Blood Red
【推しの子】
I'll start with the bolded point. The series has had many protagonists who bonded with and earned the respect of Legendaries (and that too, in my opinion, to a much greater extent) but Goh is the only one to have caught one. Why now, and why not then? And if you say that it's because the anime has changed, then I guess I'll wait and see if the writers decide to extend this 'change' to other characters and give Dawn a Cresselia in the next episode.My entire comment was that he earned the right to challenge trial missions by completing the A. Ninetales mission, making him eligible to compete in the trial missions. Oak recommended him coz he saw he caught Suicune. Whether he deserves Suicune or not is another matter (considering he bonded with it and earned its respect), it's everything in the Gary episode and project mew episode WASNT handed to him.
Either way, I think it's cheap for Goh to catch a Pokémon that is so way above his current experience level just because he 'earned its respect'. Even in the games, these things are late-game rewards; it shouldn't happen in the fifty-third episode, especially when even Ash (the protagonist of the series for nearly a quarter of a century) hasn't caught one yet.
And when you say stuff like 'Goh earned everything in the Project Mew episode', you miss the fact that him catching Suicune was a part of why he was recommended in the first place, which means the reason he got a foot in the door was because of a handout. It feels incredibly cheap, and it doesn't really fit the rest of the anime. Heck, it's not like mocking characters for surviving on handouts is something new; the charity Ash got in Kanto more than two decades ago still affects his reputation to this day, even though he's spent a long time making up for it by progressing as a trainer and losing out on well-deserved victories because of bad writing choices. I saw that you also mentioned Scott and the Battle Frontier, conveniently leaving out the fact that Ash earned that invitation by having a great match against an Elite Four member using experience and techniques which took him years to refine and develop. It feels earned because we've seen Ash work for it.
I think if Goh had moments like other characters, where he was shown to actually work hard for his goal and had some incredibly memorable failures to balance out his moments of triumph, people would root for him a lot more. As it stands though, his reputation as a character who can only progress if the writers just give him stuff isn't going to change any time soon, if ever.
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