>>53534039>Gyms and Leagues are fucking weakNot Famon but this is where you're LE WRONG.
GYMs are cool since they build up tension and always are visual feasts for the MC to show off some skills.
Leagues are kino precisely because fundamentally they are never stuck in the same boring ADVENTURES narratives of "oh my gosh le good guys have to defeat le bad guys and since this is a le kodomo franchise of course they will".
Leagues are all about the clash of ambitions, and the ashnime always delivered on that.
This is why Pokemon Festival of Champions is good - it takes the League - the best aspect of the ashnime and extrapolates it to greater heights.
In leagues, the one who wins isn't the MC, or the good guy, or the chosen one.
It's the one who has the best skills,tactics, strategy, luck, adaptation, reaction. It's a combination of factors, there are ways to increase the probability of winning but it's still always a gamble.
Even Ash's "underdog" plot armour can't help him against actually strong opponents or opponents who have the same "protagonist" energy lile Ritchie or Cameron/Alain.
Each worthy league rival is a person with his own encounters, hostory and story, that's the entire point.
With a typical adventure plot, you can't really do much without it turbing into the same thing over and over again.
Yeah yeah leagues are formulaic too but there's just so much more factors to it that the result combination has way more potential outcomes and scenarios.
SM and JN never really did the League writing properly so I'm not gonna count them. SM was a joke league and JN failed to sustain the previously established canon of Champions being Gods of Pokebattle. It felt extremely nerfed for what was supposed to be 10 tiers more intense and it's not about the animation. (Although that was cheap too, despite Pokemon having billions of money).
