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Were we too hard on Iris?

Honestly, I didn't mind her dynamic with Ash too much... but did they have to make that a catchphrase like they were selling T-Shirt? Laying it on thick, aren't we?
 
Fairy Wind said:
I always thought that was the point- I get the sense that they were going for hypocritical humor with that, though most people didn't find it funny. But I like Iris in spite of that, and don't think she deserved the extreme level of vitriol she got from the fandom.
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To me the thing about that is she pushed and puched but Ash never pushed back.
 
Fairy Wind said:
I always thought that was the point- I get the sense that they were going for hypocritical humor with that, though most people didn't find it funny. But I like Iris in spite of that, and don't think she deserved the extreme level of vitriol she got from the fandom.
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Perhaps but what they got was something annoying. Iris wasn't playing the heel, she was a babyface - so she isn't supposed to have annoying tropes. Plus she's too overpowered, so she's like Kirito - always wins, feels like a self insert and when she does lose it's never clean and is always for BS reasons
 
HiroHunter said:
To me the thing about that is she pushed and puched but Ash never pushed back.
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Yeah, if they were going for another Misty, they could've had there be more of a back and forth with Ash getting a bit teasy himself. They clearly rebooted him so why not?

Muur said:
so she's like Kirito
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Personally, I think she had the makings of SAO Abridged's Kirito. She just needed the dub to dial up the snark with her dialogue to at least make her entertaining.
 
Were we too hard on Iris? Nope. Sorry, but no.
Was she the worst character on BW? No. Not while there is characters like Cameron and Cilan. Actually, the most distinctive feature of BW was how annoying its characters were. It's ironic that the most relatable characters of BW were two rivals we supposed to dislike, Burgundy and Georgia. Makes you think...
Did people hate Iris because she was black? I don't think so. People used to worship her when BW first started, saying how different she is from the previous female companions, how she doesn't steal screentime, how cute she is with Axew, etc. Even if there was any race based prejudice against her, it's very minor compared to support she got. If we're talking about prejudices, she got very little hate for replacing the previous girl, compared to what May and Dawn "experienced". Claim that Iris was hated because of racism is not justified, it's just whitewashing (no pun intended) Iris' flaws that make her unpopular in the first place.
Did fandom went too far? It could be argued that some people, because of their frustration with Iris, went too far in their hate on her. But it's not something exclusive to her, many pokeani characters are disliked and hated by certain parts of fandom before and after, reasonable or not; this is just how fandoms work. As I said before, Iris used to be popular at the start of BW, she gradually lost that popularity because of her character flaws and flawed screenwriters that make her look bad. At one point people just gave up on her, and that was the point that most of the fandom jump on the bandwagon of hating her, because it was the popular choice.
 
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HiroHunter said:
Is the Iris and Dragonite thing the same as the Ash and Charizard thing back in Kanto only Iris didn't learn anything while Ash did.
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I think it was more like the resolution with Dragonite was more of an afterthought in a big event rather than being the main focus like what happened with Charizard's resolution. Plus, Iris doing the same thing as before with saving Dragonite probably didn't help either. Ash already helped to save Charizard's life when it was a Charmander, but he had a much more active role after it was frozen and seeing Ash's determination to save it resulted in Charizard trusting Ash again.

HiroHunter said:
To me the thing about that is she pushed and puched but Ash never pushed back.
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There was a bit of reaction from Ash early on in BW, but it was no where near as much as when he and Misty used to argue. That was one of the problems people had with their dynamic. They were trying to go for something similar he had with Misty, but it usually ended up being one-sided.

martianmister said:
If we're talking about prejudices, she got very little hate for replacing the previous girl, compared to what May and Dawn "experienced". Claim that Iris was hated because of racism is not justified, it's just whitewashing (no pun intended) Iris' flaws that make her unpopular in the first place.
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I think that Iris benefited in a way due to being the fourth main female lead in that regard. By that point, it was much more expected/accepted that the female leads would be replaced with every series. It was much more surprising when Misty was written off and she has the most nostalgic value out of all of the female leads too. There were still people upset when May and Dawn were replaced and people still generally hoped that the female leads would stay for more than one series. I still remember people giving me a hard time for saying that Iris being replaced was definitely going to happen, but the backlash for the new female leads replacing the previous one is practically nonexistent at this point that Iris wouldn't be hated for that.

