Why does Ash Always Lose? | Defending Ash Ketchum (and Alola League Predictions) - CMG

I think it's basically the popular opinion of this point inside and out of the Pokemon community that Ash Ketchum is a bad trainer I mean have you seen the twitch chat on the Pokemon marathons Christ I haven't seen such basic opinions since 2012 but anyways there's always been a lot of misconceptions about the Pokemon anime that lead a lot of people to believe that Ash Ketchum the bad trainer that some events should have played out differently than they actually did so today I'm gonna be taking a look at some of the common Pokemon anime criticisms aimed at Ash and explaining why they actually do make sense you guys just mean let's start with the big meme of the twitch at the pitty badge this joke goes all the way back to the first season of the anime where Ash would often never complete his gym battles but still got the badge anyways probably because of defeating Team Rocket or something like that wellthey twitch chat refers to as a pity badge people will still say this even though he won fair and square so that's probably just some exaggeration on their part but I think we should take a look at how many badges he earned versus how many were actual pity badges starting with Brock he beat him legit though the sprinkler thing I guess could be up for debate he never finishes battle with Misty so I guess that qualifies it's a pity badge lieutenant surge was fair and square he never finished his battles with Sabrina or Erica so those are two more pity badges Koga and Blaine were also legit with the earth badge being probably up for debate considering Team Rocket weren't actually the gym leaders but he did defeat them in battle so I think that counts as a legit bad that's only three pity badges out of the first eight so that's not as bad as it's made out to be and it only really gets better from there the rest of his badges were legit some arguments possibly being made for price and Johto who forfeited Watson and Hoenn who technically wasn't at full power and may lean in Sinnoh whom Ash tied with but every other gym battle other than that Ash won fair and square no sprinklers no pity badges this rumor is bogus yo now let's talk about another gripe that fans tend to have Pikachu for years and years fans have been wondering why anxious Pikachu hasn't evolved yet and why ash keeps a lot of his Pokemon unevolved the out of universe explanation for this is obviously marketing and brand recognition Pikachu is literally the mascot of the entire franchise so it would make no sense the main character of the long-running show to have a ride shoe trust me I love ride shoe as much as the next guy it's my favorite Pokemon but that just doesn't make any sense at all Pikachu needs to stay Pikachu for the Pokemon brand it's that simple and I don't know how people don't understand this when it comes to his other Pokemon the cute ones will stay small and cute like most starters while ones with cool evolutions will evolve like Charizard and krookodile in universe it's been explained to multiple times that Pikachu does not want to evolve and since Ash respects his Pokemon he lets Pikachu do what he wants and that's to stay as a Pikachu in regards to his other Pokemon I often hear this argument mammootty's - evolve his Pokemon the toy he loses every league the dumbest thing my problem with this argument comes mostly with the wording of it people say this as if it's at the games and asking just level his Bulbasaur up to level 16 and boom Ivysaur and we'll get to levels in a minute but this is not how this works in the anime the way I see it Pokemon evolution in the anime works a lot like a Dragonball Z transformation once a Pokemon has achieved a certain quote-unquote power level which the anime shows by more powerful moves and such then the Pokemon can choose whether or not it wants to evolve a lot of times when Ash's Pokemon do evolve it's because they need to to avoid a bad situation like losing a gym battle or losing the Team Rocket and other times it's just because they wanted to most of his Pokemon who have not evolved did so by choice or never wanted to in the first place in some cases there were entire episodes dedicated to certain Pokemon not wanting to evolve like with Bulbasaur and it even applies to other trainers like Dawn's Piplup Asha has a track record of never forcing a Pokemon to do anything that it didn't want to do and even when he did do so unknowingly he quickly corrected himself he lets his Pokemon evolved when they feel it is appropriate people act like ash has a choice in his pokemons evolution like he can just command it to evolve and it will but they don't take the pokemons choice into account and that's just the type of trainer that Ash is when was the last time you were watching an anime and you saw a trainer and look at its Pokemon and say evolve and then it just evolves it doesn't work like that it doesn't happen circling back to Pikachu and we're gonna get real controversial here let's talk about Latios and Snivy I'm sure you all already know where I'm going with this one but if you don't know in the final episodes of diamond and pearl ash battles against a chair named Tobias