You know, my headcanon is that Rowlett had Rest and no one knew. After the clash, Rowlett used Rest and recovered to full health. Then, later it just replaced Rest with Substitute.
And I'm calling that Substitute. There's no way that was Feather Dance lol
As much as I hated the episode, Hau wasn't robbed and Ash might be written as a crappy trainer for picking Rowlett against Decidueye in the first place, but the "fake out" isn't a reason to warrant him getting kicked off the top 8.
Ash picked Rowlett because Rowlett wanted to fight. Even in the episode people mentioned it wasn't the best choice, right down to mentioning he should have used Torracat instead.
Thing is part of being a trainer in the show is try to bring out his pokémon potential and respect its desires. Rowlett wanted to battle and Ash respected that. Had Rowlett not randomly picked itself, I could see Ash using one of the others.
I think Ash's choice shows him just as he's always been shown: a kind trainer who respects his pokémon and puts their needs beyond his own.
The match as a whole is mediocre, like a lot of things in SM. Ash's handling in this particular battle is just fine and consistent with his character.
By the way, I love that even Ash - the paragon of virtue and boyscout-ism - was tired and sick of Rowlett's garbage. One of the few times the meme faces were actually useful.
Well Ash/Rowlett did
slightly cheat during the battle (I'll get to the details below). One could argue that they made several mistakes
prior to and
leading up to the battle:
- Not training the spontaneous sleeping out of Rowlett was bad. It's a horrible trait for a pokemon to randomly fall asleep during a serious league battle in the first place and typically something exclusive to disobedient pokemon in the games if you don't have enough badges. This could have easily cost Ash the league legitimately if Decidueye had taken the opportunity to land a free hit (more on this below).
- Actually selecting Rowlett despite being both Decidueye's first form, the pokemon Hau specifically trained to beat and with the random sleep thing going. Ash shouldn't have used Rowlett at all, but especially in a 1v1 format where you only get one shot or you're out...
Fair with point 1 but with 2, well, Rowlett did have a rivalry with Decidueye. Terribly written but it existed. The point made is that Rowlett wanted to fight again, win and finally settle their score. On Hau's introduction, they battled twice with one being Hau's and other being Ash's. Rowlett wanted the final victory so I understand Ash's decision.
Did he risk everything on it? Yes, he did but at least he did what he could. I mean, after Rowlett made it clear his desire to be the one in the match, Ash went to train it.
Yeah, he really should have worked the whole sleeping out thing mentioned by point 1 but... what if he did try? We got several episodes where Ash was training with his pokémon and there were several instances where he had do wake Rowlett up. Maybe Ash tried to do it but it just didn't work out? Recalling the few times outside this battle where he had to wake Rowlett up, one could see he looked somewhat frustrated. Who's to say he didn't try and we just didn't see it because the staff thought pancake racing, Dugtrio singing and Eevee fake outs were more interesting?
That said, Ash did kind of cheat unwittingly through the revised decision. If everyone was initially aware that Rowlett was asleep then Decidueye could have taken advantage of that and landed a free hit on Rowlett. Clearly, Ash was standing too far from Rowlett and even though he was shouting at it to stand up Rowlett didn't hear him. It was only after Ash went over to check on Rowlett, flipped it over and yelled at it to wake up that he actually got through. So technically, going over to your pokemon, physically interacting with it during battle and helping it out of a status condition is cheating. Obviously it wasn't intentional but Ash should have returned back to his position without waking Rowlett up and they should have resumed the battle with it still asleep. That would have been the honorable thing to do. However, strictly speaking, the battle was interrupted at the point when Ash woke Rowlett up so it's debatable whether that was an actual rule violation.
It's probably the later. The match was put on hold which gave a window of opportunity for Ash to do something. It's not really cheating as much as Ash using lemons to make lemonade. Nanu's screw up gave Ash an opportunity and he made best use of it.
