This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/PhantasmalRelic on 2025-10-30 05:26:37+00:00.
Introduction
Once upon a time, before Pokémon fully established itself as an unstoppable, omnipresent, seemingly eternal marketing juggernaut, there was a time where series director Junichi Masuda was stressed out that the series would actually fail. It was 2003. Despite coming off the fan favourite Gold and Silver versions, Pokémon was becoming a thing of the past. The fad was fading, more teenage-oriented anime like Yu-Gi-Oh was becoming the new flavour, and admitting to liking Pokémon would make you uncool in high school. Not helping was that the most recent games, Ruby and Sapphire, were mired in controversy. Despite objective improvements such as the addition of abilities adding extra depth to the battle system, people complained because they seemingly betrayed the series ethos of “Gotta Catch 'Em All” by only having 200 out of 386 on release, having only 8 badges instead of 16, and the new Pokémon getting flack for either looking too similar or too different to previous gen Mons. If you’ve been around the fandom for any length of time, you’ll probably recognize complaints like these in any given gen. Nonetheless, the games still sold millions, so a lot of people were playing even if they wouldn’t admit it.
Advance era Pokémon was unique because this was when the online fandom was really starting to take off. Because Pokémon carried such a strong schoolyard stigma, many people retreated online (yes, like 2020 without the life threatening plague). One of the biggest fansites, Serebii.net, got its start in 1999, but really took off in popularity by 2002, just in time to witness the Advance Generation (for the record, Serebii beat everyone else because it was like Google search at the time; it had the most complete information about the entire franchise out of anyone). Because the Internet hadn’t yet become ubiquitous in our lives, and because adults generally hated or didn’t understand Pokémon (e.g. the very low Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the early Pokémon movies), the fandom skewed pretty young, likely teenage on average, but with anime fans, you never know. If what I am about to describe sounds really petty, this is one major contributing factor to this.
The Anime Before May
Unlike many TV adaptations of popular video games, the Pokémon anime was just as much a pop culture staple as the games. I think only Sonic the Hedgehog had as much multimedia success at the time. Both franchises took a bunch of simplistic game avatars and giving them personality beyond what video game technology could accurately portray in the 90s. The main power trio of Ash, Misty, and Brock would become just as synonymous with Pokémon as Pikachu. Sure, there was that time some guest star named Tracey took Brock’s place for one season, but Brock returned and he was quickly forgotten.
Naturally, with a boy and a girl travelling so long together, people were really convinced they were going to become an item. The Ash x Misty pairing was called Pokéshipping because there were no other major competitors. Sure, there were some slash fans who insisted on pairing Ash with his rival Gary instead. And there was that one time Ash got kissed by a dragon. But most people paired the main characters.
After five seasons, in a move unprecedented for the series, the fellowship finally decided to part ways. Misty got a tearful farewell scene that convinced the fans of her unrequited love, thus crushing the dreams of legions of fans. Eventually, Brock would return next season, but Misty…did not.
What’s Feminism Got To Do With This?
Before introducing our Helen, time to explain the 00’s era pop feminism part. Without getting too much into that thorny topic, North American pop culture at the time represented this as a binary: tomboy good, girly bad. What started with a justified backlash against conservative societal expectations that girls should be groomed for a life of domestic labour and nothing else got oversimplified in a way ostensibly easy enough for kids to understand (e.g. P!nk’s Stupid Girls music video). Misty was a tomboy, ergo, she was cool. Meanwhile, in the rival Digimon fandom, Sora, the tomboy who dressed in Misty’s colours, was also seen as cool, while Mimi, the fashion-obsessed girly girl, was widely reviled (JP/ENG differences contributed a lot to this, same with Pokémon). So when Pokémon’s Sora got effectively replaced by Mimi, people were pissed.
Enter May of Hoenn
May, in a lot of ways, was a victim of circumstance. A show like Digimon has a regularly rotating cast and multiple girls on the team at a time, so none of them carried the audience expectation of being the sole representative of all girls everywhere. But she was the first one to break the beloved power trio. To the bunch of romance-obsessed teenagers following the show, she was the Yoko Ono. The traitor. The evil temptress stealing Ash away from his rightful girl. Many hatefics were written of her being violently killed off to restore the rightful pairing to the throne. And when it turned out that May wasn’t a Tracey, that she was sticking around for the long haul, well, Serebii.net anime discussion and other forums were minefields divided over whether Misty or May was better.
May was hated for other reasons too. Like Mimi, she did not give off the best first impression. Though she was new to the whole Pokémon trainer thing, fans were not pleased by her being so ditzy, ignorant, and whiny. Or that she was shopping obsessed. Or that she had multiple episodes in a row dedicated to her swimsuit obsession* (yeah, you could tell Pokémon was in its least popular era). But over time, a lot of people would warm up to May. Unlike Misty, she got her own training arc parallel to Ash’s where she participated in Pokémon Contests and aspired to be the top Pokémon coordinator. Surprisingly, this was not as gender-segregated as one might think because there were plenty of male coordinators as well and each contest had a battle component so May’s Pokémon would become legit fighters in their own right. She got a lot more respect and airtime than female characters in many other rival shonen franchises of the era could even dream of (as for Digimon…let’s not talk about Zoe). Also, many people liked her from the start because they played as her in the games, they found her cute, or were won over by her perky, cheerful, and emotional personality, which is more than can be said for the comparatively bland Tracey.
In fact, a lot of fans got pretty defensive about perceptions that May was hated for being a girly girl. They saw themselves in May, and got upset at how society keeps shitting on “girly” interests. So in this sense, Pokémon became a proxy war for pop feminist debate…which is again a result of only having one girl at a time. There are many series where more tomboyish and more “girly” characters become good friends. Unfortunately, society also has an unfortunate tendency to pit girls and women against each other, hence why people get so…competitive. (you could also solve the problem by being like other shonen anime and simply making all the girls useless…but that defeats the point, doesn’t it?)
Ultimately, May would also rotate out of the cast, and while some of her fans resented her replacement Dawn, and there were still a lot of angry Misty fans who couldn’t let it go, as it turns out, Dawn was pretty well liked. She was even more fashion obsessed, but also more active in the plot and people generally considered her Contest arc deeper and more emotionally resonant. Most people at this point accepted that, like many other long-runners, Ash was going to have a rotating cast of friends, especially when Brock would also rotate out along with Dawn. She also coincided with Pokémon becoming more popular again, and the fandom, well, growing up.
And at the end of the Ash Ketchum saga, he, Misty and Brock finally reunited for one last arc together. No, Ash and Misty do not declare their love for each other because it’s not that kind of show (and Ash’s Japanese VA has gone on record saying he’s asexual anyway). Unfortunately, May was not so lucky because her Japanese voice actress contracted spasmodic dysphonia and couldn’t do her voice anymore. Japan has huge respect for their voice actors, so they just rotated May out. It’s actually a pretty sad end to a character’s legacy.
*Worth noting that Misty’s Japanese counterpart Kasumi was similarly looks-obsessed, muddling the whole tomboy vs girly girl divide. 4Kids toned that down a lot, but that part of her personality still made it to Pokemon Yellow.
Conclusion
I’m surprised I haven’t yet seen any posts covering Advance-era Pokémon, because that was such a turbulent time to be in the fandom. Hopefully I managed to entertain you with this glimpse o…
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