Out of all of the main character exits which would you consider the worse?

danh19

danh19

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it clearly has to be iris and cilan it was treated as a utter after thought and makes no sense they travel all the way to kanto with ash then randomly decide to leave
 
They never simply left Ash out of randomness, they had already decided what they were doing because Ash's journey was finished at that point.

But even then, their farewell wasn't that heartfelt compared to the others we've seen.
 
it still felt random if I remember right cilans now goal came out of nowhere
 
Well, it's not "clearly" them because it's not a fact. Probably Max.
 
I admit I worded it badly I should said it seems clear in my opinion
 
All 30 Tauros... They had the worst exit. No emotion at all. Lol... They just went to Oak's lab.

Jokes aside, I've never disliked an exit more than Cilan and Iris's. Everyone else, I felt some kind of emotion or a sense of something more for the characters. That ending felt more like a relief to the production to end it all.
 
NeoMiniTails said:
All 30 Tauros... They had the worst exit. No emotion at all. Lol... They just went to Oak's lab.
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I was a huge fan of their blush in last week's Kanto episode. It truly shows that Ash's Pokemon love him, however less attention he pays to them. Liked to see the swooning emotion from a stereotypically 'tough' Pokemon who has almost never shown emotion.
 
The farewell scene itself was alright, the whole build-up was total trash.

Iris and Cilan said they wanted to go to Kanto when the Decolora arc began.
First thing they do when they finally arrive there is leaving for another region.

Cilan had just said to his brothers that he wanted to keep travelling with Iris and Ash.
First thing he does in the following episode is parting ways with him.

The main problem is that there was no previous mention of their plans. Had Iris implied she was going to Johto right after meeting Clair instead of waiting till the last minute, or had Cilan even talked about that fishing contest before, it would not have seem like they were just improvising some excuses to leave Ash once and for all.

Not only that, but the first three quarters of their departure was actually a Team Rocket episode. Don't get me wrong, I love those and this one was particularly entertaining, but that might as well have been a separate plot. The protagonists holding hands in one scene and sharing a group attack to blast off Team Rocket just isn't enough for a farewell episode (shoutouts to Ash's Unova team doing exactly the same thing in the following episode).

I feel like even Porter got a better "last shining moment" than Iris and Cilan did in the same episode, at least in proportion to what his character entailed. I love it when such a minor, bland character suddenly has a boost in badassery and does something heroic. I don't love it so much when the main characters simply do the same thing they've always been doing, except it gets played as a "last time".

To top it off, they had no closure whatsoever. Sure, they did get a couple of last episodes focusing on them, but those might as well have been random episodes placed anytime during the series. Not to mention there was plenty of time for the writers to gave them a decent conclusion. XY managed it in fewer episodes... heck, even DP did it with just two. And let's just say those characters had more... fleshed out goals than Iris and Cilan ever did.
 
Iris and Cilan for me, definitely. The whole thing was just so abrupt and overall weird. I actually liked Iris and Cilan as characters, and there was litrally no feeling at all during their exit. It really felt like the writers were just bored of them and wanted them out of the picture immediately, which really doesn't make for a memorable or enjoyable departure.

I actually think that whole poorly done build up and departure is when I started to get kind of disenchanted with the series for a while...it just started to feel rushed and mailed in.
 
The worst part of Iris and Cilan departure is it didn't come soon enough. Nyeck nyeck nyeck.

In all seriousness I never seen theirs but all of the others had something good about them. Brock and Misty's goodbye were kinda random though. Tracy didn't feel any sorrow for leaving but he got what he said he wanted.
 
I can't really imagine a worse departure than what Iris and Cilan got. It felt so random, sudden and lacked any kind of emotional weight. They spent the entire arc going to Kanto and didn't even stay long enough to meet Ash's mother or see Professor Oak again. It made their journey feel virtually pointless if they didn't bother to stay in Kanto for a whole episode. It might not have been too bad if there was more buildup to their departures, but there wasn't, which was really weird. They had plenty of time to do that with the Decalore Islands arc, but none of the focus they got really added up to their departures or gave them a sense of conclusion. This was especially strange with Iris since you'd think that meeting Clair would make her desire to go to Johto more reasonable and less random. At least it did tie into her goal, which is more than I can say for Cilan and his random fishing contest.

Most of the other group departures have more emotional weight and buildup to the characters going their separate ways. This was just an attempt of getting Iris and Cilan on a train out of Kanto as soon as possible. Even their farewell scene to Ash had little to no emotion behind it. While I really don't like Iris and Cilan was just okay, I did feel bad for their fans given how extremely lackluster their departures were.

