>>36821728>>36821762>>36821889The guy discussing "fake popularity" is clearly shitposting, but i do agree that Greninja was an instant hit, and therefore, the popularity push was deserved. Why?
Well if you look at the stats on Oct 2nd 2013, people instantly started jumping on the Greninja train instantly after proper high quality pictures of him leaked. Go to Serebii Forums, Marriland, /vp/ archives, Twitter results virtually anywhere on the net and you'll see that polls that used to overwhelmingly go towards either Fennekin or Chespin began to skew havily to Froakie. Remember that those two million voter polls everyone always posts were conducted one month after the release of X/Y. By then Greninja had no appearances in media, no Smash inclusion and no in-game importance, yet he still topped lists. I consider that to be the utmost case of natural popularity, and if they truly wanted to shill it from the start, they completely lucked out instead of ending in an Incineroar kind of deal where they clearly always wanted Incineroar to have some degree of popularity considering it's Masked Royal's signature pokemon, so it is one of the few Pokemon that appears in the overworld and much more often than the others along with being the only fully evolved starter to appear in the movie as a main antagonist, and more recently being virtually the only Final Stage starter to get screentime and being an absolute menace in both VGC and TCG, Yet even so, he's not as well regarded as Greninja was during those early months before the shilling. Another example of (slightly) natural popularity was Charizard. Sure, he was in the actual cover of the games, one of the 3 starters to get such an honor, but even before his anime appearances he was obviously the most popular starter even though in-game he was either average or flat-out shit until Gen 6 gave him a mega buff.
In those specific cases it becomes only natural to want to be able to please a much larger demographic.
