show, a solid ground must first be established, and that means Ash and Pikachu. They are the only two characters to appear in every episode so far (not counting the spin-off)--though note that I say this not because I have read it (or experienced it) for a fact, but because I'm confident that if they were absent from an episode I would have read that. The closest they come is the first episode of the third series, as they only make a cameo, really, at the very end... but I'll get to that.
The show begins with Ash, newly ten years old, eager to start his journey to become "the greatest Pokémon Master in the world!" He gets off on a great start and ends up not with one of the regular starter pokémon but with Pikachu, who refuses to listen to him. Things happen (hey, I'm not recapping the whole show here) and they end up inseparable best friends--he has, in fact, called Pikachu his best friend far more often than he's used the term on any of his human friends. But we're getting ahead of ourselves...
It's a little curious that Ash, who is obviously a huge fan of Pokémon (a look at his room shows that they used the typical shortcut-to-obsession-for-kids: everything in his room is related to Pokémon, from his clock to his bed sheets, et cetera), actually knows very little about being a trainer. He tries to catch a wild Pokémon without battling it first; when his Pokédex (amusingly) points out his error, and when Pikachu refuses to battle for him, he tries to physically assault it himself, only to of course fail, only to end up running for his life from a flock of wild Pokémon...
(I'm not complaining that Ash doesn't know what he's doing, mind you. The show needed an entry point for new viewers (which by default was everyone, as even those familiar with the games would be wondering how the show was going to work), while his goal serves as the entire driving force of the show there at the beginning--faced with so many reasons and opportunities to give up, there had to be a good reason for him not to, and that very lofty goal was it)
...Said running for his life ends rather spectacularly when he, to protect a hurt Pikachu, challenges the flock and I mentioned this part in a past entry, didn't I? Ah well. And remember I'm not recapping the show... anyway, he defends Pikachu, despite having no way at all to follow through on his grandiose claims at the time, and no apparent way to keep both himself and Pikachu safe, so he chooses Pikachu, and that right there--though on one hand it's a convenient way to begin the trust between Ash and Pikachu, on the other it is exactly why the show works.
Ash's dream is just that, a dream. That early on, he was in no way a great trainer. He lost all the time, he fumbled about, everything had to be explained to him, and while a show about some incompetent guy in the world of Pokémon might have been a passable show for a while, I highly doubt it would have lasted twelve years (as of April 1) and running. See, the thing is, although Ash is woefully inexperienced, he does learn--and more importantly, he has something it's probably impossible to learn. He has his instinctive compassion for all Pokémon. Ash is probably the only character on the show who could say something like "Pokémon are people too!" and completely 100% mean it. More, as a trainer, he understands from the very beginning that caring for Pokémon is a huge responsibility, and for his Pokémon in particular he would do whatever it takes to protect them. So Ash isn't incompetent after all. He may not yet have the skill, but he's got the attitude--the incredible determination and the incredible caring. It's easy to see that some day, after a whole lot of growth, he might actually achieve his dream.
All that from a convenient way to get Pikachu (and the viewers) to like Ash. Not bad, writers. Not bad at all.
Perhaps more impressive is that the writers knew exactly what they were doing in showing off this side of Ash. Granted, it was a bit heavy-handed at times ("Look at Ash befriending the Pokémon! He doesn't have to battle because he's got The Right Stuff!") but it was not, say, a fluke, or subjected to "character development" down the line. Ash of course gets plenty of that, but he still has that drive and he still has that compassion. ...Actually, a lot of the development is the drive's transition from arrogance to confidence... also fun things like, for example, the maturity to handle losses a whole lot better, but one thing that never seems to change--if you want to rile Ash up, just insult his abilities as a trainer. Gets to him every time.
