>>30057778The anime says that you start your journey at ten.
The games don't seem to give a shit, since we've had multiple characters start their journey older.
Hilbert/Hilda were canon 16 at the start of BW.
Nate/Rosa were clearly around the same age when they started.
Calem/Serena were blatantly the oldest protagonists in a main series game by far and certainly they had to be no younger than 18, to the point that game Serena was just too old to follow Ash around and needed to be de-aged for the anime just so she wasn't out of place. Just look at the head count on pic related. That is not the body of a child, or even a young teenager.
Another thing to consider is region.
Notice how the regions that take place in the counterparts of western countries, Unova and Kalos, have older teenagers as their protagonists.
Meanwhile, the regions of PokeJapan have much younger protagonists in the pre-teen age bracket.
Western countries tend to place much stricter rules on their youth than Asian countries do when it comes to anything deemed harmful to the child's 'safety'.
And then you also need to factor in that most of the PokeJapan regions are in much more rural and safe areas with little in the way of major cities, where kids play around in the woods all the time. Where as Unova and Kalos are based around two of the largest cities on the planet, where a 10 year old child would easily get abducted and thrown into a sex dungeon if they were left unattended too long, something that teenagers tend to escape more often than not via common sense.
Sure, Alola has a young protagonist and is technically based on a U.S. state the way Unova was, but Hawaii has had large Japanese populations for decades. At it's peak, Japanese people made up almost half. We can assume the same holds true in the game universe, and that a lot of Kanto's social mores and regards to Pokemon training rubbed off from generations of Kanto migrants influencing the culture.
