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What are your thoughts on Tracey and Max?

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Cybersai

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Ah, good ol' Tracey and Max.

They're the only two new male traveling companions that were introduced in the show over its run, and both of them seemed to have trouble having a sizeable fanbase.

What are your thoughts on Tracey and Max?

It seems to me that the writers do a much better job introducing new female traveling companions for Ash than they do the new male traveling companions. May and Dawn became popular characters almost immediately after they were introduced, but Tracey and Max have always had such open dislike toward them from the fandom.

Do you think with the exception of Brock, the writers have trouble finding new male traveling companions for Ash? Is this why we're seemingly stuck with Brock forever? Is this why Tracey and Max weren't received with open arms?

What are your thoughts on these two and do you think they helped enrich the Pokemon formula or they didn't do anything for it?
 
Tracey > Brock!. IMO, the fandom's failure to acknowledge this probably comes from blind nostalgia for the "good old days" of season 1. (or that's at least the reason that one of my friends gives ^^;;. "Tracey was cool, but Brock is classic")

Max > Brock too, IMO. You could probably guess that I don't like Brock all that much.

A big part of the fandom backlash against these guy characters could be just because they are "not Brock". Brock is cemented into the minds of a lot of the audience as an essential part of the show, so any other guy characters have to compete with him. I think the same thing could have happened to May, had she not been given her own seperate quest with the contests.
 
Part of the problem with all of the male supporting characters is they never get to do anything interesting. Brock's a breeder who's never bred two Pokemon together. Max is a trainer without a Pokemon. Tracey watches Pokemon. Whoop-de-fucking do - so does everyone. I like all of them, but they're pretty boring to actually watch and could be removed from the show without losing a step, sadly.
 
Kenji, Masato and Hiroshi = CRAP!

I hate these characters!

Masato is dumb. He only annoys the Satoshi-tachi. And me.

Kenji is weak, he didn't do anything to make Orange Islands saga better. The worst Satoshi's partner ever.
 
Masato? Adorable. Absolutely adorable. I know many people hate him and think of him as an annoying nerd or geek or whatever, but I don't care. Just the way he looked and behaved...I found it really sweet. I loved seeing him get starry eyed over his father and real emotional about his sister. Sure we had seen characters with brothers and sisters before in Pokemon, but this was the first time any of them actually behaved in a realistic manner. Otherwise Takeshi's siblings (despite there being so many) all seemed to stay so ridiculously in-line and Kasumi's sisters, ah...I don't even think I need to go there. ^^;

Something I also find rather amusing is that, although so many people hate him, whenever the writers actually took time out to focus on him, those scenes and/or episodes were suddenly loved by the fandom. ^^; Kinda odd how that works out.

Now Kenji? Ho boy, don't even get me started on him. Not only does his outfit make me wanna go all preppy and file a report to the "fashion police", but he just doesn't have a character. Sure he fanboys over the professor, but that's it. He doesn't talk about his family, doesn't really say a whole lot about his own pokemon, I mean...I just dunno. The guy just comes off so bland to me. The fact the writers also tried to make him a less severe version of Takeshi when he first appeared also annoyed me. Really showed they were lacking on ideas of what to do with him IMO. ._.; And rather off-topic, but are the writers ever going to give the guy a new set of clothes? Characters of the day have more outfits than him!
 
Agreed with Yotsuba on Masato. He's annoying, but what little kid ISN'T? And sweet and so... real! I adore the Jirachi movie and the Ralts episode~ and the broken Pokenav episode. xD

Heh, I like Kenji, but yeah ,the writers just didn't give him very much in the way of a personality... poor Kenji.
 
None of Ash's partners were ever certified beyond gym leader status, and even there they were either interim or barely met prefectural standards. May and Max being on the team at all, given Ash's erratic thinking, was a horrible idea, although it actually went by a game scheme for once. May was starting out herself, and as far as I can tell from the little I've seen of him, Max was nothing more than a pundit.

Tracey was meant to be the hobbyist hunk, an adventurer who restricted himself to the Orange Islands for the better of his vocation. It doesn't offer much of an aid to Ash, making it look as if the team was just a set of wilderness explorers whilst trying to maintain Ash's ambition to be a master trainer. I'm sure the fandom has already fallen for the fact that he's this relaxed but pragmatic, hunky persona, which was probably the objective of the writers, although it was well known that his area of expertise would do no good come the move to Johto.

I'm fine with Tracey being on the team as the Orange Islands trip was mainly recreational, but I think that if Ash wants to be helped along in his journey to be a Pokémon master, we need someone under which he can actually train. May and Max serve no purpose, and Brock and Misty had personal setbacks that compromised their worth of the spot.
 
May serve no purpose
Click to expand...

I have to disagree, May served just as much purpose as Misty and Brock.

She had her own Story-Arc for one, which easily cemented her a decent reason to exist.
 
Tracey is meh.

