SPOILERS! General Pokémon Anime Discussion

Okay if I didn't know any better, I would say Friede is fucking dead just by looking at Captain Pikachu lmao

I like the new designs. Still annoyed there is no Skeledirge tho, specially when Meowscarada is going to debut in a way too similar to Floragato but eh, I can wait.

Curious about what the storyline will even be about but I guess that with the current arc ending soon we will find out after episode 90.

Also, looking at Terapagos, is that the first time we see a Pokemon from the outside of the ball excluding Adventures?
Yung Dramps said:
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It is very weird to me they are doubling down on Lucario to promote Megas instead of a brand new one. In fact, while I know they probably only made it shiny to not overlap with Ash's,
design-wise it kind of overlaps with Zeraora so it's extra weird
It's also odd they probably wanted a very popular poster child for Mega and then they also went with...Sableye. Don't get me wrong, I adore Mega Sableye. Just never thought it would be the main mon of a (seemingly) important anime character. Then again, the new TCG sets are for Mega Gardevoir and Lucario, with Gengar and Diancie also confirmed. So I guess they are focusing more on nostalgia/return of people's favourites (is Diancie even popular?) I guess I just would have guessed they would promote something like Mega Greninja rather than Lucario again.

Liko is definetly getting something new. I'm more curious about Friede, ignoring his story sheanigans, because there is no way they won't use Mega Charizard (Y I guess? They can't make it shiny lol) but he already has Tera. I guess he could lose the Tera orb or something and Megas are obviously still more hype and easy to promote, but if Champions is anything to go by they are obviously not randomly dropping Teras.

R_N said:
If they didn't want Horizons to be doing its own thing, they would have stepped in significantly sooner. I think TPC likes having the anime do its own thing and probably encouraged it as something different to go alongside their other properties. Horizons was an opportunity to keep things fresh and it has seemingly succeeded.
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While this is true, the Teraleak specifically had GF annoyed at the shiny Rayquaza and Zygarde- which is fair given the bad timing with ZA- as well as pushing it to be more like SV hence why we got the Terastal training arc at Paldea (which still sticks out to be as a sore thumb even if the justification was at least decent)
and they also mentioned how the idea of travelling trough different places was too similar to Gaia.
It would absolutely not surprise me if the next anime after Horizons is over is a lot tigher about how close to the games they must be to avoid all of these annoyances happening again. Trough personally I still don't understand the Rayquaza/Zygarde thing, while I guess it could be somehow confusing to children, if I had not been told otherwise I would have swore they were intentional Z-A tie-ins. If anything if I was GF I would be gladly surprised and take advantage of them.
 
I would rather see Crocalor evolve into Skeledirge on screen. I'm not surprised Crocalor and Quaxwell have yet to evolve, Crocalor was already quite late so it could use more time as Crocalor. Sprigatito to begin with was the first to evolve into its middle form, and Floragato will be the first of the three to reach its final form. I do think Roy will get Skeledirge in the future, there's too much smoke around that fire.

Nonetheless I'm really excited for this upcoming chapter. A timeskip is a pleasant surprise for the Pokemon anime, and seeing Liko, Roy, and Dot with their new designs they look so cool, they've really shown how far they've come as Trainers and I look forward to continuing to see them get even stronger. They've mastered Terastallization over the course of last year, now it's time for them to master Mega Evolution! Roy seems to have a Shiny Mega Lucario, which I don't mind. I hope Liko and Dot get more new team members on this new journey, hopefully Megas of their own too.

That new character seems interesting, seems he's friends/rivals with Roy, hope to see what he adds to the dynamic.

Also Friede seems to have been eliminated from the equation, which is interesting. We'll see how he gets eliminated within the next two episodes, but now it seems Captain Pikachu is under custodianship of Roy, at least for now. But I'm good with seeing Friede eliminated, and it feels like a natural progression where now the three kids are fully on their own as Trainers, doing their own adventure on their terms. Over the past year they grew strong enough where they can hold their own without Friede, now they're fully loose without Friede in the picture and doing their own thing, which is good. In that regard that makes this upcoming chapter even more exciting to see the kids fully on their own as Trainers without Friede entirely, which means that they have full autonomy over their upcoming adventures. Looking forward to it!
 
The only disappointment with the timeskip is the cast don't really look that much older. Liko barely looks any different, her clothes change is like Ash going from his Kanto/Johto clothes to his Hoenn outfit, it's even the same type of hoodie. Roy looks a little taller and Dot is basically the same besides her hair?

I realize they don't want to age them too much due to the target audience being kids, but I was expecting it to be more drastic like looking like older teens. It seems the timeskip is only a year or so? As said, if you'd place Hoenn Ash next to his old Kanto self, he already looked older in Hoenn despite still being 10 in canon. So it feels like the same thing they already did with Ash back then, it's why everyone assumed Ash was aging a year every series until BW hit us with the hard reboot.
 
I don't know if is because I found his Teraleak role a lot more interesting (even if it was also rather nonsensical and impossible to do this late anyways) but this whole thing with Friede was painfully anticlimatic.

Yes, we all knew he will be alive and well and show up with Mega Charizard later to save the day. But they could at least put more effort into me buying he was ever at danger. A flying accident while he is riding fucking Charizard is hard to buy. And him giving his googles to Pikachu was really arbitrary and out of nowhere.

On a related negative note, Roy's rival looking for Rayquaza as promo material says would be extremely lame by now. Roy already catched it pretty much. We don't need more sheanigans of pursuing it again.

Those are small nitpicks tho. Still have a lot of hope on the first real timeskip they have done, even if it probably means Horizons will be over by gen 10 which is kind of sad.
 
It's for the best we have all new casts every generation now. They're never going to do what they did with Ash again, and keep the same character for over two decades with various soft-reboots to keep him going. And it was only because the anime started with him and Pikachu, he was named after Satoshi Tajiri the creator, and the writers just saw him as too marketable to leave all those years.

Nowadays they don't have to do that anymore, and write character arcs that go on 3 or so years and move on with another fresh cast. Technically that's already what they've been doing before even with Ash around, like Go, the Sun/Moon cast, XY cast, Iris/Cilan, etc. were all only around 3 years and left when their series ended. So they've technically already been doing all new casts every 3 years since 2010 even when Ash and TR were still there.
 
Finished watching the first two episodes of the new chapter of Horizons, Mega Voltage.

It's off to a great start, and it's cool to see where Liko and Roy were by the point of the one-year timeskip and for them to reunite for a new adventure, this time on their own two feet without Friede. This is going to be a great chapter.

Horizons has been really great over the past two years and this chapter is looking to keep it up. It's been really cool to feel genuinely invested in the Pokemon anime for the first time in a long while. Journeys was a fun breath of fresh air, even if it had its faults, and seeing a lot of old characters show up again was icing on the cake there, but Horizons manages to make the Pokemon anime really stand out on its own merits, especially from a storytelling standpoint. Horizons is the most Pokemon as a show has felt like a true anime, especially one that is more on par with what modern anime is capable of nowadays, and I am here for it.

Can't wait to see more of this chapter, we're in for a good ride.
 
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