SPOILERS! Mysteries and Conspiracies of Pokemon

My thing is why would disliking something like Ash losing the Kalos League lead to deleting the Ash-Greninja form from continuity? If anything wouldn't favoring the scenario of Ash winning that League make them biased to keeping the form that would have gotten the win around (or at least send it off without literally retconning it out of flashbacks)?

My Conspiracy for Ash-Greninja was always that TPC didn't like the idea of Ash's win coming down to a new mon's super form as the poster boy. Notice how the two wins that made headlines (Ash winning Alola and then Leon in the Coronation Series) put their final bouts down to Pikachu, whether directly or indirectly (the Tapu Koko battle right after the actual tournament), and the Galar closer was Pikachu vs a Charizard user who they made no secret about being an Ace (bonus points for "Leon" also being the name of the Indigo League Pikachu that cost Ash the OG run). A good deal of this assumption is because I'm just cynical with their refusal to let you forget Pikachu (or Charizard) for more than a week ever since Gen 6 happened in general (up to and including Horizons) and Greninja's popularity plus story role setting it up as a prime scapegoat for such an example.
 
pika pal said:
My thing is why would disliking something like Ash losing the Kalos League lead to deleting the Ash-Greninja form from continuity? If anything wouldn't favoring the scenario of Ash winning that League make them biased to keeping the form that would have gotten the win around (or at least send it off without literally retconning it out of flashbacks)?

My Conspiracy for Ash-Greninja was always that TPC didn't like the idea of Ash's win coming down to a new mon's super form as the poster boy. Notice how the two wins that made headlines (Ash winning Alola and then Leon in the Coronation Series) put their final bouts down to Pikachu, whether directly or indirectly (the Tapu Koko battle right after the actual tournament), and the Galar closer was Pikachu vs a Charizard user who they made no secret about being an Ace (bonus points for "Leon" also being the name of the Indigo League Pikachu that cost Ash the OG run). A good deal of this assumption is because I'm just cynical with their refusal to let you forget Pikachu (or Charizard) for more than a week ever since Gen 6 happened in general (up to and including Horizons) and Greninja's popularity plus story role setting it up as a prime scapegoat for such an example.
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I still think that maybe we're veering too much into spite territory here

The last non-Zygarde battle was a 3-way defeat of Lysandre's Mega Gyarados by Greninja, Charizard and Pikachu. The circumstances of the entire thing are pretty different for the series (the traditional battling went out the window and the giant rock was a full team effort that involved squishy nuking lysandre from orbit) but it's not that dissimilar to Pikachu getting the finale against Tapu Koko (as opposed to his actual championship coming down to lycanroc) and Leon's charizard and equally relevantly, the sinnoh league where while Infernape got the final blow against Paul, Pikachu was brought out to be the one to get the KO on Darkrai and take down Latios for Tobias.

I think that even if ash had been written to win against Alain things would likely either play out about the same (so Pikachu still gets a notable win, even as a group effort), or they'd tweak it so greninja set up a ko for Pikachu (since the villain plot can feel more disconnected).
 
R_N said:
Is there like...sources, about that fallout. I know that the tetra leak had some stuff about gamefreak/TPC grumbling about the Horizons anime's handling or not handling of certain things, with some translated emails here & there but even then there does not seem to be the level of spite that would lead to deleting an entire form because Ash lost, for a reason that didn't even correspond with why the form existed.
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The only thing we know for sure is the part where TPCi directly forced the anime to have the Alola win happen.

Tbh I don't even fully buy into my own theory – I'm not gonna go around peddling it or anything. I just thought it would be fun to talk about.

pika pal said:
My thing is why would disliking something like Ash losing the Kalos League lead to deleting the Ash-Greninja form from continuity? If anything wouldn't favoring the scenario of Ash winning that League make them biased to keeping the form that would have gotten the win around (or at least send it off without literally retconning it out of flashbacks)?
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I don't know? I'm just trying to rationalize a reason that makes some degree of sense, because it's just super fucking weird that the form was wholesale deleted from both the games and anime. The only other Pokémon forms that are currently gone are the Primals, Ultra Necrozma, and Gigantimaxes, and they at least have the excuse of being tied to defunct battle gimmicks. Battle Bond is only Mega adjacent and returned in Gen 9 with a completely different function. There's a nonzero chance Ash-Greninja will never come back if PLZA gives us Mega Greninja.
 
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12-XVI said:
Maybe they got rid of it because the new Battle Bond is easier to animate. Obviously GF hates animating stuff in Pokemon.

