With the cycle of how the player characters get which starter, I'm surprised that Sodo is using Grookey instead of Sobble. Makes me kinda worried for what could happen to Sobble or Grookey if they decide to go in a similar route to Treecko and Fennekin.
Yeah. It’s interesting because, according to some concept stuff posted by Yamamoto a while ago, the cycle would have been broken years ago. He had planned to give Treecko to Sapphire instead, but choose to give her Torchic in the end.To be fair, I kinda saw the end of this starter cycle coming. Ever since rivals in game have been unable to be renamed. I’m not entirely sure how to word this, but it feels like with rivals being given unchangeable canon names and with third versions of Pokemon games being basically non existent since Gen 5 onwards, we haven’t seen a third PokeSpe arc protagonist in a while. Usually the way the starter cycle had worked is that the Main Protagonist (usually the male avatar based character) gets the starter weak to the rival/third protagonist’s starter (who has a changeable name,) and the rival’s pokemon is weak against the secondary protagonists’ (usually the female avatar) starter, and then the secondary protag’s starter is weak to the main protagonists starter. When Gen 5 rolled around, we had Black with Tepig, Cheren with Snivy and Bianca with Oshawott, though the cycle got shaken up once White was introduced with another Tepig and then given a Servine. In BW2, Lack-two has a Dewott and Whi-Two currently kinda has a Tepig; Hugh, who is the rival in BW2 doesn’t have a starter Pokemon, There are several ways you can see this as either breaking the cycle of continuing the cycle.Once we get into Gen 6, X and Y follow the cycle for the two protagonists with X’s Marisso (Chespin) being strong against Y’s Froakie. Fennekin ended up with a non-dex holder for most of the arc and even then it’s official ownership isn’t clear.Gen 7 we have a slight return to the original cycle with Sun having Litten, Moon having Rowlett, and Hau having Popplio. The only thing is that Hau hardly has any page time compared to the two protagonist.Now with Gen 8, that cycle finally seems broken, since it’s Schilly who has the starter (Scorbunny) that’s strong against Soudo’s starter (Grookey). He was likely given Grooky to match his profession.Either way, when the cycle broke doesn’t really bother me. I’ll leave you guys to decide if the starter cycle is truly broken and when you guys think that the cycle broke.EDIT: I had to fix some mistakes.