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I have been binging every Pokemon generation and I can safely say XY is by far in a way my least favorite generation

I need to talk about the abomination that is XY Ash because that is the root of almost all of my problems. It seems that in a misguided attempt to make Ash “cool” they wiped away all of his charisma and childlike excitement, but forgot to replace it with anything. Thus leaving behind just this hollow shell of a character who could be replaced with a piece of cardboard and nothing would feel different.
XY Ash gives off the same vibe of someone who ... is at a friend’s party and would rather be anywhere else, but is pretending to have fun so they don’t hurt their friend’s feelings.

Every other Ash has this hyperactive nature where he gets pumped up over every single thing he sees and does which would infect the viewer and make them just as excited. XY Ash never gets even close to as fired up about anything like every other Ash and if the main character isn’t hyped up how the fuck am I supposed to be hyped up?

Another thing is people keep banging on about how XY Ash is “competent” but I kept track and he did not perform any better or worse than any other Ash. In fact I think Sun and Moon Ash is actually a bit better. One of the only key differences between XY Ash and all of the others is that he entered the league with a fully evolved team, but literally every previous season endlessly banged on about how evolution didn’t make your Pokemon objectively better and you would often see other high level trainers entering the league with underevolved Pokemon as well. This felt like a betrayal of that concept. And again like I said, it made no fucking difference.

The other difference was that XY Ash was “strategic” and this was a massive misstep in my opinion. Before XY, Ash always operated on instinct choosing the Pokemon his sixth sense knew was right even if logic would dictate otherwise, most times he would be proven right and on occasion his instinct would be wrong which would be fine because then he’d learn. In addition he’d constantly come up with brilliant outside of the box solutions that could only be done if he wasn’t already committed to a different strategy.
The problem with a strategic Ash is that he always thinks inside of the box and when he fucks up it’s not his instinct failing him, it’s just because he’s a retard who comes up with dumb plans.

Let me give you a specific example that really pissed me off. (WARNING SPOILER)

When Ash was facing off against Valerie she had her Spritzee use Trick Room which switched the speeds of Ash’s Fletchinder and her Spritzee. So Ash began repeatedly using Flame Charge which is a move that boosts speed which would just boost the Spritzee’s speed instead because of Trick Room which just let Spritzee keep wailing on Fletchinder. It turned out Ash’s idea was that he’d get all of the speed when the Trick Room ended. When that came to light everyone on the sidelines began verbally sucking Ash’s dick over it. Naturally as you’d expect with a mind numbingly dumb plan like that Fletchinder got the shit knocked out of it.
What made this particularly upsetting aside from the aforementioned verbal cocksucking was that Ash had countered Trick Room in a much better way before. In the Sinnoh League in Ash’s battle with Conway, Conway had his Dusknoir use Trick Room so to counter it Ash had his Gible use dig, pop up underneath Dusknoir and bite onto its hand. Gible had a strong jaw so Dusknoir couldn’t get Gible off meaning it suddenly didn’t matter how fast Dusknoir was because Gible would always be attacthed to its hand. Then Ash had Gible use Draco Meteor point blank while still holding on so Dusknoir couldn’t dodge no matter how fast it was moving and it got knocked out winning the match for Ash.

The difference between these two solutions was that the second one was totally outside of the box which made it so much more effective. You’d never see an idea like that come out of XY Ash.

Gonna move on from Ash now and switch to the other pulsating tumor on this generation, Serena. My god you could use her as a guide on how NOT to create a love interest.
First thing is that they forcefully disrupted the canon to make them childhood friends just to give her an excuse to like him. I don’t know why the Japanese are so addicted to this super lazy premise. I don’t understand why they couldn’t have her fall in love with Ash for his qualities, from travelling with him and realizing she enjoys his company. No, she just needs to have happened to met him at one point in time and suddenly decide she wants to give up her current life to see this random asshole she hasn’t seen in years and could be completely different from the person she once knew.
Pretty much every other point I could make could best be summarized by what I said about Ash’s personality (or lack thereof).

Lastly I want to talk about the dynamic backgrounds which i actually have mixed feelings about. On one hand I do feel like they enhanced the battles but on the other hand they only did so if you completely turned your brain off while watching. The second you decide to start looking for details and you’ll quickly notice the characters never move with the background and its so fucking jarring that it shatters my immersion every time and as someone who is a stickler for detail that is a major problem.
I remember someone saying it was so they didn’t have to rely on speedlines anymore but I retort by saying that Sun and Moon does that without any stupid gimmicks.