I actually like Max. It was good to have him around to prevent Brock from making a fool of himself whenever Brock glanced at a pretty face. And I was able to sympathize with the little guy during "Do I Hear a Ralts" and "Home Is Where The Start Is". I almost cried when Max was saying how jealous he was of May.
 
Tracey never really appealed to me, which is mainly the fault of the writers for not doing much with him. I've liked him more since he became a secondary character for some reason.

Now Max, on the other hand, is my favourite character. Giving focus to a character who doesn't have a Pokémon yet was an interesting idea and it worked out well in Hoenn. He fell into the background in BF but he was still great in movie 9 and had a great departure at the end of AG.
 
Crystal Walrein said:
but I think that if Ash wants to be helped along in his journey to be a Pokémon master, we need someone under which he can actually train. May and Max serve no purpose, and Brock and Misty had personal setbacks that compromised their worth of the spot.
Click to expand...

I think the point is that all the characters Ash traveled with make up an essential part of his character.

For most of Kanto and Johto, Misty and Brock were good friends/mentors for Ash. They made sure he never did anything completely stupid, made sure he was always set on his goal, and made sure that everything was well.

The AG cast revamp, besides including Contests, was meant to show how much Ash has grown from Kanto-Johto. He was far more mature in AG, his Pokemon were better trained, (and as a result evolved for once, his AG team was his first almost fully evolved team aside from Corphish), and he basically takes May and Max under his wing in AG3. It was a nice contrast to the early seasons, that the newbie Ash finally became a mentor figure himself now that younger characters were with him. This is repeated to a lesser extent with Dawh in D/P, although she doesn't rely on Ash as much as May/Max did.

Getting back to the main point, do you guys think Ash's status as the star prevents any of the other males from accomplishing any sort of goal? If say Brock had a major story arc revolving around his breeding skills, would it take too much screentime away from Ash?

It's noticeable that the writers have already taken a huge chunk of the show away from Ash when May was introduced, so they apparently have no problem with a female trainer having her own goal alongside Ash. Dawn has had her opening theme placed right off the bat to cement her co-star status, which goes along with the fact that the females can have plot-driven story arcs.

Or do you think the writers keep Brock (and Tracey/Max, when they were on the show), in the background because they don't want him to overshadow Ash or the female coordinators?
 
Max > Tracey.

I don't even remember if I payed much attention to the Orange Islands, so I can't say anything about Tracey. But he doesn't appeal to me.

But Max. Ah, that annoying little cutie pie brother. He has had a nice amount of moments in AG. And me, being the huge May fangirl I am, loves the cute moments he has with May. Plus, I love the little comments he makes all the time.

So yes. Max >>> Tracey. =D
 
Tracey = awesome. 'Nuff said.

Max = annoying. I'm glad he's out of the show. Sure, he's incredibly cute and he had his moments, like his relationship with May's Munchlax and the Ralts episode, but other than that, he didn't do anything worth noticing.
 
They're okay characters who ended up on the wrong show. It's too plot-driven for a minor character who can't really affect the plot to win much in the way of support.
 
Too plot driven? What is there of a plot other than [character] collects [items]? There's plenty of time to give their own story focus in the fillers.
 
Pokemon is the least plot-driven anime I've ever seen. It's basically an anime version of a Hannah-Barbera cartoon like "Wacky Races", or "Scooby-Doo", but based on some semblance of a story loosely taken from a videogame.
 
Max wins because he proved to be the smartest character in the whole show almost, since he's the only one who showed any suspicion of Harley after they knew he was "not nice" (such as in the Saffron episode).

And he was the star of one of the overall well done episodes of the show so...yay!

Tracey's better as a supporting dude at Oak's lab, imo. He should appear more though...
 
In my opinion, Max was the star of the best movie (Jirachi) and one of the best episodes (Ralts).

Therefore, Max = win.
 
IMO, they're not liked because they don't have game counterparts. Misty, Brock, May and Dawn, all from the games, so they'll obviously be liked, whereas Tracey was kinda just sprung on us, and Max was the little tag-along kid that only had a PokeNav.

If Max was a trainer during his time with Ash, that almost certainly would've made him more popular, but since he wasn't, he just became redundant. =\
 
I think what Shooting Ristar meant about Max ending up in the wrong show that was plot related is because the writers were too busy with the Gym/Contest plot.

Since Max didn't have a goal, he got about as much screentime as Brock usually gets, but since he didn't have Pokemon, he wasn't able to have the odd battle or two that Brock gets once in a blue moon.

I tend to think that Max was an experiment by the writers. They wanted to include a little kid character that looked up to both Ash and his older sister, but somewhere along the road they got so wrapped up in Ash/May that they completely forgot about him.

The Ralts episode was Max's last real shining moment of Hoenn, and aside from the Cleffa ep in early Battle Frontier, he wasn't focused on at all for the rest of the AG.

If Max ended up on one of those shoujo anime that didn't have characters collecting pretty tokens, he may have ended up with more spotlight.
 
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