I feel like the dark/violent stuff is carried on entirely from people always seeing the panels of charmeleon cutting arbok in half this aint your mama's pokemon!!!!!!! stuff and just extrapolating from there because that stuff tends to fall off fast when you burn through the arcs lolI could write pages and pages about pokespe because it's been part of my life for yeaaars. extremely cringe but it's true. I don't want to derail this thread too much though so I'll just throw a few fun ones:
- Pokespe isn't really that dark or violent. A lot of mangas of its own age rating and genre get much more bloody and pokespes violence is very subdued. There's times where it gets bloody but ngl it just looks kinda edgy and stupid when they do it LOL (yamamoto can't draw violence to save his life)
- Pokespe isn't always better than the anime. Sumo anime sweeps sumo arc out of the water it's not even a joke. And a lot of times the comparison is just nonsensical (different audiences, genres and media.)
- Kusaka cant write romance and everytime it shows up its either very annoying or just ruins the characters outright if he focus on it for more than 2 seconds. Stop doing that my guy.
And finally: I like ruby. I wish he were in a better manga.
In general I wonder how much general "popular fandom consciousness" opinions about Adventures are like that, hedged in those first couple generations of manga.