Yea but to the point of being considered worse than a dead weight nuisance who does nothing but create chaos and never suffers any kind of repercussions or comeuppance? Even looking at it objectively, Grookey is worse by virtue of Greninja at least being important to the plot while Grookey is either a shoulder warmer that could be removed and nothing would change or a brat that causes trouble.
I mean, it literally is not a Mary Sue. The fact that Greninja can never win with the fandom can be demonstrated in this plus the controversial opinions thread. It might be the only Pokémon I've seen called BOTH a "Mary Sue" and "It’s bad and weak since it lost all its battles against Charizard".
Because...... Reasons?
Hell, the entire scenario of the episode was contrived as Hell. Like, Grookey’s pokeball just so happens to be dropped by Pelipher right outside of the Sakuragi lab and, rather than go anywhere else, Grookey climbs into Ash’s and Go’s room and lays in Go’s arms just as he’s having a dream about being given one. Then the thing clings to Go for no reason. You’d think that it were Togepi and imprinting happened and it thought that Go was it’s parent. They then find out that it belongs to someone and set out to return it to its owner which could have been a nice premise what with Go learning that there’s more important things than catching a Pokémon even if he’s started bonding with it. But no, that all goes out the window when it just so happens to turn out to be TRio’s Pokémon. At that point, said Pokémon liberates itself simply so Go can get it. God, the stars had to align to get a capture this bad and for a starter at that. I thought they couldn’t do worse than Sobble’s capture but the writer of this one must’ve saw that episode and just been like ‘hold my beer. I can do one better.’
No but it's honestly batshit insane because Grookey, literally, fell out of the sky onto Goh's lap. It just gave itself to him.
If they wanted to give Grookey to Goh, there were plenty of other ways to make it happen without it being forced. It honestly felt more like wish fulfillment than something deep. Episodes like that happen when you bend the universe and its rules to favor one character. If I wrote the episode, I would have made Grookey a wild Pokemon that both Goh and TRio wanted to get, and they compete against each other to catch it. Yeah, it wouldn't be perfect, but it wouldn't be so contrived, and the rules of the universe remain intact.
The thing is, the episode told us about their so-called bond instead of showing us. From what I see, I don't see any semblance of bonding. It was more like they just hung out with each other. But they told us about their "bond" to justify giving it to Goh. That's one of the problems with the show.
Nobody is trying to demonize Goh tho?
Journeys has had some pretty abysmal writing in terms of some of its episodes.
The dozens of "Goh stole Grookey from TR" claims from when the ep aired say otherwise.
The writers had to justify giving Grookey to Goh somehow.
They probably wanted to do something different?
If that was the case they didn't do it well.
I like to think of it as karma for Yanma.
