>>57239665... which is how it came out during the peak age of Tumblr and when Millennials all realized en-mass that nerdiness could be trendy and cool instead of cringe and fail and when they started getting disposable incomes. It was a second mini Pokémania *between young adults and older teens* who all left back at Gen 2.
You had these late teens and young adults returning to Pokémon in droves because their nerdier online friends (who never left pokémon) played XY and because these games encouraged online interaction. For a while, alongside Animal Crossing: New Leaf and FE: Awakening it was THE 3DS game that you played to socialize online and the fandoms were all connected in some ways.
(This is also why to this day and age Sycamore, Lysandre, ORAS' Maxie and Archie and Guzma are all popular husbandos; it's partially thanks to Pokétumblr's reach to other weeb and vidiya fandoms)
At the time, nobody could see XY's flaws because the online aspect was fun and encouraged socialization. This is how mid online games that are worse than XY thrive: human interaction.
And undoubtly the Kanto pandering helped at the time because Megas were cool and GameFreak had proper buzz and marketing with Megas of famous mons.
