my feelings are mixed. On one hand, yeah, maaaaybe this episode could have happened at literally any other time EXCEPT during the ultimate tournament.
But on the other hand, I thought Cerise’s story with Clefairy was touching, though a bit too saccharine. I’m quite tired of the “Pokémon are amaZing” kid montages that are 99% Kanto mons and twinkly eyes. It’s definitely interesting that Cerise is like, the 3rd Pokémon anime character to have a deep connection with the Cleffa line and the second this season. I loved that the Clefairy Evolution ritual was a straight up word-for-word recital of that Pikachu chant those village Pikachu made back in the OG series. Considering how Clefairy was supposed to be the mascot, I feel like this was a nice callback.
Speaking of mascot though….what….what the actual hfil are these guys doing with Chloe and Eevee? This felt like a Cerise episode until they realized they needed a kid so they threw in Chloe’s little storyline and reaaaaally failed at trying to connect them. You could tell they weren’t firing on all of the cylinders by how they wrote out the wife, brother and Yamper from joining Chloe and Cerise on the road trip at first. I had a good laugh at that animation cheat.
This episode gave us the second worst conclusion to the Eevee arc, at least imo; the “we’ll decide together one step at a time” choice. While I like it way more than the “I like you just the way you are” route, it feels so pointless to have spent all this time meeting the Eeveelutions just for both Chloe and Eevee to be as clueless about what to do as when they started. And it doesn’t help that basically every episode about the Eevee Tour ended with that same damn conclusion.
But what I feel made this episode even worse was that they threw in this stupid little question “why do Pokémon evolve?” The jokester is me says that if you could skip puberty and instantly become an adult after punching some stuff and a few seconds of glowing, wouldn’t you want to evolve? Eevee especially should want to evolve; they can evolve into creatures that can breathe underwater, breathe fire, grow feelers, use psychic powers and all kinds of cool critters.
The anime has NO place to be asking this question though because of their infamous treatment of Pokémon when they DO evolve. Evolving in the games means accessing new types, new moves and new stats so you SHOULD want to evolve your mons. Evolving in the anime though means your screentime gets demolished, getting reduced to a battle bot and whatever charming personality you had gets evaporated. The second you’re no longer an oval-headed shoulder pet that can sell plushies in as little animation as possible, you’re dead to the anime. I just find it so freaking fresh that they decided to ask why Pokémon evolve when Drizzile was shoved into a damn cave the second they were no longer a crybaby potato.
But hey, I like that Chloe’s weird hair tattoo kinda looks like a crossroads like they showed at the end of this episode. So that’s neat, I guess.