>>53125667What is there to explain?
It was fucking awful for the most part, everyone who started on gen 1/gen 2 was going into middle/high school and now pokemon was seen kiddie shit.
It was a game that was not only NOT evolving, it was GOING BACKWARDS, gen 3 removed animated sprites, day/night, did a massive dexcut, only 1 region, etc.
Meanwhile the anime dropped Misty and Brock, it started feeling like a proper cash in meant to be nothing but an advertisement.
At the same time there was constant talks of sony coming up with their own portable that would release a couple years later and the PS2 was absolutely dominating everything while stuff like Yu-gi-oh! was taking over.
You couldn't really talk about Pokemon anymore without being considered either an idiot or a kid that won't grow up, it was the end of the era of Poke mania, gen 3 designs looked extremely overdesigned and "like digimon" to most people and people lambasted gen 3 for the completely horrid graphics and same old formula, fan content was scarce because it was only either done by autists, kids or very few die hard fans.
Gen 4 came and it was the same, lambasted for the graphics, lack of innovation, same old stuff.
Around the release of platinum, hgss and gen 5, it started growing past the kids demographic again as the original crowd are now entering college/adult life and Pokemon starts becoming mainstream again until GO made it way bigger, in big part due to the jump on quality from later DS games coupled with the insane abundance of flashcarts so everyone was able to play them.
It's gonna be hard to find much stuff because it happened to be the early days of normie internet, most of the stuff you'll see is from 2007 and beyond with stuff like romhacks and what not.
Not fan content, but this ad always works as a time capsule and brings me back to those days;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0ErE0BGU0 
