- Joined
- Sep 27, 2007
- Messages
- 4,047
- Reaction score
- 11,368
I definitely think executive meddling of some sort is the reason Ash always lost in leagues. You read so many stories when you delve into the background on television, film, comics, and so on.I believe the only reason of Alan's winning was executive meddling. Going through those last XYZ episodes made me realise it makes way more sense for him to eventually lose to Satoshi (especially since in all their battles (I think it was 2 or 3?) Alan won), but I guess because OLM decided to bring him to the Kalos league and being in the finals he had to win.
For me XY was building up to the first league win, more than SM if you will.
However I'm actually starting to reconsider my earlier comment that I don't think he was ever intended to win XY when I think about it.
I can't find it again, but we were told Alain was always meant to be his league opponent, but I don't think it said that Alain was always going to win, and the huge amount of build up to Greninja and sudden focus on Ash as a respected and skilled trainer only not to go anywhere with that does have a distinct feeling of an invisible hand grabbing the steering wheel at some late junction.
In addition Iwane Masaaki made an interesting comment after the league:
Translation is tricky but this reads like "The story is saying he'll win but the nature of the show means he never will". We don't know how much he knows about the writing process but along with Rica Matsumoto's "are we allowed to do that?" after being told he would win in Alola it is very suspicious. If the initial plan was a win in Kalos then it was stopped near the end a lot of things would match up well. That doesn't confirm anything, of course.Of course according to this fictional work I think "Probably he cannot win", it is only according to the flow of story "it seems like he can win", probably it makes one think "Even at the final episode he will also lose then?"
(I sort of wonder how many viewers decided to give up because of that comment though. It was definitely not what the fans wanted to hear right then).
It's also possible it was already determined he'd win gen 7 (due to running low on rankings) and XY was trying to start setting it up, but then gen 7 completely shifted gears (supposedly trying to copy Yokai Watch) and it became sort of messy.