martianmister said:
Did fandom went too far? It could be argued that some people, because of their frustration with Iris, went too far in their hate on her. But it's not something exclusive to her, many pokeani characters are disliked and hated by certain parts of fandom before and after, reasonable or not; this is just how fandoms work. As I said before, Iris used to be popular at the start of BW, she gradually lost that popularity because of her character flaws and flawed screenwriters that make her look bad. At one point people just gave up on her, and that was the point that most of the fandom jump on the bandwagon of hating her, because it was the popular choice.
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I don't think that the hate on Iris started to become really common place until around the time she got Excadril to listen to her. It definitely would have started no later than the first Club Battle tournament considering how that started the trend of giving her undeserved victories. I remember liking her at the beginning of the series because she was so flawed. I figured that the writers were eventually going to work on her flaws and Axew's progress throughout the series would mirror her own. Clearly, that didn't happen. The writers never really addressed those flaws and instead just gave her a lot of accomplishments to make it look like she had become stronger. I'm still surprised that I thought she earned Axew mastering Dragon Rage. It's not as cheap as her other accomplishments, but it felt like it just happened because she was suddenly an expert about Dragon Pokemon, was presented as a mentor to the character of the day and they didn't want to make her look bad after putting her in such a good light. They started making Iris look like a special gifted trainer much earlier in the series than I remembered, but it is still incredibly jarring.
 
I think she deserves the hate for saying "You're such a little kid" because she always said it and Ash never reacted (so it never was like Misty because Ash used to always go "OH YEAH <insert cringy comeback here>", which was funny) so it is worth mentioning that whilst the anime writers were trying to go for a cringy or a "hypocritical humour" line, they still overdid it.
 
Huikyeong said:
To be honest, Ash did kinda regress in B/W so there were many times where the little kid comment was warranted.
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Well to me it looked like the writers know the BW Ash was worst than DP Ash and instead of fixing it, they have Iris say this hypocritical line over and over and hopes that makes it ok when it didn't.
 
Huikyeong said:
To be honest, Ash did kinda regress in B/W so there were many times where the little kid comment was warranted.
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Honestly, I'm still not sure how much Ash actually regressed in BW. Early on in the series, his skill seemed fine. The only problem was how he kept losing to Trip and even then, I'm more upset over the writers making Trip an overpowered rookie trainer more than Ash losing to him. I do remember how some of his later Unova Gym battles go, so maybe the regression happened much later in the series than I originally thought it did, but based on the first thirty or so episodes, Ash's skills seem fine to me for the most part.

There were times where Ash's immaturity did warrant the little kid comment, but that was rare compared to the times where it wasn't warranted. Besides that, Iris acted just as immature as Ash did most of the time, if not more so. She had no room to talk when it came to acting like a little kid. She would often come off as a hypocrite and that annoyed people, especially when she was rarely called out on her own immaturity. It's the same reason why Iris complaining about Ash's skills early on in the series was frustrating. She couldn't even get Axew to use Dragon Rage, so she didn't have any room to complain about Ash's decisions in battle either. I still think that her catchphrase was one of the least of Iris' problems in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly didn't help.
 
I disliked a lot of things about the Best Wishes series (saw about 80% of Season 1, all of Season 2, all of Episode N, none of Da!).

The whole series was pretty much a disappointment overall with bad writing and appalling decisions from the writers/production team/whoever. Iris was just one of the characters who suffered from that. People already mentioned about her attitude of belittling Ash and her owning an overpowered Dragonite, so I don't need to add much there.

