>>39031983Kinda building off the "it's about battles" part, I think a lot of it is how the whole franchise chose to separate itself from normal real life. It might sound stupid now, but I feel like quite a bit of it for kids was that, especially during Pokemania, GF hadn't done a whole lot ASIDE FROM pokemon to differentiate the world from real life. For a great many kids, the pokemon world could very well just be ours, and they were seeing some hidden side of it.
But with the generations, they started clearing up ambiguous questions in ways that made it clear it's its own world, with only some similarities to ours for convenience. Suddenly animals just plain don't exist despite the indian elephant meme (still a PAINFULLY STUPID idea from my view, but that's for another time). Suddenly there's a mythology that's not too different from one people could make, but it's absolutely not a real-world one. Suddenly there's kingdoms in not-New York. With each bit of back-story, more of the "it might be real" magic-but-not was chipped away. Now it's just fiction like any other. So the anime lost a lot of its mystery, and so did the rest of the franchise, and the world found in it
