See, I like Iris and I really like dragonite...what's really disconcerting is that she got it right off the bat without having to work to evolve it...it seems a little "cheap"....it's like giving Ash a garchomp straight up rather than a gible...I guess what made people angry is that of all people, she was the only one to get this kind of special treatment...and when dragonite, destroyed mamoswine, the Dawn fans just couldn't take it anymore...
I agree with you on the "cheap" thing. In the past the anime gave this view that pokemon liwillke Dragonite really were borderline legendary, that seeing this kind of pokemon was an absolute privilege, and owning one took a trainer of high skill and quality, who would still have to spend a long time working hard with it to bring out its full potential. Iris got hers with minimal effort on her part, complete with a full set of four powerful moves, and all she had to do was spend a couple of episodes getting to know it.
Before the Iris fans have a go at me for this, I will point out that I felt this way about Dawn when she got her Togekiss too.
It's just one of those things that I really don't like. Most of each characters' development as a trainer comes first from teaching their pokemon new moves, and secondly from having their pokemon evolve under their care. They don't necessarily have to do both of these, but doing one or the other is important. Look at Buizel - it didn't evolve, but you can say that it learned Water Pulse and Ice Punch while under Ash's ownership. On the other hand you can look at Unfezant - personally I don't think it has much going for it, but you can still say that it fully evolved under Ash's care. You cannot say this about either Dragonite or Togekiss.
Its not as if I don't like then having powerful Pokémon - that's just fine, so long as they work as hard as Ash had to work to get his powerhouses, like Charizard, Sceptile, Infernape and Gliscor, which he had to evolve from their basic forms, or Snorlax and Heracross, which he had to train up so that they had decent moves.
I would feel exactly the same way if Ash ended up with a powerhouse pokemon in this way. If Ash happened to get a Lucario from Korrina, that's fine, but if it had Close Combat, Aura Sphere, Bullet Punch and Poison Jab and then never learned anything else, then I'd think it just as cheap as giving Iris that Dragonite
