>>54427575Compared to Serena, Misty's ship tease with Ash was toned down a lot by the fact that Indigo Ash was written as a sort of goofy, sort of bratty immature kid who had exclusively Pokémon on his mind. Misty and Ash have a kind of relationship that relies mostly on the concept of 'frenemies', they are often picking at each other and while it's easy to read their relationship as an about-to-blossom romance, it is never shown bluntly that way, it is always implied at most and never rubbed on the audience's face.
Meanwhile, Serena is written before and foremost as a love interest for Ash, and they aren't subtle at all about it. The whole premise of her character is, fundamentally, what you'd find as a self-insert OC by a 14 years old girl whose fictional crush is Ash. To make it worse, XY Ash is a Shonen Protagonist wannabe, so he lost most of the bratty, naive innocence of Indigo Ash.
Sure, XY Ash is still unaffected by love feelings in a blunt way, but his relationship with Serena shows more awareness from the writers' pov of wanting to tease Amourshipping for the fans, because that did draw in audience, somehow.
Such a planning would have been very hard to do in the late 90s because the Pokeani fanbase, and the shipping part of it especially, were still in an embryonal phase.
Pearlshipping had a lot of fans back then, because while Dawn didn't show nearly as much interest as Serena, she actually rejected Kenny, was written to develop a deeper bond with Ash compared to May, and after May's canon romance subplot with Drew, people were kind of expecting something similar for Dawn too.
