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May's or Dawn's rivals, who's your favorite?

Favorite rival

  • Dawn's rivals

    Votes: 9 15.3%

  • May's rivals

    Votes: 42 71.2%

  • Both

    Votes: 8 13.6%
  • Total voters
    59
M

Maya Oak

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So who's rivals is your favorite? May's or Dawn's? Personally I like May's better since I think Drew is just plain awesome. Solidad seems like an older sister to May and Drew. Even though Harley is hilarious.

I'm not sure about Dawn and her rivals. I love Dawn in all but I'm not really a fan of Zoey and Kenny all that much.
 
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May's rivals were great. Even the ones who only appeared in 2 episodes for a contest were memorable. Drew had good interactions with May. Harley's a creepy, obsessive guy who makes me laugh. Solidad, although she only appeared in the 3 Kanto Grand Festival episodes was a good addition to the group. She was mature, and interacted easily with them. She had a degree of insight into both Contests, and people that was interesting to see.

Dawn's rivals, on the other hand, were less great, in my opinion. Kenny annoyed me, mostly, and while I didn't mind Zoey, she just didn't impress me. Nando interested me, but then he got so little screentime and focus that it killed his character. Ursula was actually a good rival. She had some sort of vendetta against Dawn. But she could have been a lot better, if she had gotten at least one much needed win against Dawn.
 
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I moved this thread to the Anime forum (Professor Orchid's Live Caster) because I felt this topic is more suitable there.

Anyway, as for the topic, since I never experienced both series, I am not familiar with them, although from what I heard, May's rivals are better for being actually rivals, unlike Dawn's, whose rival don't make good rivals.

That's it for now.
 
Problem is most of Dawn's rivals weren't really rivals.

Zoey = More of a mentor and good friend
Kenny = Kinda just treated as a childhood crush and a punching bag, she beats him in his first appearance and he fails out of the GF.
Nando = Had no rivalry with Dawn whatsoever

The only real rival Dawn had was Ursula. And even then Ursula lost against her all 3 times.
 
Both
I feel like May's rivals were the most fitting as rival characters to May and Dawn's rivals were the most fitting as rival characters to Dawn
May's story was in a way that she needed "mean" rivals to push her to do her best, while Dawn's story was more about needing supportive friendly rivals to help her get out of her depression and a figure to try to reach their level (like how amazed Dawn was when she watched Zoey VS Nando in the GF, saying that THIS is a true Contest Battle and that she's still not on their level yet)
So each set of rivals worked the best for their respective main character
 
May's rivals were definitely better; they're sort of the deciding factor in my preferring May's quest over Dawn's as a whole. Beyond the subliminal Contestshipping vibes, Drew was a legitimately good character and rival and probably one of the anime's better attempts of making a rival that's in the gray area between friendly and antagonistic. And I don't think I need to tl;dr about how amazing Harley was; he's the kind of character/rival that you just can't replicate no matter how hard you try.

The clashing dynamics also played a part in why I preferred May's rivals. May started out very self-conscious and uncertain of herself, so having her being pushed around by strong-willed rivals through misunderstandings and whatnot made for great entertainment. I'd be remiss to neglect mentioning May's one-shot Hoenn rivals, most of whom were a step above the casual CotD you'd get from this show.

On the other hand, we had Dawn, who was a fundamental opposite in being self-assured and confident from the beginning (helped that she already liked Pokemon and knew what she wanted to be right from the get-go). While Dawn was humbled over time by her rivals, there was hardly a trace of conflict between Dawn and her rivals. Most of them were friendly - Nando was a total Red Herring of a rival, Kenny was no doubt the blandest rival ever conceived on this show (plus the most meaningful thing he ever did was be mowed over by Dawn in their first match and teach Ash's Turtwig Energy Ball), Ursula was a great character, but was marred by losses without ever getting a win against Dawn (despite having way better Contest moves, imo)... Jessie was at her absolute best for this Contest saga (an improvement over being a joke in AG) but went out with a pretty pitiful bang. Zoey at least benefited from character development, but she still had potential that was never tapped upon and thus remained sort of a so-so rival in my eyes.

So yeah. Whenever I think of memorable Contest rivals on this show, Drew and Harley will always come to mind first. They were just better characters conceptually, had more dynamic development, and undeniably had a better sendoff than any of DP's rivals (even if Zoey did win the GF - was I the only one who thought it was BS that Sinnoh's GF came down to a bunch of newbies?).
 
I prefered May's rivals a lot more. Drew was the typical pretty boy, Harley was the creepy guy who was likeable for some reason. The only boring one was Solidad.