in the cinah League the dude sweeps his whole team with a Darkrai ash manages to finally take that thing out and then he has to fight this dude second Pokemon which is a Latios the battle ends with Pikachu and Latios both fainting and ash losing the battle fast-forward a few more episodes and we get to black and white ash meets trip and wants to battle this dude calls out his Snivy that he just got and beats I think we all know the song and dance by now the argument here that many people like to make especially in regards to Ash's character and black and white is that Ash's Pikachu should have easily beaten tripp Snivy after all Ash's had four regions of battle experience on his side of all trip just started his journey that day with an untrained Snivy so surely it would be an easy win but no ash losses from a writing perspective this was very obviously done to make trip seem like more of a rival for ash in this generation and since Gen 5 for both the anime and the games was meant to be a soft reboot of sorts ash was scaled down a little to introduce new kids to the show that's whatever I'm okay with all that but what bothers me are these in-universe explanations that are there and ever clearly present but fans will willfully ignore because hahaha black and white was bad losing here I don't much care for black and white either but you've got to look at things rationally here people seem to be under the impression that there aren't levels in the anime and like I said I will get to that so they assume that Ash's Pikachu must be level 100 by now when in reality Pikachu was never Ash's best Pokemon to begin with he's far from his worst Pokemon but certainly not as best by any means when people make this argument that his Pikachu defeated a Latios and then lost to a Snivy they willingly leave out the context of both situations it's not like Pikachu had an easy time defeating that Latios in fact most of his attacks barely did anything when both of them were already slightly weakened from the battle before Pikachu may have beaten this Latios but it was no easy feat he essentially G's his way to victory by hopping on lan deals his back and hammering away with Thunderbolts if Ash's Pikachu and Tobias's latias were to go against each other at full power rather than both of them being weakened Pikachu would not stand a chance so yeah because you did win against the Latios but just barely when it comes to Snivy Pikachu was severely underpowered in that fight Pikachu didn't have access to Thunderbolt or volt tackle two of his most powerful attacks and trip even though this was his first battle seemed to know a fair bit about Pokemon battles beforehand so it's not like he's some nameless trainer with no concept of battling Pikachu is not as strong as most people make him out to be so it's not entirely surprising to me that he could barely beat a Latios and still lose to a Snivy at half power I guess the point here is that people will willfully ignore blatant information that presents them in the show just for the sake of making fun of it moving on from that let's finally talk about levels in the anime I think to any rational person it's fairly up that levels are not a thing in the anime the way that they are in the games people have tried to apply game logic to the anime since the beginning and though the anime did start out with some of that stuff they quickly phase it out because it would just not work with the kind of story they wanted to tell if you want proof as to why levels don't exist then take a look at Bulbasaur for example Bulbasaur made it through two regions and the orange islands taking on Pokemon way stronger than itself and there is no way it was under level 16 at that point if levels existed in the anime even in the episode where it was going to evolve focus was mysterious garden there is no way it would be such a low level if we're applying game mechanics this took place between Ash's battles against Koga and Blaine between Jim six and seven meaning for applying game mechanics there's no way he can be such a low-level at this point which therefore proves that levels do not exist in the anime if you still deny this you are delusional oh but what would what about some of the times worse other characters mentioned all levels those can be easily misconstrued into the game version of levels for example in an episode of X&Y Clement is explaining to Bonnie how pokemon evolution works and he mentions when a Pokemon hits a certain level that doesn't mean it hits a numerical level that means it just becomes a certain level of power it's not level 14 or level 16 it's just I'm stronger I'm at this level of power now there's no numbers applied to it it's not how the anime works I don't even know why I'm touching this one with a ten-foot pole because honestly it doesn't even matter that much but I'm just gonna do this to get it out of the way why do people care that ash is quote unquote forever ten years old it's a cartoon who cares listen I like time skips as much as the next guy but it doesn't matter how old he is you could literally disregard the throwaway ten-years-old line from black and white episode 1 and it would change nothing in my head Canon every episode is about