Pokemon Official Couples

[Redeemer]

Okay guys, I've been poking around dA a lot (probably a bad idea in case I catch stupidity herpes or something) and there is a LOT of controversy about Ash and Misty being canon. What are your thoughts on this?

 

There are quite a few hints towards feelings of attraction or at least affection, especially from Misty. For example at the end of the second movie, Misty states that Ash will never be alone "because he has me". Not to mention the intense jealousy she displays when Melody is hitting on Ash.

Misty also gets jealous when a girl with pigtails in the third season, Macy, asks Ash out to lunch, in fact she even gets aggressive.

 

Ash himself also gets jealous when Misty fangirls over a movie star, Fiorello, who is visiting the town and offering photos with the locals. He then acts surprised when Misty states that she's only participating in order to win a doll set.

Ash also gets pissy when Misty crushes over an older gym leader called Danny. Later in that episode, he's disappointed when Misty runs to Danny instead of him, when they meet up at the top of a mountain. He specifically says "What about me?", which can simply be butthurt or embarrassment, but his previous tantrum regarding Danny suggests otherwise.

 

Throughout the series, Misty has many chances and even offers to leave the party, and do something more productive with her career, but time and time again she chooses to stay with Ash. There is one episode in particular where a gym leader called Rudy, falls for Misty after she rescues his sister. He offers her a place with him, for good, which is a pretty huge thing. Misty turns him down, eventually. I'm personally glad she did, because in the manga, this guy starts crossdressing in order to give his little sister an older sister. Oh Japan.

In another episode, one of the side stories actually, a guy called Georgio asks Misty out on a date. She declines, then gets very flustered when asked if her decision was due to loving someone else. To make matters worse, her Psyduck pops out of his Pokeball and makes the dick-move of mocking and laughing at her embarrassment, which further enrages Misty.

 

Finally, in the movie with Jirachi, Ash talks about his memories of Misty. He doesn't name her, but he does say "... and I miss her every day, but I know we'll be friends forever." He looks sad as he says this, and that actually had an effect on me, and I totally missed the first season at that moment. XD

Ash also has a fight with Dawn when she asks to use his fishing lure, which was a gift from Misty. He won't even let her touch it.

It's also worth mentioning that Ash cried when Misty left the party, but not when Brock left. While cycling away, Misty thinks to herself "now I know how you feel about me", which indicates that she has an idea that there is a connection there.

 

I do think that because they're both so young, romance would be awkward for the both of them at first. It would probably look something like this:

 

 

 

So that's my evidence! I dunno why I brought it up, I just felt like writing about something not related to uni. I've been working in placement every day for the past 2 weeks, and writing essays at night. Yesterday was my last day of this, so yeah. XD

[Zzz]

Zzz

[Redeemer]

Ash and Misty is like....

I dunno, back in the day, I always thought we were gonna see them together at one point. Our western TV soundtracks didn't even hint at anything, they CLEARLY demonstrated Misty feelings towards Ash and it seemed like it was only a matter of time until we see some canon shipping shiz in the anime. Pokémon 2000 felt like that was when love would blossom but it was kept all sublte and wasn't really going anywhere, sadly. All we are left with is basically what you told us about, which is fine enough, at the end of the day.

I completely agree with your post 100 % and if the anime is ever gonna end I'd love to see Ash return to Misty ;_;

 

Good read, definitely

 

 

Oh my god, I totally forgot about the OST CDs. They actually have songs on them about Misty's feelings for Ash! Here, for reading pleasure:

 

Out here in the quiet of the night

Beneath the stars, and moon

We both know we've got somethin' on our minds

We won't admit, but it's true

You look at me, I look away

I wanna tell you what I'm feeling

But I don't know how to start

I wanna tell you, but now

I'm afraid that you might break my heart

Oh, why should anything so easy ever

Be so hard to do

 

I wanna tell you what I'm feeling

And to say that, I love you

I practice all the things that I would say

Line by line, every word

I tell myself today would be the day

But every time, I lose my nerve

I look at you, you look away

I wanna tell you what I'm feeling

But I don't know how to start

I wanna tell you, but now

I'm afraid that you might break my heart

Oh, why should anything so easy ever

Be so hard to do

I wanna tell you what I'm feeling

And to say that, I love you

 

Yada yada yada, it goes on like this for a while. XD

[Vy'drach]

Didn't think the connection between Ash and Misty was really disputable. Like from your examples, it really couldn't of gotten more obvious without directly stating it.

