>>15815543Is XY really all that different, though?
I mean, look at your list: Ash doesn't remember anything this time that he didn't then. Pikachu's 'worst first loss' is something we just have to agree to disagree on (personally I think getting his shit wrecked by a fucking Surskit when Ash was so hopelessly overmatched he couldn't even touch it was worse, at least there was some attempt to explain the Snivy one) Iris might have been a more annoying Misty but at least she wasn't a cock-hungry bore with no defining traits at all besides Ash's existence. Is Clemont all that different from Cilan, in all honesty? All they did with him was substitute silly machines for the food puns, and Team Rocket somehow managed to do that better.
I'll take a boring rival over no rival.
You could argue that Team Rocket 'did a 180 for no reason at all', but at least it made them actually mean something to what little plot this show has for the first time since Kanto, plus it eventually freed us, however temporarily, from having to deal with them every week. Plus, their second sudden 180 at the end of BW comes even more out of left field than the one from the beginning, which at least got foreshadowed by the ending of DP.
No comment on Oshawott, there's really no way to debate on him. You either like him or don't.
Frankly, five episodes into BW we at the very least had the beginning of the ongoing plot that was going to end with the banned Team Plasma episodes. Five episodes into XY, all we have is a guy with a mask, Serena wanting the D and nothing else, and Pikachu getting his shit smacked by something one step above that OP Magikarp from early DP. Flashy camera angles during battles haven't saved this from being a boring grind to anything interesting, and in all honesty I wonder how much of its praise is coming from people who have forgotten the worst thing about DP - I watched it when it was airing, only skipping two episodes (the Poketch episode and the tag battle twins