a day and with over a thousand episodes it's been almost three years making Ash 13 at most by Sun and Moon but that's not the real cannon the real cannon is that his age doesn't matter just watch the children's show and shut up but anyways let's get back to ash more specifically why does he lose all the time and is he worthy of a league win let's go through this in chronological order shall we so in the indigo League it makes perfect sense that he would lose this lead and I think most fans tend to be okay with that he was inexperienced three of his badges were illegitimate and he simply wasn't ready to take on most of the trainers there he was way below the bar at that point so it makes perfect sense that he would the trainer's who didn't have that kind of coddling the orange islands while most people claim it doesn't count makes sense that he would win it was a smaller scale League that wasn't as tough as the real leagues but it was perfect for him to truly ease into being a trainer it's like trying to fight the final boss without taking out the all the enemies first you got to start small and then work your way up and ash started way too big in the indigo league so the orange islands was a fresh start great for him to ease into thing again most people don't count this one so I don't feel the need to fully explain it but it's kind of supplementary to the indigo League your orange islands were exactly what Ash needed to truly ease into being a pokemon trainer which pretty much put him on par with many of the trainers in Johto with Joe doe while ash may have lost in the end he still finally managed to beat Gary which brings that whole arc and rival a turn and after five seasons out of universe it makes sense that he would lose to Harrison as well because with his home in Pokemon of pushes ash to want to travel to Hoenn so it's less of a character improving kind of thing and more of a transitioning to the next-gen kind of thing in university could also make sense because Hoenn is way different than Joe doe or Kanto so ash would not have any idea how to deal with Seiya Blaziken for example even though he did have the type advantage with Charizard Hoenn if you ask me was a very stagnant generation for Ash he didn't really noticeably improve he didn't really get worse he just kind of the same as he wasn't Johto throughout that gen as a result it's the league that I remember the least because it was not as memorable with that said Tyson was proven to be a quite strong trainer and at this point we kind of see the pattern here ash beats the recurring rival in the league that is then beaten by someone way stronger which pushes him to go to the next region we're gonna skip the battle frontier because that doesn't really count in Sinnoh we see that same formula just with more rivals ash beat both Nando and Conway minor rivals throughout Sinnoh and then he had his big epic final battle against Paul after that they needed to continue the anime but since the big battle of the league was Ashe versus Paul there was no way that they could have topped that even if as you did beat Tobias and some other strong trainer through some deus ex machina BS none of those battles would mean anything compared to what the victory against Paul meant so it makes the most sense they're sure that even though Ashe beat his main rival one of the best battles of the series there are still bigger fish to fry Ash's Sinnoh are concluded when he beat Paul and no other battle in that series could have met more than that battle so losing was really the only other option they had considering what they gave themselves to work with by matching them up this early in the tournament if they had been matched up later in the tournament say like the finals and Ashwin I would be perfectly okay with that because the final battle would actually mean something but if he just chooses his way through two more battles to win that it doesn't mean anything his win means nothing then we get to Unova black and white was that Ash's best time I think that's well established at this point but I think the reason that he lost to this goober Cameron was two factors dumb walk-on Cameron's behalf and Ashe had way too many Pokemon that generation he had 10 Pokemon including Pikachu in rotation this generation as opposed to as usual six with more Pokemon than usual none of them had as much training as in the other generations because half of them were constantly in rotation his Pokemon were simply under trained compared to some of his other teams by the time of the league plus if you look at Cameron's team he was stacked but you had a Ferrothorn hydreigon samurai and Lucario on his team and even though he only had five Pokemon in this battle the power level was still way higher than Ash's and realistically speaking everyone has slumps or even after constant improvement you sometimes don't do as good as you have in the past everything up until the end of Diamond and Pearl was pretty consistent for Ash's character where he was almost always improving black and white was a bit of a slump but X&Y and Sun and Moon are also pretty consistent from where he left off and diamond a pearl leaving black and white as the only outlier and we all have