Why are people so obsessed with the characters aging?

[Kathylikestoread]

Does it really impact the quality of the series? For me, it really doesn't, I'm totally fine with the characters not aging, I wish that instead of using the same protagonists for twenty seven years, they would switch protagonists for every series, like the manga, Adventures does. Besides, it's a cartoon, it doesn't need to follow real life logic, if it did, then it wouldn't be Pokemon, it would just be children going to school and doing normal stuff. Lastly, characters like Bart Simpson and Eric Cartman have stayed children for at least twenty years, and it's not like anyone complains.

 

[KomaruNaegi7]

Pokémon fans are only obsessed with the concept of characters aging because the anime would reference the passage of time every so often in the first few generations, and characters would actually grow and develop, and the art style would shift ever so slightly in a way that characters would not just act a bit more mature, but look it, too.

Compare Ash and Misty from the original series to how they are in Hoenn and Sinnoh for instance. They’re still their usual hotheaded selves but nowhere near to the same extent as when they first met. They’re much more mellowed out and they’re written like all the adventures they had together really helped them grow and change, and the new outfits they got helped reflect that.

They’d also throw out lines here and there that’d imply how long they’ve been traveling. Weeks, months, and there was even that special in Johto where Ash celebrated the anniversary of when he and Pikachu first met.

So the fact that the anime would imply some sort of progression is happening for the first several years it ran would naturally make fans expect more of that, or have fun making headcanons about potential timeskip or fan designs of the characters as teenagers or adults.

But sadly, the anime was expected to run forever, and Ash was too iconic of a character to replace, so after Sinnoh, which would’ve been a fine point to end his character, they just regressed him instead, and after Unova, Ash just became whatever the writers wanted him to be—shounen action-adventure hero for Kalos, comedic slice-of-life hero for Alola, and then basically winging it and writing on the fly with Journeys.

Which understandably left fans raging or disappointed. And only kinda enabled the constant jokes about him being 10 forever, especially when BW insisted he was still 10.

At least we have Pokémon Horizons now, and since they’re not as bound by marketing as Ash’s anime was, they’re allowed to tell more story-driven arcs and have characters grow and change again.

 

[Falaish]

It's mainly due to Ash staying too long, the fact that he traveled through 7 regions in about a year is a bit unbelieveable. That means each of his companions only traveled with him for 2 months tops!

I do think AG/DP gave the illusion Ash was aging, he did seem older and acted more mature than in the OS. Even before XY made him look older, he just felt older before that. I also think May and Dawn turning 10 AFTER Ash gives that impression too, otherwise wouldn't they start their journies the same time Ash did in Kanto? Then you have Max and Bonnie who can't age and become trainers, etc.

If Ash's story ended with DP at the least, I do think you could say Ash felt about 13-14ish.

 

[Rockapheller]

I am not sure if I would call questioning the passage of time in the anime universe an "obsession". People were just left confused due to inconsistencies, so we see all opinions getting defended here and there all the time. The inconsistency is that during the early sagas, the time was visibly passing and has been made references by how Lapras aged, how a narrator in a special mentioned that it has been a year since Ash and Pikachu met, and so on. Some of the people in the fandom may not remember, but until Ash's age was once again confirmed to be 10 in BW001, people simply assumed Ash, and for that matter all the other characters, were, in fact, aging, despite not being explicitly addressed. Obviously this sort of inconsistency has left a room for discussion for years.

Comparing Pokémon anime to shows like Simpsons and South Park is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. These are completely different formats, created by very different cultures, and aims for completely different purposes in their shows. You can see progression in Pokémon and it is an anime made by Japanese creators, while shows like Simpsons just sticks to episodic format with sole base being humor/comedy and their target audience is average American people.

 

[Daren]

The games they're based off of do have characters age; heck, the guy Ash is adapted from is an adult now!
Plus I don't think it was confirmed he was still 10 until B/W (mid post edit: Rockapheller seems to recall the same as me in that regard), and people disliked that series in general--even right at the start there were complaints about Ash's new design, the infamous Snivy loss right out the gate, and I suspect some ill will left from Tobias.

