Changes are common in the world of Pokémon. Technology moves forward, new generations have their own favorites and developers don’t want things to get stale. However, that apparently doesn’t apply to the Pokémon anime, because for the last 25 years Ash Ketchum has been the series’ protagonist. Is that about to change?
There’s been speculation for years, but more and more people are seeing signs that the Ash era could be coming to an end. The folks over at ScreenRant recently wrote a piece called “Pokémon Just Hinted That It’s Retiring Ash Ketchum.” The argument is that the Netflix show Pokémon Journeys is a perfect way to retire Ash.
The article argues that Ash is finally a world-class trainer and his storyline is stagnant. His replacement could be none other than Pokémon Journeys’ Goh because Goh is already familiar to the audience and it would allow the franchise to get back to its roots of simply collecting every Pokémon.
Another hint could be that episode 135 is a callback to the first episode of the original series. It’s loosely translated from Japanese to “Pokémon I’m Glad I Chose You!” while the first ep of the older one is “Pokémon, I Choose You!” This has a lot of people thinking this is the end for Ash.
Over on r/Pokemon, one user posted that “This is Ash’s last series and Goh is his replacement.” That was two years ago, so this discussion has been going on for a while. Just like anything else, some people say yes and other people say things like “They’re not getting rid of Ash. We’d all love it, but at this point, that’d be like getting rid of Pikachu.”
“If they did, sales would drop so much. And everyone would hate pokemon for what they did,” someone else said. However, feelings can change. While it may have seemed like getting rid of Ash was impossible two years ago that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
About six months ago someone else on r/Pokemon talked about what Goh replacing Ash might look like.
“Goh … seems like a character with a personality similar to Ash’s, but has enough differences to not be Ash 2.0. Goh could change the objective of the anime. He could turn it from ‘becoming a Pokemon master’, which is, let’s be honest, vague and poorly defined, to a much more realistic objective for the plot: capturing Mew.”
For now, we’ll have to wait and see but it really does feel like a change is in the air. We’ll keep you posted.