>>36742853Famously EXTRA non canon, same as literally everything else in Pokemon but the games. EToP was presented as a concept by a manga group to rewrite and reintroduce the anime as something people could read and enjoy differently while still just being a retelling that could come out more frequently than episodes of the show. It went way the fuck off the rails like immediately though. If I recall they got one guy to do all the writing and character designs and art and everything and gave him super vague ideas of what they wanted him to do. it was a fairly popular manga, but it was cancelled kind of fast, too. Special was the preferred one and I guess the copyright holders didn't like the idea that there was so much over saturation of the market at the time.
The guy they got to do everything was cheap, too. Classic tale of Japanese cartoon and comic culture in the 90s trying to take advantage of something and just grabbing a cheap artist to do it. He was cheap for a reason, though. He had, up until that point, done literally nothing but porn and after the comic stopped running he continued to do porn. And it shows from time to time. If memory serves I think he did a porn comic of Jessie and James that (because of his connection to the manga series) is sometimes taken as canon for EToP. With some people even suggesting it as the event that caused that very image.
