just browsed serebii , and state of PAD there is pathetic seriously horizons reached 3 years and speculation page has barely around 750 lol , and most comments were just from same few group of users
The state of bulbagarden is even more pathetic it seems like at this point only reddit where activity is still quite active but most posts nowadays there were just stupid posting .
honestly ash leaving the anime has more affected the fandom more than I expected .
I mean no offense, but discussion about pokeani as a whole has been diminishing for years now. Not to mention that pinpointing popularity of a media based on another dying means of communication like forums does not make for good evidence :/
The only time pokeani saw an actual renaissance was during the XY era, but after SM the hype started to die down again (and got a small peak when companions started reappering in JNs and it was announced that would be Ash's final season).
Acting like Horizons is not the closest thing to a pokeani renaissance since XY is just being sorta of a boomer. There's plenty of people who got into the anime for the first time now with horizons, and the anime has a trusted following, but since its fans are mostly young kids (aka the target audience for pokeani, aka the people the higher up do wanna watching the show, not 30yo who have empty nest syndrome with ash) that tend to use social media like twitter, discord or tiktok, not some ancient forum that has been around since 2004, is hard for old ashnime fans to find the "proof" of how big Horizons actually is.
Yes, it is still not as popular as the likes of XY or the OG saga, but Horizons is doing the hard job of finding a new audience as 90% of the people who watched ashnimes newest seasons did it because of Ash and to some extend Team Rocket. No one was coming to pokeani for the amazing storytelling, just for the characters they got way too attached during childhood and cared for even decades later.
Horizons is about letting those people go and starting a new era. And considering they had to build it's community from close to zero, it grew pretty impressively in my opinion and I honestly don't like when fellow Ashnimers try to downplay that achievement just because Ash is gone :T