 

On the subject of the romances, in one of the mangas, I believe Pokemon Adventures, at the end of the third book you can see Jessie and James married, with a quite pregnant Jessie.

 

Here's the image:

 

 

Apparently it caused a big stir in the Pokemon community, from what I heard.

[Faisul]

[Xortberg]

NO

 

I WANTED TO USE THAT GIF FOREVER NOW

 

I JUST NEVER HAD A CHANCE

 

DAMMIT FAISUL

 

And yeah, I'm not a big fan of the Pokemon anime, but even I can recognize that MistyxAsh was a thing. Anyone who says they were just friends is totes blind.

[Redeemer]

See that's the thing, on dA there are thousands of people who deny the connection. But most of them, I guess, are the fans of other shippings, or Misty haters.

 

Here's a damn good question: What makes these people want to ship other characters so bad? I could make another topic but I don't see the point, when it's already in question here. Why do people, fans rather, ship characters that aren't meant to be shipped? For example, Ash and Gary, or even in other fandoms like um, Naruto. People ship characters there faster than the plague.

[Drasiana]

Oh boy there's a whole world of reasons why people ship but I don't know if anyone is interested in reading a gigantic essay about it.

 

Never cared about Pokemon shipping but for what it's worth I'm kinda glad they never went in-depth on the Ash/Misty thing. It made their relationship more likeable. Shipping isn't really serious business either way, I don't think.

[Zzz]

On 1/17/2013 at 1:53 AM, Drasiana said:

Oh boy there's a whole world of reasons why people ship but I don't know if anyone is interested in reading a gigantic essay about it.

Zzz

[Drasiana]

When I say "shipping isn't serious business" I mean more that it shouldn't be, I'm aware that some people do take it seriously, and those people are ridiculous.

 

I don't know a whole lot about Pokemon shipping and frankly don't really care to, so I'll be approaching it more from a general perspective on shipping as a whole. I don't really want to derail from Redeemer's Pokemon thing too much, so if it's too deraily maybe we could split the topic? Anyway, here goes.

 

Personally, I never took much interest to shipping fictional characters. I've had maybe two pairings that I thoroughly enjoyed in the history of forever. Obsessing over the love lives of fictional characters is not a high priority on my to-do list. However, I have noticed a trend with myself and others on the rare occasion that I do become fascinated with a character relationship, and it leads into this, which is more of an answer to Red's last question than anything:

 

 

Why do people, fans rather, ship characters that aren't meant to be shipped?

 

 

Simply, it's because their relationships are more interesting than the canon love interest to begin with.

 

Now of course this isn't 100% true on every instance and a lot of ships are really just done on the basis of "two hot guys/girls, must bone". But there is more of a subconscious response to media cliche in there, I think, and don't let any of the vaguely misogynistic pseudoscience of "slash fangirls just want to be gangbanged/whatever" fool you, because it really is much simpler.

 

Female characters typically always fall into the roles of girlfriend, sister/mom or evil temptress. Their relationship with the typically male protagonist will then be extraordinarily predictable from then on out. Maybe she's stubborn, maybe she's with the "jock" character at the time, who knows, but we do know it'll probably end in googly-eyes and sunset kisses. Basically, female characters are almost entirely based on how they'll wind up with the hero. People can play with it but the formula is more of the same.

