When credits is truly deserved, credits will be given without begging. When something is underappreciated, there must be some reason that prevents ones to give out credits.
Azerolf just mentioned an important fandom phenomenon: Many people misinterprets Pokemon's inner messages behind its story.
But, I can't help but have to counterquestion: Do those people truly misinterpreted the inner message? Wasn't Pokemon Anime rather using the wrong narrative tropes to portray those messages? Or, maybe in fact, Pokemon Anime doesn't even have any inner message to tell? Hence audience judge it subjectively based on the status quo it continued throughout all these years?
I would like to bring up something YouTube movie critic Movie Bob mentioned in one of his recent videos:
"The Fearless Girl", a wax bronze statue by artist Kristen Visbal was installed on New York's Bowling Green, Wall Street, one day prior to International Women's Day 2017. It depicts a young girl standing defiantly against an unseen force with implied permanently windblown hair and clothing. It was initially accompanied by a plaque since removed and replaced, reading "Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference."
Immediately of note is that while The Fearless Girl installation itself doesn't include a specific depiction of what exactly she is standing unafraid of, the statue's placement of at least one unmistakable contextual connotation: Fearless Girl is placed directly opposite and facing another unrelated bronze statue, "The Charging Bull", which has occupied its own space on Bowling Green since 1989 and is widely viewed as a symbol of aggressive market capitalism, given its Wall Street location, the historical connotations of the term, "bull market", and its origin tied to the stock market crash of the late 1980s. In this context, the Fearless Girl's installation was immediately interpreted by much of the popular culture to not simply be a generic feminist platitude, but a very specific statement of resistance towards the hyper-masculine, retrograde, patriarchal American conservatism embodied by the elevation of explicitly anti-feminist candidate Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
Long story short, people misinterpreted The Fearless Girl as a symbol of feminism when it's really a corporate art meant to promote a Wall Street brand, while they ironically misinterpreted The Charging Bull as a corporate art, when the intention behind its installation was more genuine and sincere (a symbol of the strength of the American people). They got it backwards and misinterpreted the intentions behind these two works of art.
In other words, people misinterpret any work art all the time. The intention doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, because as much as it seems like a meaningless phrase, "art is subjective" rings true, and people can and should be allowed to interpret a work of art any way they like - including Pokemon.
On the more practical side of things, does that mean we will be blind to the fact that Ash might very well never win a League? But it's really not a simple fact of whether we dismiss his losses, however, because the real heartfelt message here is that we do see his losses, but the more optimistic of us choose to see the brighter side of his victories, and how much he has improved as a trainer, rather than let ourselves be fixated on what a bunch of toy-sellers are trying to feed us.
A funny coincidence I should bring up: that quote by Movie Bob was from his video defending Transformers: The (animated) Movie. It was obviously of poor production and meant to market toys, but generations of kids had grew up with it interpreting it as something more heartfelt. I feel the same is true here for Pokemon.
To be clear, I genuinely desire for "good writing" to be present, to have every single animation be as philosophical and meaningful as Pixar's classics, but at the end of the day, I think there's really no harm in staying positive about a work of art regardless of its actual context, and such naive positive perspectives of the show should even be something we celebrate about and discuss in length. While Pokemon might very well have no satisfying conclusion for any of us, Ash included, the subjectiveness of it all makes such a possibility absurd and even cynical. Considering that Naruto and One Piece have reached their ends (Naruto running for a shorter lifespan than Pokemon), I wouldn't be so quick to think that the Pokemon producers are all the kind of corporate greedy-bags we would like to think.
By the way, where DP and XY are concerned, I wouldn't necessarily think that the good is merely 1%. I would at least give it 15%.