...Ironically, whoever came up with the slogan "Gotta Catch 'Em All" was not privy to the inside scoop of Ash's character (I'm really not surprised...), as is apparent from the fact that the concept of catching them all directly conflicts with Ash's training style (once he develops one). Even in the early episodes, when in fact he made it his goal to catch more Pokémon than Gary, he had to be reminded continually to actually go and catch something. Instead of focusing on the catching aspect, he focuses on working with the Pokémon he already has, training them to become the best they can be. (He says pretty much exactly this in a couple of his arguments with Paul in early season ten... so you know I'm not coming up with all of this myself.) Ash doesn't tend to catch anything unless there's an opening on his team of six or there are some mitigating factors. I now turn to the very useful Bulbapedia for some closing statistics:
"Ash has caught 50 different kinds of Pokémon, including evolutions and counting Larvitar, Seaking, Beedrill, Haunter, and Raticate, even though Larvitar and Haunter were not officially his, Beedrill was given away nearly immediately, and Seaking was released as part of contest rules. The original tagline for the dub was "Gotta Catch 'em All!", but Ash has only caught 10.14% of the current number of Pokémon. This line was eventually dropped in 2003, when he only had 8.03% of the then total of 386. "
Anyway. What of Pikachu? After all, Pikachu's been with Ash from the very beginning, as has been stated a few times during... emotional moments. Well... actually the first thing that comes to mind is that Pikachu is one of the few characters with visibly apparent physical development over the course of the show. That is to say, Pikachu gets fit! Compare:
with
Yay! So anyway, Pikachu has been with Ash forever, and is just as loyal to him as Ash is to... ack, pronouns. The loyalty and friendship is mutual! And Pikachu must obviously be incredibly powerful... except somehow he keeps losing! How could it be! ...Actually I'll get more into that later. Mostly I just wanted to comment on Pikachu's fitness.
Next up--so when starting out, Ash knew nothing, but luckily he ran into Misty (got fished up by, actually) and she tagged along, and then he challenged Brock, got his badge (...notice how I didn't say he won), Brock tagged along, and the gang was complete! Because what would a hero be without his tagalong foil and exposition?
Given that Ash and Pikachu are constant (their presence, at least), variation in the main cast comes just from changing around who travels with him. Of these people, the honor of most-constant companion undeniably falls to Brock, who's been with him every single season except the second, when Tracey took his place for a short while.
Brock is--well, bulbapedia loves to call him "maternal," and he is that. He's the one with the medicine (Potions! Just spray them on, and insta-heal!), the cooking, the general maturity and knowledge, and... the irrational and pervasive "love" for every pretty girl they come across. It should be noted that being one of Ash's companions seems to give girls immunity to this--though this could also be just that they're supposed to be ten years old. Brock, on the other hand, is placed at 15 years old when he first shows up, so considering that all of them act rather older than they're supposed to be...
That's pretty much all there is to Brock. He's there to cook, heal, dispense wisdom, and contribute his running gag. Of course, the gag has gone through a lot... at first the joke was just that Brock fell "in love" so easily, then it was the reactions of the others, then various characters have been assigned the role of stopping him when he gets going on one of his love rants... including, most recently, one of his Pokémon, who paralyzes him and drags him off... only for him to reappear a few seconds later, making other characters comment on not knowing how he does it. Heh. It's a little amusing, I'll admit. It's also a little annoying, but it's pretty much become the staple of your average episode of Pokémon.
(Watch the whole video. The end is worth it, I think.)
Click to viewSave the short season two, the reason Brock hasn't been replaced--at least from the character development standpoint, as I'm sure there's a whole lot to casting decisions like that that I don't know about--is probably because his arc isn't done yet... because it's just as open-ended as Ash's, or more so. His stated goal is to be the world's best "Pokémon Breeder," which unlike Ash's goal is not really something the writers can one day have him achieve. That is to say, he may one day be the world's best Pokémon Breeder, but there's no real way for the show to portray that... at least not yet. Ash, on the other hand, could do the battle-the-Elite-Four-and-the-Champion thing, leaving him the Champion, which is pretty close to being a Master... he probably couldn't do it soon, but the possibility is there.
...But anyway, it's okay that Brock's arc has no foreseeable end, because it doesn't really move much. Save for a little character development that consists of the writers emphasizing whichever aspect of Brock fits the story most conveniently at the time, Brock has remained pretty much constant throughout the whole show--which is good, because it gives something for the ever-growing Ash to compare to. Of course, he still spouts exposition, but not at Ash anymore... he gets to talk to the new female companion (wow, that made me think of Doctor Who for a second... anyway) to show off his knowledge. Which, by the way, I have yet to notice decreasing--if he doesn't know something, he doesn't know it, but if he does he knows it in future episodes, too. That's very good.
