>>52640376earthquake was the TM reward from the final gym leader, who was very hyped up as you visit his town early without challenging it immediately.
not to suck off gen 1 for its lack of exposition but you can use your imagination and infer from it that either he's not a sore loser, not that bad of a guy, or the threat of pokemon violence makes him submit. by all means he shouldn't help you since you ruined team rocket's plans.
a n y w a y the point is that eq is a big deal, and it's the gold standard for attacking moves, on purpose. VGC zoomers are irrelevant.
