>>57643488Well it's in the name, shounen stuff is literally for young teen boys, so what happens to girl characters isn't a priority. On the other hand in shojo media for girls, a lot of male characters are just really effeminate, unrealistically chivalrous and basically always love interests and little else, though I never see people complaining about that.
There's also how the Pokemon games in general feel for a lack of a better word egalitarian, it's easy to self insert and make your Pokemon journey go whichever way you want no matter who you are. Yet Pokespecial takes the Pokemon world and funnels it through a specifically shounen lens, for better or for worse, and sometimes it leads to true retardation like trying to convince you that Ruby the fashion designer
will save the day instead of Sapphire the tarzan girl.
Yeah technically Ruby only ever makes things worse even in the story, but either way Sapphire gets written out just so Ruby can get the spotlight, and so Kusaka can desperately try to convince the main shounen demographic that his fashion designer boy MC is actually super badass guys, you'll totally find him as cool as Red the league champ or Gold the scrappy delinquent guys. (I'm not even sure it worked, most Ruby fans seem to be girls anyway.) I don't hate Ruby but just the circumstances surrounding him are pure cringe honestly