In second place on Ash's longest-companion scoreboard is, of course, Misty. She's with Ash throughout the entirety of the first series except the first episode (in which she appears, but does not travel with him yet), and the very last, in which she is entirely absent, having already left. After that, she only makes a few cameo appearances... but after five full seasons, it was time for her to go.
Unlike Brock (and of course Ash) she had no real stated goal--she said often that she wanted to be a great water-Pokémon trainer, but it came across as more of a thing to say after the other two recited their ambitions. (That said, no doubt she had a real passion for water Pokémon.) At one point she said instead she was to be the best "of everything"... but really her travels with Ash were pretty much just because of Ash, at first because Pikachu crisped her bike and later just because he was her friend and travelling together was just what they did.
To be honest, I don't have a whole lot to say about Misty. For all that she's the one I've seen most of, she doesn't get a ton of character development in that time... the first season is, understandably, focused pretty heavily on Ash. But one thing I've noticed is that Misty likes to give Ash advice, particularly during tough Pokémon battles. And it's always bad. In fact, if Misty gives Ash a bit of advice, you can almost be sure that not doing it is how Ash is going to pull out ahead. The exception is when Brock seconds her advice, in which case Ash might still ignore it, but bad things might actually happen in that case.
It's not always so much that Misty is bad at Pokémon battle strategy, she just seems to not understand Ash's style at all. (For clarity, I'm going off of the end of the first and second seasons; I have no idea if she gets better at this, but I would not be surprised.) For example, for Ash's match on the water field at the Indigo League, Misty wanted Ash to borrow one of her Pokémon, and he of course refused (repeatedly). His stated reasons were couched in arrogance (he would be fine with just what he had), but really they covered something Misty just couldn't get--that to Ash, to try to win a League match with someone else's Pokémon was unthinkable. He claimed that what he had would be fine because to him, they had to be, or that was it, and it being Ash's first league he didn't really know what he was getting into, so his assumption was he wasn't going to lose. He was of course right (for the time being), but it's kind of telling that Misty at least starts out completely not understanding where he's coming from with these things.
Misty is, of course, the last of Ash's female companions to justifiably try to give him advice (at least in the "I've been doing this longer so listen to what I say" sense), as the later ones are both new. But we'll get to them when... oh hey, wait, we've gotten to one of them, at least.
Going down the list in descending order of time spent with Ash, next comes May. I will disclaim here and now that I've barely seen any of May. I watched her introduction and far enough into her first season to know I didn't like her terribly much, and I watched her last episodes...
So May, when she's introduced at the very beginning of the second series, is about to pick up her own starter Pokémon to begin her journey as a Pokémon trainer. And yet, as she tells the audience through a narrative voice-over, she doesn't actually like Pokémon. And as is made clear later, she knows even less about it than Ash did at the beginning. Her chosen starter, Torchic, matches her well in that sense; for a Pokémon, it's pretty helpless. She has no strong desire to better herself, attempting mostly only when pushed by Ash and Brock, until the three of them discover Pokémon Contests. Now, Contests are something that really confused me until I sat down and read about them (and watched an episode with one...) so why don't you go ahead and read about what it is here so I don't have to explain it, kay? ...Actually that's not the best explanation ever, but...
May gains a goal: Pokémon Coordinator. Her quest for ribbons fits in nicely with Ash's quest for gym badges, and this was actually really smart of the writers, because Ash has done the badge thing three times already at this point, and something new is something newly interesting! Also, having a second main character who can further their goals specifically by travelling and collecting things like Ash, they can have twice as many progress-enhancing episodes without speeding the plot to twice as fast!
...Anyway, that's what May does, and what I have yet to have seen. I'll get to it, it'll just... take me a while. In any case, when she leaves, it's because she's spent the last four seasons with Ash, and she wants find her own way from there on out--understandable, really; she grew past the point of needing Ash and Brock to look over her shoulder all the time, and she wanted to go to Johto--someplace Ash had already been--so they couldn't even have the excuse of travelling together for convenience.
Continuing down the list is Max, who's just a couple of episodes below May; the both of them were with Ash for all of the second series, but Max joined the group a few episodes down the line. Max was an... interesting character addition. He's too young to be a Pokémon trainer himself, but he's rather fanatical about them. (He actually recognizes Ash from watching the Johto League on TV, which is rather amusing even before the related gag running through his first episode.) So he knows a lot more about Pokémon than May, but can't have any of his own, so... he serves basically as an extra source of exposition plus potential character development catalyst for May. All in all, I can't see how he would be a terribly useful character. But again, I skipped over the majority of the second series, so I honestly do not know.
