>>50165001This, and as someone that was a major contributor to that, I can confirm this. On /v/, you'd have several Pokégirl threads, a trading thread, occasionally an anime thread, PokéSpe threads, and some other more game related ones. Even the Sunday morning show would get its own thread on /v/. There were literally dozens of name/tripfags associated with Pokémon. Some I still have on my Steam friend's list, actually. It wasn't like, say, /mlp/, because lots of Pokémon memes underpinned old 4chan. Oh, and the Pokesho(?) oekaki threads and just generic fanart threads in general.
The spam was near constant across the board, and eventually they started to condense the threads and 4chan got one of its first ever general threads on 4chan, the Pokémon general, with the BATTLAN, TRADAN, BREEDAN, tagline. There were still Pokégirl threads, but mods cracked down on it so there'd only be one active thread allowed at any time.
Also keep in mind that 4chan was a lot slower back then. Another good example is when DP came out, there was a FC stick and it was the first time I'd ever seen sticky threads on 4chan that had over 1k posts, and there were two of them. It was following years of complaints about Pokémon being too big that it got /tr/
Not sure why I'm on /vp/ though, I only occasionally come here once every couple of months/years now and only lurk briefly.
