>>33934244Butterfree's sole purpose was to show off how game mechanics worked in the anime. Capturing, evolving, trading and releasing: these were all done for the first time in episodes involving that Pokémon.
Butterfree was useless dead weight as a battler.
Pidgeot, meanwhile, barely got any screen-time. On a rewatch, it's astounding how many episodes can go by between Pidgeotto doing anything interesting. It was the only Pokémon Ash owned in the first season they never bothered to give a personality to- even its unquestioning loyalty to Ash wasn't utilised interestingly. Lapras may as well have been a dinghy, it contributed fucking nothing else to almost every single episode of its tenure.
Greninja and Goodra at least kind of made sense because people always whine "Why doesn't Ash just use his strongest Pokémon all the time?". Well, they gave a story excuse for why he wouldn't be using those two.
