>>57399110It's absolutely related. These people had been sitting there for a long time shitting their pants in excitement waiting for Serena to finally be written out of the show. Then they got a last minute love confession and kiss on the mouth thrown at them. That broke them.
It's a bit hard to grasp if you weren't there at the time, but during the first 13 years of the show there were a LOT of fags that were extremely, extremely devoted to the idea of Ash being romantically paired with their favorite girl, and they'd sit there and nitpick scenes and dialogue to absurd degrees looking for "hints" that showed without a doubt that the writers were totally intending for you to understand that Ash and girl X were super duper in love, then have retarded slapfights with each others over which girls' "hints" were real and which were just misinterpretations.
Then Serena got introduced, and even the trailers for XY showed way more genuine romance material for her and Ash than all these "hints" combined, making a ton of these nutjobs absolutely furious and led to them devoting the next three years of their lives damage controlling the absolute shit out of everything that involved Serena's very obviously present feelings for Ash. It was fucking absurd and very very sad.