It's also just weird for a show that's supposed to have larger running story arcs with seasons passing to be trapped in a time warp, which is very different from something almost entirely episodic like The Simpsons.

Also this is just a guess but I suspect people subconsciously link the character resets and stagnation with nobody aging.

 

[UxieLover1994]

Comparing Pokémon anime to shows like Simpsons and South Park is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. These are completely different formats, created by very different cultures, and aims for completely different purposes in their shows. You can see progression in Pokémon and it is an anime made by Japanese creators, while shows like Simpsons just sticks to episodic format with sole base being humor/comedy and their target audience is average American people.

Also note that The Simpsons and South Park are aimed at adult audiences while the Ash-era anime was aimed at young children. Their older target audience allows for them to have meta references on how the characters have remained the same age for decades, like Bart writing on a chalkboard stating he should be an adult by now, or last year's season opener where Bart outright rebels against the script so he wouldn't turn 11. For the anime, outside an early DP episode where Team Rocket tells Dawn that they've been chasing Ash and Pikachu for "as long as [she's] been alive", there's been hardly any meta references to how nobody has aged even by a nanosecond.

Unageing protagonists in children's media with no in-universe justification was once the norm, but then people will question the logic as they get older, like how could one celebrate Christmas five times while remaining three years old? Or, in Ash's case, go through seven leagues and a world championship in one season?

 

[Nicolas721]

Relatability. Children from ages 5-10 could easily aspire to be him, and those from ages 11-14 could still see something in him that connected to what they were living. But afterwards, it can be hard to see that while you could grow up he was kept trapped in the same loop apparently for eternity while you grew older and older, so instead of being an aspirational character you start to envy him, and there's also the added element of unrealistic-ness some commented above.

Cartoons and comics can get away with it because it's a floating timeline and there comes a point when you just accept it these characters are not real and are just fit to every story, but the Pokemon anime 1) had advanced Ash to some degree and felt like it was building up to a great finale and 2) aired almost every week, so if you were a fan you have to be reminded every week of that fact.

Of course, there are some people who still accepted Ash in spite of that and liked him, specially in the Japanese fandom who are more used to shows that air every week there nothing changes.

 

[ninazrdl]

Also note that The Simpsons and South Park are aimed at adult audiences while the Ash-era anime was aimed at young children. Their older target audience allows for them to have meta references on how the characters have remained the same age for decades, like Bart writing on a chalkboard stating he should be an adult by now, or last year's season opener where Bart outright rebels against the script so he wouldn't turn 11. For the anime, outside an early DP episode where Team Rocket tells Dawn that they've been chasing Ash and Pikachu for "as long as [she's] been alive", there's been hardly any meta references to how nobody has aged even by a nanosecond.

Unageing protagonists in children's media with no in-universe justification was once the norm, but then people will question the logic as they get older, like how could one celebrate Christmas five times while remaining three years old? Or, in Ash's case, go through seven leagues and a world championship in one season?

Young children allow meta references too. Actually, I think it's the younger audiences that are more open to this topic.
Doraemon, Chibi-Maruko, Sasae-san(which this anime phenomena gets its name from)...all of them are facing young audiences and none of them is aging properly. Children are more open to un-realistic settings and tend to just accept them as "that's the way it is".
Not only in Anime, even in Cartoons, when the characters say "kids, don't try this at home" "hey this is not in the script" "happy new year kids", they accept them literally as the characters are talking to them.
It's the grownups who care about these problems in a fictional world. Detective Conan got a lot of mocking from its fans after the author said "in Conan's world, it's only 6 months since the story began". The Conan fans had made some serious researches and proved that within 6 months, the world had evolved from dial-up internet access to smartphones and IoTs, and the main characters had several New Year/Christmas/Valentine's Day already. Over a thousand of people died within that 6 months and all of them are somehow connected to that weird pupil. But Detective Conan was targeting high school students, that's why the main male character has high school mentality and his girlfriend is a high school student, and most of the fans, "high school students at the time" are now in their 30s or 40s, so they care about the aging problem now.
I believe this is why they decided to retire Satoshi, who never ages. Because they want to target the grownup fans more, the adults have more money and they can sell more merchs to them. Also there aren't lots of Japanese kids nowadays.