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The Great Butler

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    I see Da! is keeping up its record of winning episodes...
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    I actually think most episode have been fun and well done, they just needed to remove TR from them, otherwise, we are still getting interesting CotD like BW1 we just don't havea competition thats the main problem.

    The only episode that got me bored till now was only the Honey episode, next week Jirachi episode isn't really doing much for me either and the alien episode after same.
    Am I the only one who wouldn't mind if they actually skipped more than half the DA! episodes in Japan if it means getting to Gen 6 quicker.
    Yeah, I'm really enjoying the dub. I think it's gotten really good over the last few weeks and I am looking forward to the Final 5 episodes. So am I right in thinking DA! is probably not so great?
    Doing well, man. Sorry to be MIA for so long. I missed you also. Been awhile since I logged into Serebii. I'll try to stay on more often when I'm not busy. Needless to say, I haven't been too interested in hearing about DA! because I think I know how it will turn out. Honestly, I am enjoying watching the dub of Episode N more than I am interested to hear what's going on with DA!
    It's been awhile, man. I have been busy with other non-Serebii things lately. Having said that, it looks like I didn't miss much. The Mewtwo Prologue things seems interesting but other than that, DA! still offers no surprises.
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    Paul was pretty popular, wasn't he? Why not drop Trip entirely and bring Paul back as the main rival? Unlike Iris, Trip doesn't actually promote anything, and Paul wouldn't be the first rival to be in more than one region.
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    "They concluded his story arc and wanted to work on a new one with a new character"? *shrug*
    I'm not exactly part of the writing staff here, you know.
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    So then why did "Team Rocket's radio show for adults" exist?
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    It wasn't really "for adults", that's Bulbagarden nonsense. It was on in the early afternoon, it got advertised on Pokemon Smash... it may have been written at a somewhat more "hey, older fans are going to listen to this" level than the anime is, but it wasn't "a show for adults".


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    And judging from Mima's scripts for it, particularly the first episode, it's not an unfair thing to say that there was hatred for BW within the staff.
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    It also played directly into the ongoing anime plot, it was likely already decided at the time that the Rocket trio would go back to their original selves, and... well, they needed to use the characters' original personalities for the radio show. It wouldn't work otherwise. It's a comedy show, you need funny hosts with outgoing personalities, not dead-serious agents.


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    Not only is the show static, the long-term ratings don't really reflect any real change when things do happen. That tells me that Team Rocket in BW actually weren't affecting the ratings in any significant way.
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    The writers' job is to catch the audience's response to their show before it starts affecting ratings. The show is big business, they want as many viewers as they can to watch.


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    And the merchandise sells no matter what they do.
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    The anime is an important part of the franchise's advertisement. If kids keep watching, they won't lose interest in the franchise, and will keep wanting new plushies and toys and mugs and games and whatnot. The anime also does a lot of advertising for specific things Gamefreak wants advertised at the moment. N showed up in the anime alongside a lot of N merchandise, the Milos arc aired at the same time as a set of kami trio merchandise appeared, etc. The anime is very important to Gamefreak.
    I said "pleasing older fans" was of less importance, not of no importance. They do toss older fans a bone every once in a while - Hikari's return, Lizardon's return, nostalgic flashbacks in the Butterfree episode... it's all fanservice for older fans that they figure kids will enjoy as well.



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    But if Iris is unpopular with the target audience, wouldn't it "keep the viewer numbers high" to dump her, bring back Dawn to do nothing but be popular and keep Cilan to do the advertising for Generation 5?
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    In that case it would be better for them to change the character to make her more popular, so they could keep advertising gen 5.


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    Team Rocket doesn't do this and hasn't for a very long time
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    Indeed. They're kept around because they're popular with fans, and it's good for the show to have some stock villains to use as antagonists. Takeshi stayed on for ages too because they needed an expositionary character, and why get rid of the one they had when he was functioning well enough? And eventually they decided to do just that, having come up with a better idea. Decisions like these are alway carefully thought through, and done for a reason.


