Today the very last Pokemon episode with Ash, Misty, Brock and Pikachu aired. It’s like bidding farewell to old friends. Seems like a lot of people feel the same way?
Satoshi and Pikachu’s journeys end in Japan today. Please join me in congratulating @Pokemon_cojp on an incredible 25 year run with this iconic protagonist, by ✨POSTING YOUR FAN ART BELOW.✨
As I continue recording the final episodes of Ash and Pikachu’s journey on Pokémon, I’d like to thank and congratulate the incredible woman who has inspired my performance as the English voice of Ash Ketchum for the last 17 years, @rica_matsumoto3. 👏👏👏#ThankYouAshandPikachupic.twitter.com/3gzhLjc5fm
— Emma #ThankYouAshandPikachu (@EmmaTheDPStan) March 24, 2023
When I was a small child using the name “pokeprincess” online (I was among the first generation to grow up on the internet, for better or worse, I mostly survived it) Ash, Misty, Brock and Pikachu were EVERYTHING to me. Look! Look at these terrible, beautiful “drawings” I did as a kid!
My room would’ve been a shrine to Pokemon if my parents had allowed it. But check out the posters!
My 35th birthday is just over a week away. It’s the 1st April and I discovered just yesterday that Ash’s first Pokemon episode aired in Japan on the 1st April too. So all this time I’ve been sharing a birthday with Ash Ketchum! What a great way to end the journey! Thank you guys. You really were the very best, like no-one ever was.
“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.
I love the movie credits sequences that show the characters just travelling or relaxing or doing mundane things. They give the sense that even when nothing relevant to our interest is happening and we’re not looking, their adventure continues on.