And that brings us to Dawn! Here's where I admit that of the three girls--Misty. May, and Dawn--I like Dawn the best, at least so far. Unlike May, she knows from the start what she wants to do, though like May her goal is with the Pokémon Contests. Also from the start, she's marked as special, because she gets something neither Misty nor May got--an episode all to herself, with Ash appearing only in the coda. Even her second episode, she's by herself--it's not until her third episode that she even meets Ash. And in the meantime, she saves Pikachu from Team Rocket. Not bad.
Dawn is remarkably optimistic about pretty much everything. She has good reason to be--given the examples of Ash and May, Dawn has the strongest start as a trainer, because while she doesn't manage to catch the first two Pokémon she tries to catch, at least she battles them properly with her starter, Piplup. (It helps that Piplup is a whole lot more capable than Torchic was.) Technically, she also fails to capture the third she tries to catch, but seeing as that's Pikachu it doesn't really count. (In her defense, Pikachu had been separated from Ash and she thought it was wild.) She easily shrugs off her mistakes and presses on in a way that would probably be foolhardy if she didn't also learn from her mistakes. She's still terribly inexperienced, though, and it shows. Her confidence is still a very uncertain confidence.
Comparing here gets a little tricky, because I skipped so much of May and Misty, but I have noticed that Ash and Dawn have taken to working together more strongly than Ash did with either of the previous--at least in what I've seen of them. I think this is because with Misty, she had that superior dynamic, and with May, he had it, but Dawn is good enough from the start that when you ignore the difference in experience, the two of them are roughly equal. It helps, of course, that Ash starts in Sinnoh with only two of his old Pokémon, one of which he caught at the end of the previous season--meaning Ash is training new Pokémon just like Dawn is. He did the same going to Hoenn, of course, and so did the same with May, but May was far more clueless about Pokémon training and I certainly didn't get far enough to see her start coming into her own...
One of the things that all female companions must do, of course, is argue with Ash, because Brock basically never does it and otherwise there would be no internal conflict in the group! Or something. Misty was prone to suddenly shouting and then going back to normal, and I have no idea what May did, but with Dawn it seems to be that while she's certainly capable of snapping at Ash, she keeps it in check until they have themselves a little confrontation, after which they're friends again. I think the only time she's pulled a Misty-like brief rant out of nowhere was when, heh, a news crew was filming so she ducked off to the side to fix her hair and Ash said that it looked the same to him. Well, there was the time she got furious at Paul, but Paul is not Ash so that doesn't really count...
Something else about Dawn is that she's actually smart. She has multiple times been the one to pull together a bunch of strands of information and figure out what it all means, and she once conceived and pulled off a trap for Team Rocket. It's kind of refreshing to have a character capable of higher mental functions... which is a little mean to Ash and Brock (and Misty and May, I guess), but they all have to be fairly slow on the uptake because the writers don't want to dash ahead of any kids watching... maybe with Dawn they've realized that kids aren't actually that stupid? Hey, it's a possibility. Now all Dawn has to do is realize, just once, "Hmm, something odd going on, there's something suspicious about those three people--hey! They must be Team Rocket!" She's come really close, but has not yet managed that... of course, she won't, because Team Rocket has Patented Plot Protection that keeps them from being discovered too early. But you know what I would accept instead? After Team Rocket reveals itself, maybe a "Wow, that was obvious," instead of "Gasp! Team Rocket!" (Again, close, not but quite.)
After Dawn, who's only so low on the list because she didn't join Ash very long ago (not in the grand scheme of things, anyway--a little over a hundred episodes), there's only Tracey, who was Brock's replacement for the short second season. Considering how little I've watched of that season, I don't have a whole lot to say about Tracey. He's a "Pokémon Watcher" (which, okay, is a little ridiculous; I'll accept Pokémon Trainer and Pokémon Breeder and Pokémon Coordinator but "Pokémon Watcher"? Really?) which means basically that he goes around drawing Pokémon. Yeah. He exists basically because the writers (or whoever told the writers to create him) didn't believe people actually liked Brock; when they discovered that oops, they did, Tracey got shunted aside to occasional appearance and Brock came back. Yay!