T
The Incarnation Pokemon
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The dub, at least, said only that Lance was "a member of the Elite Four" (which makes even less sense...especially in terms of him being in Hoenn as far as jurisdictional power goes...). Unless the Japanese anime implied rather strongly that he was also Hoenn Champion (which would again make no sense, given that they at least acknowledged Steven's existence), it's not at all safe to assume that he "could very well be" the Champion of Hoenn.CyberCubed said:
Who was going to stop them? Hmm…If not Lance or Steven, then…uh…I dunno…maybe Wallace? Which would’ve been a million times better (I, for one, have seen enough of Gyarados and Dragonite in the anime, as well as Mr. Bubblegum Hair himself) or at the very least made a heck of a lot more sense. But then again, like you mentioned previously, Lance fits the Almighty Superhero character archetype perfectly, and everyone knows how the anime loves its stock characters.
Well he *definitely* always wins against the "bad guys", which is our case in point. And aside from League Tournaments, he defeats every trainer he goes against (sometimes he needs maybe 1 rematch, but that's it).Yes, which is why Ash has lost every league he's entered.
Ah, what you said reminds me of one more gripe I have about this ep: the way the anime made TM and TA behave exactly like TR (and therefore conveniently making it seem appropriate for Lance to be interfering in a plotline he really shouldn’t be involved in, since his Johto plotline concerned mistreatment of Pokémon using technology—something TR is famous for). In the games, it does appear that TR obtains and controls Pokémon illegally using lots of high-tech machinery, but not TM and TA. The latter two do try to control Kyogre and Groudon, but not by capturing with technology, only by using Orbs, which could technically be considered a much more natural means of control. But obviously, the anime folks like their stereotypes and clichés and assume their audience does too (which apparently it does…at least some parts of it…), and so any and all bad guys must capture Pokémon illegally using high-tech gadgets. Never once do they consider the possibility of a criminal organization with a different modus operandi, even though in the games the most technology either TM or TA used was the submarine, and that was merely to get to the undersea cavern, not to actually capture the Pokémon. Yes, yes, they did have the Orbs controlling the Legendaries by the end of the episode, but they just *had* to stick in that whole “lookit how we caught ‘em with our fancy machinery!” bit prior to that.
And how the heck could there still be a possibility that Wallace will ever show up in the anime…unless perhaps he does what Lance did here, i.e. appear completely out of place? Like in the Battle Frontier, Kanto, or—horrors—Diamond/Pearl? Same goes for Steven. I *cannot* believe the anime people decided to ditch those two in favor of Lance. I’m sure that if people had been asked at the beginning of the Hoenn arc whether he would show up or not, most people would’ve answered a very certain “No”. Okay, so he’s popular. Well if it’s a popularity contest that determines a character’s recyclability in the series, then Steven definitely would’ve popped up again by now, because Pokémon Search clearly indicates that he’s FAR more popular than Lance in the fandom right now (133 fansite results for “Daigo” vs. 26 fansite results for “Wataru”)—in fact, even Wallace is more popular than Lance right now (55 for “Mikuri”)—and I’m sure that this was already the case by the time the anime had gotten this far, because most of the Hoenn Champions’ popularity came from the games (including Ruby/Sapphire), which had been out for quite a while by the time the anime came to this episode.
So there really isn’t any good reason why Lance was the best character choice for this two-parter, unless you consider a “good reason” to be the anime storywriters’ penchant for predictability and character clichés.