off days you know off leagues it happens if anything I think it fits Ash's character as he's often very forgetful using the Pokedex on Pokemon he's definitely seen before is probably just him refreshing his memory because he's not that smart he's 10 years old is it that good from a writing perspective no but in terms of how real humans act absolutely it makes sense oh and is that I didn't suck the dick of X&Y enough here we get to Kalos the battle that many fans took to be a middle finger ash finally makes it to the finals of a Pokemon League further than he's ever been before but he still loses to a long I did a whole video on this when it first happened I used the argument that it's just another step and Ash's journey that you know he still has more adventures to be had and then that's just how the show goes he just destined to lose I don't a hundred percent stand by that anymore but I still think this loss can be rationalized to explain this I think we need to look at the XY Series as a whole it's a commonly held belief that Ash was way more competent in this series compared to the last one but I think people confuse having fully evolved Pokemon with competency having strong cold doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to use them correctly only two of his Pokemon had any real improvement that generation those being greninja and goodra while the others were just kind of there and didn't really do anything hawlucha had personality which was interesting but didn't really have any effect on his battling talonflame was generic bird and no bird and despite being one of the more powerful Pokemon in Gen 6 had like five battles tops in the series and lost all of them googe's whole arc was that it was a weak little goomy but then evolved very quickly into a goodra it felt like they were building him up as Ash's ace for that region they did it way too early so he wasn't even around for very long before he was released slash given to the Park Ranger guy so that Ash wouldn't be too powerful for the rest of the region greninja was the only one that had any real improvement but a lot of that was pushed until the end with ash greninja and I know I talked about this way too much on this channel I'm sorry but once ash and greninja mastered that form it was barely used until the league where it was basically the trump card transformation with all the hype around it all of his other Pokemon got pushed to the side and even then ash greninja got very little screen time in its mastered form with that said I don't think ash greninja was as mastered as it could have been if you know what I'm saying like they can use the form without going out of control and easily swept too many opponents in the league using it but there was still way more to a lock that simply wasn't there due to time constraints I'm sure ash greninja could have been way more powerful I guess what I'm trying to say is that Ash only master - greninja to the point where it could be controlled but never took it much further than that with Owens mega Charizard X he's had tons of time training with the mega Charizard X form as we've seen in the mega evolution specials so I think the power gap is pretty clear it makes perfect sense at least to me that Charizard was already was way stronger than ash greninja there was really not much of a contest here but now we're getting closer and closer to in a lo League and there's much debate as to whether ash will win it or not once it rolls around personally I don't think he's gonna win and that's just based on pure gut instinct Sun and Moon has been much more character focused in regards to the side characters and actually taking a much more casual approach this time around it's not even a full team yet two years into the series the Aloha League is way different from previous leagues because this time anyone can join regardless of Island Trials so ash can be up against anyone including his classmates gladion Kukui some minor characters that I've appeared here and there Team Rocket can even join and definitely how if he's gonna lose and it's probably gonna be - someone's significant like gladdie on Kukui or the most likely in my opinion how so at least it's not gonna be some BS nameless character who shows up out of nowhere like Tobias was I still don't think ash is gonna win and honestly I don't want him to and I know that's the very unpopular opinion when I think of Ash winning a league I think of this post I found years ago and I can't for the life of me find again but it says something along the lines of being a fan of Ash Ketchum was like being in prison and every year somebody gives you a cake with broken glass in it every time you get the cake you think hey this might mean I might not be so bad maybe I won't be broken glass and at this time next thing you know you wake up in the psych ward with cotton swabs in your mouth because you got your hopes up again in other words rooting for ash every league is Einstein's definition of insanity you're doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results you might think that hey there changing things up this time around due to how unconventional Sun and Moon has been with ash having caught two Legendary's one of