 

So when people ship non-canon characters together, it's not because they're crazy people who just want to see the world burn (mostly). It's probably because they find the existing relationship dynamics between those characters more interesting than the forcefed romantic interests.

 

Male characters can be many things in relation to each other: Best friend, rival, mentor. They can be almost any occupation: cop, doctor, blacksmith, general, mob boss. They are almost always the hero, so the other characters typically revolve around his existence, which means many more possibilities to explore in the way of character relationships. Being that they are not relegated to "romantic interest" or "the girl one", the characters are built up more and explored, given a full psychology all to themselves, and become less like tropes and more like people.

 

When you add to that that most "shippers" are generally teenagers, who are exploring their own sexuality, then generally they contextualize many relationships as being of a romantic persuasion. But not to belittle them, there is often a question of "what if" there and an interest in exploring the dynamic between two characters in their own fanwork.

 

An explanation for why there is far less F/F slashfic is because there are often less female characters (and even fewer distinct ones) in the genres that most shippers prefer (fantasy, science fiction). This is because, say it with me now kids: patriarchal writing!

 

To use an example I think we could all relate to, think of Star Fox. Fox/Krystal is the canon pairing, but it's also incredibly boring and cardboard. Krystal shows up, makes googly eyes, love forever: that's the gist of their relationship and Krystal's personality doesn't extend past her usefulness to Fox. She's boring, their relationship is boring. But there are other relationships in the series that are not so boring at all. What's the deal with Fox and Wolf? Why do they try to shoot one another down yet save each other's ass the next moment? They represent two sides of a similar coin. Fox and Bill, bffs for life! Falco and Fox, Falco's dedication to his friends and team hidden beneath a layer of snark, but always coming through for them in the end. Whether or not you want to explore it romantically, the relationships are altogether far more interesting. And what other option is there? Katt is the only other somewhat prominent female character but Fox never really speaks directly to her so it's difficult to gauge their relationship.

 

For the record, people cite "it's OOC" as a "reason" for them disliking "M/M" pairings. Guys, "gay" isn't a personality trait. Theoretically the character should not change personalities based on their sexuality. Often, fic authors DO write the characters OOC but it's not because they're writing them as gay, it's because they're shoehorning them into gendered stereotypes because they have preconceived notions that there needs to be a "man" and a "woman" in a relationship, even in relationships where one or the other is not present. They write like this because it's subconscious: it's in defiance of what originally attracted them to the pairing, but their mind has been trained to think that way so that's how they write. The seme/uke yaoi dynamic is inaccurate, reeks of homophobia and misogyny and often promotes unhealthy relationship habits. Writing that is not the same as thinking "hey what if Fox and Falco smooch".

 

So that's the long of it, I guess. People ship different characters because they find them interesting together, that's really all there is to it, and sometimes, the canon or "right" pairing is just really fucking boring to people. Some people like shipping, some people don't. I think a good rule of thumb to consider is "don't get mad because people ship/don't ship/ship something other than you" because no matter how "right" you are in the situation, you are still arguing about the love lives of fictional talking space animals/13 year olds/wizards/whatever. Have fun or ignore it because none of it is worth being upset over.

[Faisul]

[Redeemer]

Good read Dras, thanks for taking the time to write that. I truly have no idea about shippers, or whatever, I just tend to get shit from them on dA and often I'm left sitting in front of my laptop, feeling icky about defending something I've drawn. Many people are so passionate about shippings, it's like walking on eggshells trying to ask them why they're so revved up about it.

 

There's a guy on dA, I can't remember his name right now, but he runs a bunch of groups about shippings, and he's like... so obsessed, I dread seeing him write anywhere. Sadly he's a big fan of R3d's work so he's goddamn everywhere. >_>

[Drasiana]

Honestly that's like deviantArt with everything, the community there can be pretty scary. I had a guy who I'm pretty sure was some kind of Neo-Nazi gettin' real mad about the fact that my Skyrim dude wasn't also a genocidal maniac.