>>57834779Sapphire's still a jungle schizo. She even grows a 2nd set of fangs by ORAS on top of getting new powers, implying she spends even more time in the jungle now, not less. If Ruby's presence actually turned her into some basic Instagram hoe, then the nature worshipping Pokeuniverse wouldn't be rewarding her materialism, or sharpening more of her chompers.
But since she just gets less screentime in later arcs, you don't see as many leaf bikinis anymore. Her later more limited presence becomes dedicated to shilling game May's newest outfits. And in the end that's her primary purpose. Shilling the games will always take priority over showing off manga exclusive outfits or even having a decently written storyline. The same goes for every other character, not just Sapphire. It's the result of the manga's more rushed development cycle nowadays.
This also means a lot of the manga uniqueness or complexity that in past arcs might have been more emphasized, is now relegated to subtext. Increasingly buried subtext squeezed into the margins of increasingly limited chapter counts. This caused immeasurable damage to PokeSpe readers who ironically can't read and had only ever looked at "le comic book pictures xD". And it might be part of why for the newer story arcs, story interpretations between fans can vary a lot more compared to older arcs. Of course sometimes the writing is just shit too, shittiness causes division on its own.
Or maybe I'm just complaining about ORAS again, I don't know I'm sleep deprived right nowAnyway the lack of Sapphire leaf bikinis nowadays is reflective of the modern manga as a whole: it just doesn't have the time to dwell on each protagonist's uniqueness as much as it used to. Not when it has to shill 69420 new Pokemon species and forms and gadgets and game mechanics first.
