>>40204700Uh, yes, that's what I was talking about? The intention was to push Kasumi as the main waifu across all marketing, which is how the pairing was engrained, especially among normalfags (not just in the west).
The idea that it was just 4Kids making it up is what irks me, because the intention was in Japan from the start (despite people like Shudo which did not like to implement it). The rest of the world just got the Pokemon products later, so it stayed as the prime marketable shipping later than in the Japanese marketing cycle - and even there people still continued to ship it. Even the post-Shudo anime squeezed little things to remind of the OG girl, like the Queen of Hearts card and the lure. But by the time AG went in full swing, we have 4Kids adding extra Misty stuff in some places (Jirachi move), while removing on others (the specials). Might be they considered pushing May instead, even though Japan never had that push, unlike SatoKasu.
Unless you were protesting the "just teasing" thing? That's what pretty much all we had in Pokemon until Serena's big kiss. There were kisses were from secondary characters, but the main pairings were MusaKoji and SatoKasu for quite some time. Stuff like handholding and muh handkerchief were big fucking deals. And, like it or not, that's something that managed to stay in the minds of the general public, which is suddenly much more relevant now than in, say, DP era, with TPC relying more and more on Kanto nostalgia. Which is why that anon was correct about Kanto shipping stuff still being relevant (even if Shudo did not want any of it).
Then again, it's all probably irrelevant, because whoever said TPC would want to "give Ash a girlfriend" in the first place? Even the "more grown up" Special didn't.