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    Less cynically, I seem to remember someone pulling the numbers and revealing that the episodes with black uniform Team Rocket leading up to the aborted Team Rocket VS. Team Plasma episodes had higher ratings than more recent episodes.
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    Early episodes of TV shows always get a huge amount of viewers who want to check it out. Happened when AG and DP just started, too. Massive ratings spike that sunk after some 20 episodes. It has less to do with content than the "this is new" factor.
    They aren't. Vocal minorities aren't adhered to. Shows like these are written by boards that carefully probe their target audience and try their best to appeal to their tastes in order to be as popular as possible. If something doesn't work, or they think it will work better if done differently, they'll change it. Making the Rockets serious was clearly something they thought the target audience would respond positively to, but they didn't, and thus their roles were reduced, and they were eventually brought back to ho they used to be. None of this has anything to do with how loud anyone in English-speaking fan circles complain, or what the voice actors felt about it - what matters is how kids in Japan felt... and the anime directors felt that these kids didn't like this change.

    Hikari is a gen 4 character who as brought back as a bit of fanservice because she was popular, and then written out again because she's not relevant to what they're currently advertising. Virgil, whom you mentioned in the thread, is clearly a character whose creation was requested by Gamefreak, since they were doing a lot of Eeveelution-related campaigning at the time to lead up to Nymphia's reveal. The upcoming Jirachi episode primarily exists to tie into this generation's Jirachi giveaway, which will be advertised in the episode's post-segment (that's what the "Also, you can get your own Jirachi as well!" refers to).

    The key goals for the anime director board is to a) advertise what they're supposed to, and b) make it appeal to the target audience to keep the viewer numbers high. Things such as "please older fans" are of less importance.
    Hey. I know I haven't updated for a long time, but to be perfectly honest...I feel like I'm losing interest in Pokemon fics. I'm not sure why, I just haven't felt motivated to write more of Proving Grounds anymore, let alone some of the other projects I'd been planning. I want to continue, but at the same time I'm only about halfway through the story and have no idea if I can finish it or even start on anything else.

    So...yeah...writer's block at maximum possible power.
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    On another note, did you hear there is going to be a new special acting as a prologue to the movie?
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    Yeah, I just saw. I guess it's airing right after the 15th movie does.

    It looks like it tells that backstory the manga already revealed, where Mewtwo lives in the wild with natural-born Pokemon in a forest and unlocks his new forme.
    The Butterfree episode........that was.....Wow. That was even worse than I predicted. The flashbacks to Ash's old one barely took up a minute of screentime!
    Meh, throw in a brooding, tough rival and a dangerous anime-original villain whose appearances are extremely rare and the fans will be calling it totally mature. -_-
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    If Masuda was vague about an evil team at the roundtable because there isn't much of one in the games,
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    Wait, when was this? O.O
    July 18 was never going to be a break. A break seldom ever follows immediately after the movie week.

    But yeah, the island-hopping will likely end in August, with the final episodes of BW in September happening in Kanto. And sadly, my hopes are pretty much gone too.
    I saw that, but it doesn't really tell anything new (TPCI controls things here, we knew that already), except that Wayland seems to have confused "dubbed" with "released", since he says TPCI does that and not them. In terms of recording, they would have had to dub them, since episodes are recorded a few weeks before they premiere in Japan, plus the only way Wayland and the rest of DuArt would have seen those episodes is if they were brought in for recording! And again, I'm pretty sure Eileen Stevens (Iris) once confirmed they had recorded those episodes before.

    Again, if the episodes have been edited, they wouldn't need to be sent back to DuArt for any line re-recordings; TPCI could very easily get the required VAs to do that themselves.
    X/Y games are released on October 12th. Through deduction, that means Best Wishes will end on the last week of September; followed by a break, and then the X/Y anime on October 10th.
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