>>55679676>The writers saw that nobody gave a shit about Ash's meme league win in AlolaPeople adore the end of that league though. Particularly Ash vs Kukui mind, but Ash winning the league is basically a national holiday at this point.
Also the Masters 8 didn't suck because Ash won. It sucked because Journeys is an incredibly rushed product with stilted animation, terrible battle writing and awful pacing.
If the battles were high octane, well paced and well written you'd have a DP/XY situation on your hands where peoples only real issue would be Ash jobbing. The issue with JN is that the animation is so stiff you'd think everyone got hit with a T-wave beforehand and the pacing of the battles is ass. You'll have Ash's Pokemon of choice getting slapped up for the better part of 6 minutes, completely fucking dominated, then it gets 2 good hits in and all of a sudden wins.
You could easily have written his wins in a realistic and convincing manner, but when they mostly come down to getting your ass beat, Ash saying "c'mon [Pokemon], you can do it! Do your best!" and they suddenly do a really big T-bolt or Flamethrower or some shit and oneshot a healthy Pokemon owned by a fucking Champion, that's the real fucking problem.
Ash was never a jobber by virtue of the narrative, he's just at the whims of ass writing that forces him to do so. Hell the writing on the wall for even his first League was victory (fucking Gary dropped out before he did) but suddenly Zard having sleepy times against Ritchie means disqualification.