>Goodbye Butterfree
This one episode was enough to make me lose faith in the anime. That was it for me. Not letting your Pokemon reach their full potential was one thing, but letting your closest partner go, the one who went through ups and downs with you, bonded with you... Butterfree might not have been that strong. Ash is not strong. But their bond together was powerful. And to give that bond up like that. It disgusted me. It told me that the so-called "Power of Friendship" and "Bonds with Pokemon" were nothing but shallow, meaningless constructs in this anime, ready to be discarded so that they could market new Pokemon.
So it was thoroughly unsurprising to me that Ash would let Pokemon go time and time again. As a child, I hated the Pokemon anime for telling you it's okay to let Pokemon go, and that they're alright the way they were, and that there is victory in losing. It was this point, this moment when Ash let Butterfree go, that I realised that the anime wasn't for me, and that I would never be able to respect the anime as a modicum of adaptation for Pokemon.