Either way it is too bad because Ash Greninja is pretty cool especially compared to a few regular stat boosts.
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Realistically they probably didn't want to model and texture a limited distribution pokemon from 6 years prior that became mostly inaccessible with the closure of the eshop. If they had planned to make it accessible again then it might have been a worthwhile use of resources, but since Ash has been retired as a character it's not a particularly compelling event from TPC's side of things.
 
The games nuking Ash-Gren isn't too weird because as Merritt just said it's a tie-in for a series that ended close to a decade ago. Unlike the Ash Hat Pikachus which are just alt costumes for a shitmon it was also a competitively relevant form for an already good Pokemon that frankly should've never been put in the games anyway. Now, the form being memory-holed in Journeys? That is legitimately weird, still no clue what to make of that.

I want a source on Ash's SM win being a TPCi executive demand btw, sounds fascinating
 
Karxrida said:
This definitely falls under the "conspiracy" umbrella, but I wonder if the major fallout of how the XY anime was handled led to the deletion of Ash-Greninja.

We know for a fact that anime staff went to Game Freak to have Ash-Greninja designed, that a lot of people throughout the Pokémon media empire didn't like the outcome of the Kalos League (to the point that TPCi's president outright told the anime writers to cut their crap and forced them to change their plans), and iirc Game Freak didn't have entirely positive opinions on how the anime had been handled even before XY. I admittedly don't know the exact timeline for when TPCi stepped in to force the anime's course change, but I'm willing to bet it was after Game Freak added Ash-Greninja in a super limited distribution for Sun and Moon. GF might have realized they had no more obligations to the anime when it was decided Ash was actually being retired, so they deleted the form in Gen 8 to wash their hands of the whole thing and force the anime to follow suit in flashbacks.

Also likely because they want to have Mega Greninja down the line.
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While I'm not sure all of this is true, I do think it raises some points that likely are.

Ash-Greninja's entire existence is really awkward. It seems like it was essentially made to fill in a gap left by the cancellation of Pokémon Z. They could've given Ash another mon to mega evolve to match his rivals, but then that would've overshadowed the rest of his Kalos team that he had already been raising for the entire saga. It could've been one of his reserves, Sycamore's Garchomp, or heck even Lucario, but it would've been a very obvious last-minute shoehorn as opposed to coming up with a new transformation for the Pokémon on his team already likely to become his "ace" of that region. They tied its design and name directly to Ash, making it challenging to implement into the main series (though clearly not impossible).

Idk if the Kalos league loss was forced or not, but it honestly makes sense in hindsight as a stepping stone to Ash's Alola and WCS victories. In any case, it definitely put all the hype Ash-Greninja received to a screeching halt. They gave Ash a special form just so he could match mega evolution's power and it got him to 2nd place in the league. The aura farming was absolutely still there, but it definitely still felt like "close but no cigar" for a lot of fans. Then the decision to release his Greninja instead of having it chill at Oak's so it could help Zygarde with the remaining vines was weird and very much felt like executive interference. The only other reason I can think of to do so is because when Ash found it as a Froakie, it was known for leaving other trainers. But Ash was clearly special as it stuck beside him as it evolved. It exists in the games as something akin to Spiky-Eared Pichu or the Cosplay Pikachu forms, though is way more popular because of the aura farm. It basically just existed for aura farming.

I think it's weird they memory-holed the form in Journeys-all they had to do was draw it in a flashback or two. They make reference to the bond phenomenon and tie it to his Mega Lucario. I'm not sure there was a mandate against featuring Ash-Greninja-if there was, they at least showed footage of it in the MPM opening and promo footage. Greninja and Battle Bond's inclusion in SV with no form seemed to really seal its fate, and if it's not in Z-A, that'll be the final nail in the coffin. Since the Kalos starters are likely to be getting megas in this game, I'm not sure how you'd have both those forms co-exist in a game without abilities. Not to mention the retiring of Ash's character. So yeah, I think GF and the other hands involved in Pokémon kinda just agreed to wash their hands of it and we're likely to finally be getting the Mega Greninja that we could've gotten a decade ago. A lot of this could've been avoided if they had just made it the one new gen 7 mega, or if they had just given Ash a Lucario in the XY saga like in the games. Ash-Greninja was a small part of Greninja's popularity, and it was already super popular in gen 6 before it came along. So I think they ultimately just wanted to treat it like a Spiky-Eared Pichu.
 
i do agree that theres no need to assume malice per se: even if the higher ups not liking the outcome of the anime is true, theyre not really going to take it out on a random pokemon of his team, theyre just gonna tell the team to fix their story writing and get the show in order for better ratings/outcomes. ash greninja was removed because ash retired, thus the form is redundant, and pokemon likes being clean and when they retcon stuff they like doing it media wide, so they just decided to remove the mentions of ash greninja in preparation for nuking it outta existence.
 
