“Ash Ketchum failing for 22 years taught me being a loser is OK”
I really geniunely love this article.
A few nice quotes from Pokemon fans:
“Pokemon was great escapism for me but it also taught me that not necessarily being the best, that was OK too,” 27-year-old Jake Saunders from Bromborough tells BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat.
“Putting it bluntly, it was like being a loser is OK. The important lesson is to pick yourself back up, roll with the punches and keep going.
This little graphic I found on Twitter illustrates the point nicely. Look how he kept on getting better and better! Sometimes you really do gotta keep working for twenty years.
And Laura Kate Dale, who’s 28 and from Surrey, says Ash proved to her that you could be “still worthy of praise” even if you failed every single time.
“He was always the underdog, half the times he won gym badges it was because he did something nice, not because he was the best at fighting,” she tells Newsbeat.
“There was something really beautiful about seeing that growing up – that it’s OK if you’re not the strongest, the most qualified, as long as you keep trying to be the best person you can be, the nicest you can be to people around you.”
That was probably the most important thing Pokemon taught me, to be honest.
Kate says an episode in which Ash met a Charmander (small, red, dragon-ish, tail on fire – you know the one) which had been abandoned by its original trainer has stuck with her to this day.
“At the time, I was a child dealing with the fact that my biological dad had left and didn’t seem to care the way he was supposed to,” she says.
“The episode’s story was about learning to move on and be OK after someone who was supposed to look after you just vanishes – it was really tasteful in dealing with something that as a child was really difficult to comprehend.
“That’s what the show was really good at. It told stories about relatable themes in digestible ways for children.”
It was, it really really was. As a child I related to Brock the most because he was forced by circumstances into caring for his younger siblings. That wasn’t too far away from my reality. So here I was, clinging to a fictional story for children that every adult within the vincity mocked and mocked and mocked while the home life got ever worse.
Don’t make fun of stuff children like. Please don’t. Look what they can do with it.