The one saving grace of this series is that the battles are really well done, but the aforementioned problems really ruin them, I kept finding myself trying to feel excited but never could because like I said, Ash was never excited.

Immature. Lewd. Low-brow. Predictable.
You could call Shimoneta all these things and you wouldn't be wrong. But there is an underlying complexity to this.

Let's start from the beginning:
Shimoneta takes place ten years in the future where legislation has been passed to illegalize all pornographic material and profanity to promote morality.You do have to kind of suspend your disbelief for a bit to let that premise to sink in. But once you do, you see what problems that would bring.

Early on the anime demonstrates the dangers of having pubescent teenagers who are uneducated to sex.

False information gets spread and children have no way of coping with their ... urges. Not only that but "erotic terrorist" organizations begin popping up in protest. Most are peaceful but there are many who aren't.

We follow S.O.X. a newly formed organization made up of a daughter of an arrested politician who enjoys dirty jokes, the son of an "erotic terrorist" who was arrest about a decade before the events of the show and an prodigal artist student who feels like she has been limited by her inability to draw the human body. Their usual operations consist of distributing pornographic material, yelling swear words and drawing depictions of genitalia.

Throughout the latter half of the show they make a heavy emphasis on the difference between peaceful protests and violent uprisings. Which seems to be the true core of the story.

I highly recommend this show.

People are very harsh on this but usually it’s based on first impressions. I think if people gave this a solid chance they’d realize it has a lot to offer.

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first. Yes, the animation quality took a hit. The animation is kind of underwhelming and choppy at many points. It’s probably the hardest part of this new generation to get over. But there is another angle to it, being that this is the first time the show hasn’t looked like a generic shonen and it feels like it has an actual identity of its own ... now.

Ash’s personality has been reworked in this generation like it has in every other generation. But honestly this is one of my favorite Ash personalities. This is the first time he’s behaved like an actual ten year old since the Indigo League but unlike then he has retained his competence from the Kalos League. This creates a real great balance to his character where back in Kanto Ash was massively incompetent and only won through flukes which made the series borderline unwatchable at times. But here he can capture the childlike naivety and wonder while not being a constant fuck up. If you want to see what I mean, check out Episode 10 for his competence and Episode 22 for his childlike behavior. You shouldn’t worry about spoiling anything for yourself, if you are even remotely familiar with the franchise then you should know how everything plays out.

Then there’s the Pokemon School element to the show. Now when I learned about this I was convinced I would HATE this. But actually it has given some variety to the previously tired formula. See instead of tracing the footsteps of the generation’s respective game Ash instead attends a “Pokemon School” that he goes to daily to receive lectures from Professor Kukui or Professor Oak’s cousin. If you played Sun and Moon you’d already know Alola is a small place so the usual “Go on a journey” thing wasn’t going to work anyway. Instead they use the school as Ash’s sort of central hub for his adventures and whenever he thinks he’s ready he will attempt a trial.

Most episodes have him hanging out with one of his friends who in the game are some of the trial captains but in the show are his classmates. I thought I’d hate them too by the way but each of them has real personality far beyond the one note personalities of all his previous companions making each of them endearing. This is made all the more amazing by the number of them. Usually when a show has a large cast all the characters feel malnourished since the writers ave to divide up attention but here they feel wholesome and amusing. This makes me think very poorly of whoever was writing the show before now because now I realize just how little effort they had been putting into Ash’s companions before this generation.

There’s a lot more humor involved in this generation which I’m not entirely opposed to. The previous generations had jokes in them but they were usually all just recurring gags that got beaten to death early in the series. There is no shortage of lame recurring gags here either but they are balanced out with REAL jokes this time which I appreciate.

Lastly I want to mention Team Rocket’s role in all of this. In previous generations they would harass Ash in every damn episode like fucking Swiper the Fox but this time around they usually only have a brief “meanwhile” sequence that shows us what they’re up to. I LOVE this. Since now when they actually do come to mess with Ash it actually feels special. I can not praise this choice enough. I love Jessie and James but they were downright mundane until now. Also they caught some really devastating Pokemon this time around. Jessie’s Mimikyu is a psychopath and is borderline unstoppable. It kicks Pikachu’s ass regularly, James’ Mareanie is nothing to sneeze at either.

Overall I think this is extremely underrated and if you were turned off by the animation I strongly urge you to give it another chance and see what it has to offer.