DrPumpkinz said:
:sv/klawf:

Why is Klawf a Rock-type? Best as I can tell, it doesn't have rocks incorporated into its biology, not any more than any other exoskeletoned invertebrate anyway. Is it literally just because it hangs out on cliffs?
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R_N said:
I'm guessing the implication is the shell is as rocky as the mountain ranges it lives in.

I certainly never second guessed it.
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This Pokémon reminds me a lot of Dwebble and more specifically Crustle, minus the roadblocks. My best guess is that they’re Rock-Type because of their habitats being rock-related or something. I know that’s not much to go off of but Klawf already feels basically nonexistent if it wasn’t for the Titan fight.
 
Ear547 said:
So yeah, I think GF and the other hands involved in Pokémon kinda just agreed to wash their hands of it and we're likely to finally be getting the Mega Greninja that we could've gotten a decade ago.
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Welp.
1758807326667.png

It absolutely clears Ash-Greninja too.
 
DrPumpkinz said:
:sv/klawf:

Why is Klawf a Rock-type? Best as I can tell, it doesn't have rocks incorporated into its biology, not any more than any other exoskeletoned invertebrate anyway. Is it literally just because it hangs out on cliffs?
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Probably, but also, just looking at it, I’m not really sure what other type it would be without being equally as nebulous.

Water? I guess if you’re thinking that “crab” = “marine animal,” but that isn’t always the case.

Ground? That would be just about as vibes-based for Klawf as Rock is; perhaps only slightly less so because Ground itself is a more flexible type profile than Rock.

Fighting? Sure, but doesn’t Klawf just feel rockier than Crabrawler?

Normal? You could, but that’d just be giving up and admitting to my entire premise here.

You could similarly question Tyranitar’s Rock-typing because it too has only the justifications of “hard shell, lives in mountains, eats dirt,” especially since its pre-evolutions are Rock/Ground and so Tyranitar could have conceivably retained the Ground typing instead. But then we get into the question of “Maybe the devs chose for it to be Rock-type for balance reasons, since Rock/Dark is 4x weak to Fighting.” Not that Klawf is anywhere in the same vicinity as Ttar, but it’s an early-game boss with a built-in (worse) Shell Smash, so maybe they wanted to be more brittle. “If Brock’s Onix were made today…”
 
Karxrida said:
I presume it's a ninja thing since Greninja's Smash trailer shows it charging Water Shuriken while hanging upside down.

And/Or frogs and sticky feet I guess?
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I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head but I feel like it’s kind of a common ninja trope to be able to hang from the ceiling through some means or another.

So I think it’s that + the sticky frogs thing.

I do wonder if maybe GF’s artists might have been forced to come up with something less straightforward than they otherwise would have, because we know from the big leak last year that they once had plans for a Flying-type Eeveelution that they felt they had to abandoned because it was too similar to fan designs, and that’s a risk I’ve seen mentioned by creators in other series too. Mega Greninja fan arts were plentiful before now, but there aren’t really any prominent ones that tried flipping it upside-down for their concept.
 
part of me wonders if Greninja specifically is upsidedown not just because of the ninja thing but because Delphox is riding the broom upright. They wanted the pair to both be airborne but lead to opposite silhouettes with their accessories while the bulky kinda square/circular chesnaught breaks it up in group shots
 
Personally I find with a lot of the modern designs that when I look at the artwork or stills my reaction is "oh god that looks goofy, will it work?" but then seeing it in motion is a whole lot different and I like it more. Both mega Greninja and Delphox probably fall into this category, I feel like they'll work better when seen in-game.
 
Esserise said:
I do wonder if maybe GF’s artists might have been forced to come up with something less straightforward than they otherwise would have, because we know from the big leak last year that they once had plans for a Flying-type Eeveelution that they felt they had to abandoned because it was too similar to fan designs, and that’s a risk I’ve seen mentioned by creators in other series too. Mega Greninja fan arts were plentiful before now, but there aren’t really any prominent ones that tried flipping it upside-down for their concept.
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That's still just very dumb on their part. In the US, plenty of authors will state publicly that they do not read fanfic, do not accept story ideas in email, and otherwise do not engage with fanworks. You know, to reasonably avoid being sued for stealing ideas.

And I'm pretty sure at least some of them are lying through their teeth. No details, but there's reasons I suspect it.