Dawn's though, were boring. Her main rival, Zoey, didn't really come across as a rival at all to me. As others have also said, the only real rival she had was Ursula, who didn't do much at all.
 
I do have to remind myself that at DP's start, I actually really liked Zoey. She seemed to be interesting at the beginning, but it was somewhere around the Aipom/Buizel trade ep that she started to become more pushy and thus less enjoyable. And then after that....she just kept appearing...and well...there was nothing else to say really. I did really enjoy how at the Snowpoint eps however how heavily the writers pushed the Zoey/Candice pairing. I was happy to see a lesbian relationship promoted in the show in a mature and sophisticated manner. We did get some good battles out of her too.

Its kind of a shame Ursula came too late in DP to really make an impact. As much as I liked her, I know her character got screwed over by her late arrival. I keep on wishing she had Kenny's place as Dawn's childhood friend, but she had the same personality. It would have been great.

So for me May's rivals edge out, but Ursula saved the tail-end of Dawn's arc.
 
How can you top Harley?

Dawn did have Ursula. But for whatever messed up reason, Kenny was favored over her. o_O
 
May's rivals. By a MILE. I mean seriously, Harley was like the best contest rival ever and Drew's interactions with May never failed to be interesting.

On the other hand, besides Ursula, Dawn's rivals were all meh. (IMO)
 
I will say May's rivals were more interesting as well. The main ones were made for conflict, and the others were quirky and still fun to watch. Dawn ended up with so many rivals that not too many one shots were done, and the one I remember was fairly interesting, but she was never seen again. The main ones were made for a different purpose than May's were. Well, at least most of them were. I'm not against the idea of friendly rivals, as long as they still are interesting. They just didn't seem as interesting. Nando might have been, but they didn't play around with him enough, and Ursula just wasn't around enough, either. Kenny was interesting in his own way, but as a threat, no. May's rivals were just more entertaining.
 
May's rivals were much more interesting (you just can't top Harley.) Dawn's rivals didn't really feel like rivals. If Ursula was introduced earlier then that would ahve made things more interesting. Instead Dawn's "rivals" were a girl who was more like a mentor to her and a childhood friend with a crush.
 
so, is this a serious question? Are you just waiting to see if somebody out there will try to give a reason behind liking Hikari's rivals better? But yeah, Haruka's rivals by a long shot (hell, even Saori managed to be interesting despite being such a late arrival, and I'm not even counting the one-shots here). All Hikari had was Urara, and Musashi acting competent to an extent.
 
Well both Zoey and Nando had the potential to be interesting, but the writers pretty much just left their characters stagnant.

I don't remember people disliking Zoey until around the Aipom trade fiasco, and then after that people just felt Zoey became boring in general. Nando...lol, do I even have to explain what went wrong there?

Kenny felt like filler just to promote Prinplup.
 
May's rivals, no contest. Maybe if Nando didn't disappear for over 100 episodes then he would have been interesting.
In the dub, Zoey came off as more bitchy than in the Japanese version (at least with her tone of voice and some of the line changes the dub made.) and the only time I found Kenny slightly interesting was in the Piplup vs. Prinplup contest (mainly because I love the Piplup evolution line). Ursula and Jessie actually competing fairly were the only interesting things about Dawn's rivals.
 
i just now realized something dawn rarely faced a cotd she most faced one of her rivals in all her contests while may faced a variety of intresting one shot oppoents kelly, the girl from paicdog town who got jealous of may inteaction with that guy she liked, jeremny who was torn between his family and his love for contests and timmy the phatom each of them brought exictement to may contests and the story leading to them while dawn on the other hand if was which rival of hers will she face this time the only time we got a cotd inteaction from dawn was the princess switch episode where she got her togkiss.

now i pretty sure i gotten get another infraction for this but i'm sorry i no good as spacing my thoughts into writing.
 
Remember guys, you need to give reasons for your choice between May's rivals and Dawn's rivals.
 
I agree on the lack of one-shot rivals too. The only one Dawn had was that Tiger Lily woman with the Delcatty, and I thought she was a pretty good character about on par with the one-shot Hoenn rivals.

I think the problem is they recycled Zoey and Kenny in EVERY contest up until Ursula was introduced. So not only were Zoey and Kenny rather dull to begin with, but they were both shoved into every contest at the beginning which got even worse. Nando, for some reason, completely disappearing until the Grand Festival didn't help matters either.

I feel as if Ursula saved the tail-end of Dawn's arc. Imagine if there was no Ursula and we just had to see more Zoey/Kenny in those last few DP contests? The horror.

Probably helps matters that the Ursula contest battles were usually the best, certainly better than Kenny's matches with Dawn.
 
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