>>37621193Decidueye's early popularity being overstated and expectations because of Greninja's popularity last gen while Gamefreak made decisions to show favouritism towards Incineroar. Had Incineroar been the clear favourite early on or Gamefreak deciding to push Decidueye since it was the stand out favourite in the beginning it would have just been business as usual.
Since they fanbase was already split from the casualization of the series with PokemonGo this caused more division looking to every little reference to any starter as win for that group but with no real spin offs to talk about we not only had nothing to discuss other than starter wars but the "shilling" was slow and not large enough of a pattern to declare a clear pick as it was happening.
Eventually with the newest Smash and looking at how Incineroar was treated it was clear what was the the focus for Gamefreak but with all the other decisions they made to upset fans during this gen tensions were/ still are high so we get the state of the fandom that we have now. Also Incineroar being a heel didn't help with how its fans act.
tldr: Gamefreak splits the fanbase with undelivered expectations, doesn't give us anything real to talk about so we focus on starter wars shit, and heels act like heels