And that's fine, because the fact that they say it so often and how hard it would be to prove means that they're basically protected forever because of that unless something really obvious happens. With Nintendo lawyers on their side? If GF/TPC just said "While we love and appreciate all the work fans put into exploring the Pokémon universe, and we do hang fanart we enjoy around our offices, our designers do not look at any art that includes unofficial Pokémon", they'd be safe from any lawsuits. Instead they specifically said they trawl the internet looking for fan designs to be sure they don't get too close to one of them. Which means if they miss one and actually do end up close to a fan design by sheer coincidence, the fan has proof GF looks at fakemon.

And that leads to them throwing out the most logical and reasonable expansions to the dex, which is really concerning from a design perspective.
 
Hugin said:
That's still just very dumb on their part. In the US, plenty of authors will state publicly that they do not read fanfic, do not accept story ideas in email, and otherwise do not engage with fanworks. You know, to reasonably avoid being sued for stealing ideas.

And I'm pretty sure at least some of them are lying through their teeth. No details, but there's reasons I suspect it.

And that's fine, because the fact that they say it so often and how hard it would be to prove means that they're basically protected forever because of that unless something really obvious happens. With Nintendo lawyers on their side? If GF/TPC just said "While we love and appreciate all the work fans put into exploring the Pokémon universe, and we do hang fanart we enjoy around our offices, our designers do not look at any art that includes unofficial Pokémon", they'd be safe from any lawsuits. Instead they specifically said they trawl the internet looking for fan designs to be sure they don't get too close to one of them. Which means if they miss one and actually do end up close to a fan design by sheer coincidence, the fan has proof GF looks at fakemon.

And that leads to them throwing out the most logical and reasonable expansions to the dex, which is really concerning from a design perspective.
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Well, it is only idle speculation on my end. I have no idea if that was a factor in the process for Mega Greninja or not, I just know it’s what resulted in that Eeveelution being scrapped. For all we know, upside-down Greninja might’ve been their very first idea, or maybe it was part of a slate of proposals and whoever makes the final decision liked it best and felt it was “most logical.” Maybe they just wanted something that was visually distinct from Ash-Greninja.

I agree that they would probably have more then enough room for plausible deniability to avoid any legal objections, but I’m also not an international lawyer so I can’t say I fully understand the specifics involved. Again, I just know it’s a thing I’ve also seen other creators mention before.

As an example, the guy who used to do most of the writing and story planning for the LEGO series Bionicle way way back in the day was pretty active on forums, but I remember him saying he said he legally wasn’t allowed to read any fanfic outside of officially designated “The winning story will become canon!” contests because the suits didn’t want to be susceptible to any claims of plagiarism. Obviously I don’t think they could have policed what he did in his personal free time, so maybe he could have read fanfics anyway, and maybe it was all really just a somewhat paranoid abundance of caution rather than a real legal risk, but nevertheless, that was the official stance on how he was able to interact with fan-made content. And since I recall seeing some other creators in other franchises say similar things over the years, the Flying-type Eeveelution thing just makes me think, “Huh, maybe GF have a weird restriction like that too for some reason.”
 
This is just an aside, but wasn't it not an eeveelution but instead a would-be Alolan Eevee from the design phase where they were like "yeah this alolan scyther just evolves into normal scizor"

Honestly sounds like it probably wouldn't have gone that far in the design process regardless.


(Also I think the comment about the eevee design snafoo was only on internal documents and not like a public statement?)
 
Hugin said:
That's still just very dumb on their part. In the US, plenty of authors will state publicly that they do not read fanfic, do not accept story ideas in email, and otherwise do not engage with fanworks. You know, to reasonably avoid being sued for stealing ideas.

And I'm pretty sure at least some of them are lying through their teeth. No details, but there's reasons I suspect it.

And that's fine, because the fact that they say it so often and how hard it would be to prove means that they're basically protected forever because of that unless something really obvious happens. With Nintendo lawyers on their side? If GF/TPC just said "While we love and appreciate all the work fans put into exploring the Pokémon universe, and we do hang fanart we enjoy around our offices, our designers do not look at any art that includes unofficial Pokémon", they'd be safe from any lawsuits. Instead they specifically said they trawl the internet looking for fan designs to be sure they don't get too close to one of them. Which means if they miss one and actually do end up close to a fan design by sheer coincidence, the fan has proof GF looks at fakemon.

And that leads to them throwing out the most logical and reasonable expansions to the dex, which is really concerning from a design perspective.
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And that is truly disappointing. Because it means that the stuff people have been begging for all these years may never get made due to all of the fan designs out there.
 
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