Like I said, she has a different character, as in she's not your typical "sweet and caring girl", say she's the game/manga Serena type. (But to be frank, I really like the game/manga Serena more than the girly girl Serena)
In any case, to answer my own question, No. The childhood back story and crushing are what got me into this ship (Hell, you wouldn't even see me in this thread in the first place).
Next question:
Tying this up to my earlier question, would you still be watching XY even without the "unique" amourshipping? Or was amourshipping the sole reason you were watching the show in the first place?
Pretty much what a lot of other people said.
Amourshipping did indeed get me into the XY series, but I would still be watching XY even if Amourshipping didn't happen in the anime. As we already know, Amourshipping is a romantic sub-plot that isn't the main drive for this anime. I also got into this anime because of the way Ash has matured and also the animation quality being more sharper and better compared to previous.
But yes, primarily because of Amourshipping and how popular it has become made me get engaged into this anime and how it's going to turn out.
Good question though.
About what got me into this ship, it's definitely the amount of weight it has received, not really even marketing/promotion but the fact that it's been written into the core fabric of the series. Would I have started watching XY without the ship? Yes, though I probably wouldn't have stayed as interested.
I had stopped watching the anime sometime into the AG saga because it had gotten boring/repetitive, plus I had sort of outgrown it. Every now and then, I would read people's gripes about DP and BW, and they sounded all too similar to the gripes I had regarding AG, so I never bothered resuming watching. A couple of months ago, I was feeling nostalgic, and I read somewhere that the anime
was still going after all these years but the animation quality had massively improved. I thought I'd start watching a few episodes again just to see what it was like today. I just happened to choose the beginning of the XY series as my starting point. Little did I know what I was about to watch.
Two episodes in, Ash jumping off the friggin Eiffel Tower of the Pokemon world was eyebrow-raising enough. But when Serena saw Ash on TV and said, "Hmm? That boy, no, it couldn't be!" I was like "Whoaaaa..." I watched a few more episodes with interest. I saw how she basically decided to set out on a journey to reunite with Ash, I saw her having flashbacks of him and blushing while thinking about him, and I saw her entering the Santalune Gym in XY005 and getting excited at seeing Ash ("There he is! It's Ash!"). I was like, "Is she crushing on Ash? Is this for real?" Then, of course, she tried to talk to him after his battle but seemed too shy to shout his name, so he passed right by her without noticing her, and she looked so heartbroken (plus she seemed so nervous/hesitant at first when trying to talk to Ash the rest of that episode). And I was just like "Awwww, that poor girl
." I just about freaked out at the end of XY005 when Serena told Ash (with cute romantic-sounding BG music playing): "Uhh...here we go...Ash, do you...remember me?" and they ended it with a cliffhanger. I couldn't believe that
this was actually Pokemon. And naturally the flashback to the summer camp scene in XY007 was too adorable, I was all "SQUEEEE!"
It really brought out the feels. The Pokemon anime had never featured any romance when I had watched it (aside from the playfulness and occasional cute moments between Ash and Misty, some of which were embellished by 4Kids), so all this came as a major shock to me. It seemed like a sign that the anime was about to change course, even if just a bit, from its previous repetitiveness and lackluster writing. Of course the anime's general structure is still largely the same.
Amour was far from being the only thing that grabbed my interest as I watched, and as
Spectro889 noted, Amour is but one thread of a much bigger tapestry. The quality of animation is better than when I used to watch. The battle mechanics/strategy in the anime also have gotten much more sophisticated. The writers seem to be giving the main characters and the twerps more camaraderie and depth than I remembered them having in AG — some DP and BW episodes I saw recently seem to suffer from the same problem of "flat" characters. Moreover, I saw some hints in the early XY episodes that Ash seemed serious about winning a league this time, and watching the final episode of BW confirmed that winning a league is now high on Ash's mind. To see Ash finally make progress toward his dream would bring some nice closure to a defining era of childhood, my Pokemon obsession era. Amour would just be icing on the cake for me.
I still have my gripes about the anime, though: the at-times infantile dialogue (it
is still geared toward young kids, after all), the painfully over-emphatic pronunciation that the English dub voice actors use, and Team Rocket doing the same crap over and over again. As a result, I'm not sure I would have gotten nearly as far with XY or watched it with the same level of interest without Amour. But no question, I still would have started watching, with or without Amour. I didn't know Serena's crush on Ash existed until I had seen it myself, and, indeed, the very
concept of shipping in Pokemon was virtually unknown to me until I decided to do some research on Serena's crush online. That's how I stumbled upon this forum, actually.