Also, Best Wishes was notorious for coming up with outrageous ideas for characters throughout the series (both recurring and one-shot) when they had perfectly reliable, established characters readily available from the source material they were creating the anime out of. Iris, while also a canon game character, was not just any gym leader - she was the 8th gym leader, sharing the spot with Drayden as the strongest gym leader. And she later became champion in the sequels. There's this glaring dissonance between what she's like in the games, and how she's presented in the anime. She's a prodigy yes, but she's not someone who goes around feeling smug about being better than other trainers, or belittling other people for being stupid in the games.

Drayden chose Iris as his successor because he was impressed with her natural ability as a trainer and with how the opponents enjoyed battling her even though they lost (implying her respect towards other trainers regardless of skill levels). She's a young girl from a distant village who's not familiar with city directions. Despite feeling homesick sometimes, she does her best to become a strong trainer and volunteers to be the bodyguard of someone in need. While the "young prodigy" part may have been a little forced, the games provided enough background information for us to be aware of her character and personality - and the anime completely missed out on that.
 
Hidden Mew said:
Honestly, I'm still not sure how much Ash actually regressed in BW. Early on in the series, his skill seemed fine. The only problem was how he kept losing to Trip and even then, I'm more upset over the writers making Trip an overpowered rookie trainer more than Ash losing to him. I do remember how some of his later Unova Gym battles go, so maybe the regression happened much later in the series than I originally thought it did, but based on the first thirty or so episodes, Ash's skills seem fine to me for the most part.

There were times where Ash's immaturity did warrant the little kid comment, but that was rare compared to the times where it wasn't warranted. Besides that, Iris acted just as immature as Ash did most of the time, if not more so. She had no room to talk when it came to acting like a little kid. She would often come off as a hypocrite and that annoyed people, especially when she was rarely called out on her own immaturity. It's the same reason why Iris complaining about Ash's skills early on in the series was frustrating. She couldn't even get Axew to use Dragon Rage, so she didn't have any room to complain about Ash's decisions in battle either. I still think that her catchphrase was one of the least of Iris' problems in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly didn't help.
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They writers probably thought her catchphrase was funny so they started repeating it ad infinitum.
 
SinnohEevee said:
gave us a lot of annoying characters.
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Focus on the word 'lot'. In this section, I have talked many times about how many characters were in BW, it was too much. In addition, a lot of them were annoying, as you said, and not properly developed. It's a real shame. I was so pumped after DP (WHICH WAS AMAZING) and I was let down. I watched the BW theme tune and I was like ok this is more cringe than Sinnoh League Victors, nuuuu. The only redeemable thing about BW was the episodes with Cynthia and Dawn.
UPDATE: I reminded myself of Sinnoh League Victors and I am watching Zoey vs Dawn at Grand Festival again because it is my favourite episode. The feels... :cry::cry::cry:
 
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Now here i'm thinking why did the writer give Iris a goal of evolving Axew if she was never going to do it? And why did she only have 2 dragon types at the end of BW?
 
HiroHunter said:
Now here i'm thinking why did the writer give Iris a goal of evolving Axew if she was never going to do it? And why did she only have 2 dragon types at the end of BW?
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They probably wanted to evolve Axew but scrapped it like with the GS Ball. I don't think the writers knew what to do with Iris other than trying to make her Misty 2.0.
 
SinnohEevee said:
They probably wanted to evolve Axew but scrapped it like with the GS Ball. I don't think the writers knew what to do with Iris other than trying to make her Misty 2.0.
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Well I hate Misty so that didn't help Iris at all. In fact I find Iris worst than Misty. And heres something else are Ash and Iris even friends because it didn't feel like they where.
 
HiroHunter said:
Well I hate Misty so that didn't help Iris at all. In fact I find Iris worst than Misty. And heres something else are Ash and Iris even friends because it didn't feel like they where.
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I wasn't too fond of Misty as a kid, but they had time to mellow her. I find her overrated. I also don't like Jessie be sure she's *worse*.
 
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