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In the interest of looking more deeply into the writing staff, I began another spreadsheet to sort out all of the screenplay writers that worked on the Ashnime. I basically wanted to see if I could get a glance at "who did what." Here are some things I learned:
1. Shudo's influence on the Pokemon anime is probably overstated. This is likely more of a PokeTuber thing than a trend here, but while Shudo saved Team Rocket and wrote in the world view of the series, a lot of it didn't really make it on screen, per his blog. I knew beforehand that even with the first three movies, 20 episodes isn't a lot to write for the Pokemon anime given how big it is. But I didn't really "get" how much more the freelance writers did compared to Shudo until I laid it all out on a spreadsheet. Even in the OS, Tomioka, Junki Takegami, Hideki Sonoda, and Yukiyoshi Ohashi were the ones writing many of the things people remember (i.e., Takegami wrote Brock's backstory and Shudo used it for the novel). I still like Shudo, and his episodes and the way he thinks about writing are all fascinating, but outside of Kanto he's a bit overplayed.
2. I was surprised by how few patterns I could pick up at a glance. There were a few niche things: Shinzo Fujita really likes kaiju, and wrote three kaiju episodes for AG; Akemi Omode notably wrote the lion's share of Serena's episodes in XY. Otherwise, you don't really get a sense of where they fit into the production. Pretty much everyone wrote Gym battles, League battles, villain arcs, CotD, whatever. There is one cool exception I noticed and it's pic related. In late AG, Tomioka basically took over writing May's Contests. He had his fair share of Gym battles, but the League was mostly written by Shoji Yonemura and Ash's Battle Frontier matches were spread across the team. I don't think it's quite as one-sided with Dawn's Contests in DP, but he was also the composer and did most of DP's shit, including Team Galactic and Paul.
