@Pixcalibur: Nothing wrong with it if the shipping itself "might" have something to do with ratings ; )
Ratings have nothing to do with episode quality. Unless you think a horse race filler in the first season is the best episode ever made isnce it had a rating of 18.
And Serena having a more soap opera like goal would be a nice change from the constant pokemon oriented goals other people have.
Nobody here said it was the best episode, and man, you are talking about the anime former glory..., neverthless, a 6.2 is high for todays pokemon anime standards .
But yeah, ratings usually gives you an idea of how much anticipation the episode had, not the actual quality of it. It doesn't matter if it was a crappy filler episode or not, ratings/viewer counts are heavily influenced by prior episodes and previews making people more interested in watching the show when the next episode air.So, the high rating is thanks to either the better animation and battles of the few first episodes that are bringing back old adepts/ fans or new ones ( wich I honestly doubt, because, let's face it , there aren't many people who care for the anime anymore...) , or it is thanks to the SatoSere thing going on that has got people's attention.
Now the point should be, do the producers/writers care about ratings at all? The most logic thing to think is that they do( or they should...), but I don't know to what extent... certainly not much because of the promotional nature of this anime that continues to change characters every new gen for the sake of it. As I said before, a shipping popularity hasn't been proven reason enough for them to cater to fans and decide to make it canon based just on that. If things were different, I imagine they'd have made Pokeshipping or Pearlshipping canon a long time ago...
Difference is, they are the ones pushing a shipping for the first time in years, not the fans. If the new director indeed care for the fans, I imagine they were testing the waters with these first few episodes, to see the reaction of the fandom, and then make some modifications to their original plan along the road according to it. Not saying SatoSere will become canon now thanks to the popularity its getting, but I really think they'll try at least to cater to those fans in some way or another (if only a little bit, like maybe adding more hints, or more shippy episodes to please the fans) and maybe it will make them think twice before deciding to drop the whole thing now.
That kind of make me doubt they will make Serena's crush just fade away, like Morning Sun said, it wouldn't make much sense to do that after they took the liberty to make that kind of backstory for them, only for it to go nowhere. People forget this is Pokemon we're talking about,things are usually played pretty straight forward, if anything, the only way the crush can go is up imo. Who knows, maybe past the point of being a simple crush and develop into real love by the end of the series.
If they don't care,well... no matter the consequences , they should be able to easily ignore what fans want and do whatever they want. Whether making this ship canon or not is already decided, or if they listen to fans or not, so be it. I'll just enjoy the ride.
But wow,who would have predicted that two episodes without hints would result in so much negativeness in this thread? I guess XY07 really raised the bar for people expectations... lol