I never had much of a problem with Tracey's departure. He didn't seem sad about it, but he got what he wanted. Both Ash and Misty would be happy for him anyway. The first separation for the AG group also felt a bit lacking, but I don't think it would fair to count that since they quickly got back together for the Battle Frontier arc and their separation at the end of AG was handled better.
 
I agree that Iris and Dent had terrible departures, usually I don't subscribe to the whole "the writers made this decision to make up for this other decision that was bad" theory but it really seemed like by the end of Best Wishes they were either regretting how they wrote Iris/Dent or just sick of the series itself and hastily cobbled together something. My feelings on other characters' farewells:

I thought all of Takeshi's departures were lame from a meta standpoint. When he "left" at the end of OS and AG we already knew he would be back in the following series so there was no emotional impact, and when he finally left for good at the end of DP we had already seen him leave four different times (end of Kanto, end of Johto, end of Hoenn, and end of Battle Frontier) that, to me personally, it was super stale at that point.

Kasumi's departure itself was handled well enough, it tied in nicely with the running gag in Kanto about her bike and was probably one of the more emotional goodbyes. But it was super out of left field with no build up beforehand, other than knowing that her sisters were kind of shitty gym leaders and not very responsible. Surely the writers could have cut out a filler or two from somewhere in Johto, moved the league up a few episodes, and given us an episode to set up the first major departure of the franchise.

Kenji's departure was lame but he was a lame nothing character so I didn't really expect much.

I thought the XY group probably had the best departures, they had episodes beforehand setting up how they would leave and it was emotional enough. Well I mean Satoshi didn't seem much bothered by it but he showed an emotion other than determined maybe 5 times in XY so it fit well enough. I also liked how it gave brief glimpses into how their lives would continue after Satoshi, and by extension the audience, left them-- Serena arrives in Hoenn to start participating in Contests, Citron and Eureka stay behind in Kalos, what all of the rivals are up to, etc. Hikari also had a pretty good farewell, I can't really put my finger on it but it worked for me. Haruka and Masato's departures I actually don't really remember, but I don't have any negative emotions tied to it so I'm pretty neutral on it.

If I had to rank the departures from best to worst, I'd probably do it XY > DP > OS > AG > BW.

The fact that I haven't ever been wow-ed by a character's farewell makes me worried for the inevitable time the Rocket trio is finally written out of the show. Or Satoshi for that matter (whether or not the show as we know it ends with him is irrelevant). The longer these characters stay with us the harder it will be for them to have satisfying conclusions, which I guess is one way to justify them sticking around until the end of time?
 
The reason Tracey didn't have an emotional departure is because he'd pretty much become Ash's neighbor from that point on, and thus would keep appearing regularly. If only he knew he'd be slowly retconned out of existence...

kantoskies said:
Surely the writers could have cut out a filler or two from somewhere in Johto, moved the league up a few episodes, and given us an episode to set up the first major departure of the franchise.
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Not writing a filler episode as the series finale would've been nice too. I mean that thing was so bland fans usually forget it exists.
 
Iris and Cilan, that was one of the worst departures i have ever seen from the show.
 
Despite the fact that BW is one of my favorite series in the anime, and that I admittedly was still moved by the farewell scene, there is no denying the fact that the entire build up for Iris and Cilan's farewell was pretty irritating and random at best. I am not usually the one to pinpoint tiny flaws in the writing of a series, save for some obvious blunders like outright confirming a Raichu with the tail of a male, to be a female, but I still could not get over this insipid writing, even after three years of watching the episode.
 
Iris and Cilan's farewell is very rushed and had no build up at all. It just seems like that they changed their minds as soon as they reached Kanto and went for Johto instead as if they got board of Kanto as soon as they got there. If they take out some pointless fillers and/or take out Cameron all together, there will be room for build up about the fact that they're leaving Ash.
 
Gabo2oo said:
Not writing a filler episode as the series finale would've been nice too. I mean that thing was so bland fans usually forget it exists.
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Very true, I completely forgot about it when making that post. While more than one setup episode should have been there for Kasumi's exit-- I would say set it up over a good portion of Johto but then we'd be getting into how her story overall was executed which is for another thread-- had they extended the buildup to get goodbye to last all of EP273 and then had the actual goodbye take place during EP274 and then had the last half of that episode deal with Satoshi going to Hoenn, getting his clothes, Pikachu getting sick, maybe another scene with the Rocket trio deciding to follow him despite their constant failures, etc. it probably would have been up there with XY's ending for me.

Also Satoshi and Kasumi totally should have split off by that waterfall where they first met. Symbolism or something like that.
 
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