>>51595686Serena's journey towards independence starts with a single step, as many other journeys do, however, this being the Pokémon XY anime, it's a start with one step forward and two steps back. When we first meet her we see that she is in an unfavorable position in life, stuck with her mother, forced to continue her practice of Rhyhorn racing, which she doesn't enjoy. It is at the end of what we can only assume is an average day in her life, does she receive her call to action by way of seeing Ash on the news reporting on the events that happened on the Lumiose Tower. She immediately decides to leave her home and go traveling to meet Ash, but, what is important to keep in mind is that the reason she went off isn't because of a desire to fulfill a dream or passion, or to pursue a romantic endeavor, as was stated in XY113 during her talk with Palermo, she only used reuniting with Ash as an excuse to just get out of her daily routine and live her life independently, even if she didn't exactly know how to do that in the beginning. This is where the excuse of meeting up with Ash and her relationship with him become relevant, while she was using her crush on him as an excuse to be stagnant, as shown by the first third where she didn't even have any sort of long term goal, it was precisely because she got as close to Ash did she come to desire a dream of her own. Indeed, it wasn't just childlike infatuation she had for Ash but also admiration for his attitude towards life, this, of course, spawned a duality in her relationship with him, as her desire to be with him was only a result of initially wanting to run away from what she didn't like and remain stagnant but also her closeness makes her strive for finding a passion in her life, and therein lies the conflict, the closer she is to Ash the more she wants to find and achieve her dream herself, while the same closeness makes it harder for her to truly commit to any of those because of her dependence on Ash. (1/3)
