>>56817425It was Yuyama vs the world.
The thing is that everyone else mostly let Yuyama just be. They didn't take the idea of Ash staying forever seriously and any suggestion of Ash leaving was just that, a suggestion, an off-handed thing they mentioned here and there.
It's only when the kalos league happened and there was massive backlash that everyone else realized that letting Ash stay forever and be a eternal loser had become a problem, furthermore, Yuyama wanted to Ash to lose during the Alola League too, which is when people finally grew a spine and told him to fuck off, that they shouldn't depend just on staff whims, and that they have to start taking in the thoughts of the fans and take their needs an desires into consideration, which was an idea they decided to push further when they saw the celebrations for the alola league win.
The SM anime was also confirmed to be an experiment on a "no-progress" series, which failed, which is why they decided to go for the league at the end of the day.
Ash simply was a balloon that kept having air blown into it, mostly by Yuyama, while everyone watched, and no one expected would actually explode, but then it exploded.
It was all nothing but carelessness and utter mismanagement.