which he released but that's still a first regardless but when it comes to tradition pokemon rarely breaks it every time they've tried to break tradition such as attempting to get rid of Team Rocket circa black and white or when they replace Brock for the orange islands fans reacted negatively and they went back to the basics the transition from black and white to X&Y was the most obvious because of how much black and white deviated from the first four generations was received poorly than they later went back to the basics with X&Y and may seem as though Sun and Moon is breaking this trend but even today like two years into the series there are still people who vehemently hate it for the same reasons from before it began the point is when Pokemon tries to break tradition there may be people who like the changes even the ones that are for the better but the majority of people do not like change and they have a history of backpedaling when this happens I understand why Ash winning a league is a thing that fans have wanted for years I get it you know seeing a character lose and lose over and over again you think he deserves a win at this point but I just don't think that it would fit Ash's goals and the way the writers have written it so far Asher said since day one that he wants to become a Pokemon master and based on what the anime told us in the past winning a league seems like a surefire way to do that excluding orange islands because they don't count for some reason but even now we still don't know what it means to be a Pokemon master I did a whole video one at years ago and there is still no definitive answer it's basically common knowledge at this point that when Ash becomes a Pokemon master the show will end but with no definitive answer as of yet that it means the anime will keep going until they decide to end it naturally or afreeca Matsumoto wants to stop voicing ash for whatever reason in the future the reason I don't want ash to win a league isn't because I like seeing him lose like most people would want you to believe when they hear this kind of thing in fact I don't really care who wins or loses as long as the battles are entertaining but because there is always room to improve as a trainer and since we are nowhere close to the Pokemon series endgame as of now there is no reason to give ash one of the most prestigious honors in the Pokemon world this early on if they want to tell more story obviously this is gonna lead to power creep something that a lot of long-running anime have had trouble with and I'm looking at you Dragonball so if ash wins then where do we go from here they could do the champion league something that was hinted at in diamond and pearl but again we're not close to the endgame yet and I think it's been long enough to where they've probably abandoned that idea entirely assuming we've been building up to a win all these years with ash placing better and better in each league with the exception of Unova getting progressively better if he actually did win then you'd have to win every future league after that they're probably not what I rise from this would be the Champions League cuz it just become the same Pokemon League cycle we've been seeing since the start well he'll challenge it but then he'll lose again and again because they have to continue the show narrative Lee speaking it'd be best to save the Champions League for the final arc of Pokemon its final arc ever its end game if you will but as of now we are nowhere close to this end game I'd say if anything we're probably about half way and they're gonna keep taking new approaches to each new generation to give ash reasons not to win or for there to not be a league so as to pad things out for a little while whenever they do decide to end it off they're probably gonna pull some bogus definition of Pokemon master out of nowhere maybe do a time skip or something for the last episode and the amore shipper in me just wants to see him end up with Serena and they have a child for the next series and could be the boruto of Pokemon however I don't see the latter happening because they simply will not replace ash ever period this video is going on longer than I expected and if I triggered you with my unpopular opinions regarding Ash Ketchum then good call me an ash Ketcham apologist all you want I don't really care but on the real though if you disagree and please leave an intelligent comment down below so we can have a genuine discussion about this topic that's all for this video I've been Matt CMG and I'll see you next time thanks for watching [Music] Oh God [Music] [Music]

Channel: MattCMG

Views: 282,209

Rating: 4.3316083 out of 5

Keywords: mattcmg, cmg, matt cmg, pokemon, ash ketchum, defending ash ketchum, ash ketchum loses, ash ketchum loser, ash ketchum league, ash vs paul, ash vs gary, ash vs alain, ash vs tobias, pokemon ash, unpopular opinions, unpopular opinions pokemon, unpopular pokemon opinions, pokemon league, sinnoh league, indigo league, kalos league, alola league, alola league predictions, ash wins the league, ash loses the league, why does ash always lose, pokemon sword and shield, gen 8 anime

Id: blb9aUC6JGE

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019