Cleanup on Isle 2

[Rainbowdashtheawesome]

Anybody else ever get perplexed by the fact that, in the pokemon anime, nobody ever cares how much collateral damage is done during gym battles, frontier battles, and even contests?
They have a gym battle, the gym is torn to pieces, and yet the gym leader has absolutely no problem giving the challenger a badge. They do it all the time (note that I haven't seen any pre-Sinnoh gym battles or frontier battles in a long time), sometimes in small amounts and sometimes in extreme proportions.
*When Ash fought Candice and she took down Gliscor it left a gaping crater in the wall. They didn't take any notice of it at the time, but certainly they had to hire someone to patch up the wall later. Then notice how many ice boulders were shattered; if Candice wants to maintain a battlefield that gives her pokemon a home field advantage, she must have someone come in once in a while to replace the ice. That's also the problem at Roark's gym; so many boulders are wrecked in each battle, surely he needs to replace them once in a while.
* When Ash battled Byron, Chimchar got the upper hand on Steelix by digging a network of tunnels, thus weakening the floor and causing a cave in under Steelix. Byron must have done something to fix the floor afterward, right?
* The biggest one: when Ash battled Maylene, the crossfire between Lucario and Buizel blasted the roof off the gym. Even though they didn't show it, there were probably a large number of roofers working on the gym for the next few days.

I just find it odd that none of these issues are ever addressed at all, what do you think?

 

[BCVM22]

The logical conclusion is that given the nature of Pokémon battles and the abilities that Pokémon are able to employ at will - pressurized water jets, concentrated flame, bolts of electricity, the list goes on - gyms, particularly those with intricate battlefields, employ trained maintenance crews and keep large quantities of the necessary repair supplies on hand.

In a hockey arena, what happens if a pane of the glass is broken or knocked from its fixture? The venue's operations staff brings out a new one, replaces it and play continues within a few minutes.

In a basketball arena, what happens if a backboard is shattered and/or the entire hoop is brought down by some 300-pound lunk trying to dunk? The operations staff replaces the backboard and/or the entire hoop and play continues.

The punchline to all of this is that the writers and animators have less than 30 minutes to tell a story in each episode and as such they don't regularly waste time showing the repairs or having the Gym Leader explain "oh, don't worry about those giant holes in the wall your Pikachu left, the repair crews will have those fixed in no time", nor should they because they aren't really necessary.

As an aside, when Ash passed through Viridian City on his way home from Hoenn, he did in fact mention something to the effect of "they've fixed the gym up since I was last here", referencing the fact that he and his Pokémon did a solid job of wrecking up the place when Ash battled for the Earth Badge.

 

[Swampert_trainer]

As an aside, when Ash passed through Viridian City on his way home from Hoenn, he did in fact mention something to the effect of "they've fixed the gym up since I was last here", referencing the fact that he and his Pokémon did a solid job of wrecking up the place when Ash battled for the Earth Badge.

Yay for continuity. Your post pretty much covered what I was going to say.

 

[Mimori Kiryu]

What I love is that when the gym leader is giving Ash the badge, sometimes the damage is all gone somehow instantaneously.

 

[An00bis]

What I love is that when the gym leader is giving Ash the badge, sometimes the damage is all gone somehow instantaneously.

They fix it with magic.

Magic Pokemon.

 

[Magical Needle Smash]

I can't wait for the episode where the gang visits a school and learns all about the exciting career of Pokemon Maintenance.

 

[An00bis]

I thought they already did Gym Maintenance. Flannery's Gym?

 

[Ash-kid]

In this situation the gym leader is probably brings someone that will fix his gym fast.
But yes it's very strange. In the contests I really don't know what they doing if something is broken.

 

[CyberCubed]

I usually chuckle when Hyperbeams destroy the walls and nobody cares.

 

[Rainbowdashtheawesome]

Also, what about when people in contests give performances that involve creating some kind of structure using their pokemon's attacks? They leave with the structures still there, and when the next guy goes up, the structure has vanished.
Like that one contest in the BF arc when Harley's Ariados created a giant web around the stage. How did they get rid of that web between that performance and the one after it?
When Dawn was in the Chocovine contest, Buneary made a gigantic slide made of ice for the appeals round. After that did the guys in charge send in some Fire-type to melt the slide away, or what did they do with it?
The biggest I can think of is when Soledad did her performance round in the GF. Lapras created a giant, all-encompasing tidal wave that almost soaked everybody in the building, then it used Sheer Cold to completely freeze all the water. How did they clear away the ice after that? If they had some pokemon use an attack to melt it, they'd probably have had to get everybody who doesn't want to get soaked out of the building, because when the ice melted, the water was going to come right down on whatever poor sap was sitting under it at the time.

 

[mysteryperson]

For the battlefield, I wouldn't be too surprised if the gym leader has a rotating battlefield system like the ones at the Pokemon League stadiums, giving the gym leader time to hire someone to fix the battlefield.

As for the rest of the damage, I have no idea.