A mildly warm take that I've somehow never seen before.
The SuMo art style is very good, but Ash has a bad design.
Everyone else looks fine, it's just that he wasn't adapted to the art style well. He's always been a very angular and spiky character, so making him soft and squishy was never going to go over well with the fans, but Ash specifically looks terrible in a way that none of the other characters do, and I think it soured everyone's opinion of the show before they could actually watch it.
Character design rant below the cut.
Regarding his design being bad, I'm actually surprised that nobody's cared to explain why he doesn't look right beyond "he's SQUISHY >:C" because if you look at his SuMo design alongside the others, it's actually pretty easy to see what's wrong with him.
They messed up his anatomy.
Let me explain.
Throughout the course of the previous anime series, Ash has had a relatively consistent facial structure, even during the switch to digital animation. SuMo, however, drew his face wrong and for some reason, they just kept it like that.
The image I found in this Reddit post has them all side by side (minus Journeys) and with them all together, it's pretty blatantly obvious what they got wrong with his anatomy.
His eyes are too small and his mouth is too big. That's it.
Stylized as SuMo was, I'm genuinely shocked that they didn't go back and fix something as simple as this, given how much effort they put into the rest of the animation.
Another weird thing about this design is that nobody else in the anime has proportions like this. It's literally just Ash. I'd be more understanding of the "It's just a different art style!" crowd if that weren't the case, but Ash's design is uniquely bad in a way that none of the other characters are.
Fuck, Mallow's face structure is more Ash-like than the Ash we got in SuMo. If it's really just stylization, why didn't they make him look more like her instead of what we got?
Along with the fucked up anatomy, I don't like his outfit and I don't think that it's something that Ash would realistically wear day-to-day, given what we've seen him with before. The color scheme is right, but throughout the series, he's shown a preference for wearing sportswear, particularly lightweight jackets and fingerless gloves that look similar to the special batting gloves that baseball players use. Comparatively, the outfit he wears in SuMo looks like something he pulled out of the Old Navy bargain bin. It might be a decent enough outfit for another character, but it doesn't look right for Ash.
Obviously he wasn't actively traveling like how he was in the prior generations, but because he never stopped working with Pokémon while he was in Alola, I don't see a reason for him to drop the sportswear. Even when they dressed him up as fucking Calem in XY, they did the bare minimum and modified his outfit so that it was more appropriate for his character, cutting off the sleeves and letting him keep his gloves. If they were that hellbent on making him cosplay Elio from the games, why didn't they do the same thing they did in XY?
I also generally hated the relatively short lived XY-SuMo trend of putting him in other characters' outfits and I'm glad it died. Rest in piss.
In short, despite what rage baiting YouTube channels would have you believe, SuMo doesn't have the worst art style ever made.
(That honor goes to Journeys, but that's a rant for another day.)
Hell, it doesn't even have a bad art style, and the show is both a fun break from the bland edgefest that was XY and just a generally well animated series. Ash's design just sucks because for whatever reason, the character designers went out of their way to make it suck, and I'm sad that the animators got so much shit for it when it was just one shitty design in a sea of good ones.
So to all the people who have been fighting for a million years over whether SuMo is ugly or not, here's your answer.
There is one (1) ugly character design in the show that breaks all of the design conventions of that show for no reason and everything else is great. All of you can shut up now. Goodbye.
The automatic association of not liking the way Gou is incorporated in the series with racism and homophobia is such a ludicrous statement. People come with many legit criticisms about the start of the new series but all you people have to respond to this is "hurrr durrr the implications!!!" as if ignoring every shortcoming (and that includes Ash) of PM2019 wasn't enough, you people have to go back to your delusional generalizations. Can't people just happen not to like the feel of this series ?
Woah there anon, just because I reblog a post doesn’t mean I agree with everything said, more or less that I can empathize with the heart of what’s been spoken. That being said I admittedly do get some implicitely subtle vibes from Pokémon fandom sometimes when it comes to characters and certain things. I’m not necessarily generalizing all criticisms of Gou or any characters as being malicious just that I can see where the posters who feel this way are coming from. Truth be told I’m not shocked. If you went on Bulbagarden or were active there you would know how much of a hot mess Gou/Go discussions are. BMFG has been getting flack for not shutting down this nonsense for a while, for example did you know they had a whole thread in which Gou/Go was labeled as a “Psycho / Sociopath.”
It took a constant ring of fighting and complaining to get it shutdown, forget Gou/Go but you want to be a bit more mindful in 2020 of throwing out labels like that. It did not shine a favorable light on Bulbagarden considering I’ve seen people on various sites discussing this. I can agree with the portion of whether justified or not, I’m kind of sick of the overly belligerent vitriol aimed at brown/dark-skinned characters as being THE WORST because of writing. Mallow/Mao seem to be everyone’s punching bag last series for being “useless” or “worthless.” I’ve seen post around bombarding Mallow with labels like that get dozens of likes and replies on BMFG. I’ve seen Iris for example get called by the N-word, “bitch,” “ugly,” “witch,” “animal,” seen her empathetic talent likened to “voodoo” (ew....) I’m of Native and African descent, it’s not hard for me to see the micro aggressions and think certain things.
As for Gou/Go I’ve see him referred to by transphobic names many a time than I care to admit. He’s not exactly the most “fanservice-y” male character (receding hairline, brown, prominent forehead, eyelashes). So I do think in general people are less tolerant of the actions of these characters than say “Serena” or “Hikari” or their good ole’ boy and hero Ash Ketchum. So I do have my feels about passive micro aggressions that are easier to get on board with about certain characters than others. Especially among pale-PokeGirl and Satoshi-fans (I say as a lover of various blonde, blue-eyes white girl characters like Korrina) That being said I’m not boxing all criticisms of Gou off as shady, I have my criticisms of his character and goal (inconsequential, not enough substance, kind of meh at times) but it does feel a bit overdone at times. There’s also the shipping implications I see with certain characters who are “nice” to Satoshi and “good waifus” to him versus ones like Koharu who are “mean, cold bitches” for “ignoring him” so I can understand why people side eye Gou hate as homophobia too.
Honestly, I can see why people are sick of it. Female characters shouldn’t have to act like “nice, well mannered waifus” to be treated decently by the fandom. Characters like Gou should be able to make mistakes without seeing so much demonization compared to characters like Paul/Shinji. The fandom needs to watch its language sometimes when it comes to what is said about characters like this because when you feel the need to constantly call characters by certain names it’s going to be hard for fans especially teen and young adult ones to not side eye you. Especially in a fandom like this one that doesn’t exactly hide its love of “waifus” and “lolis” and shipping (usually using Satoshi as a fandom bike). You do you man, but I’m just saying be self aware.
Kind of funny since I feel like one of the more bigger critics of certain aspects of PM from time to times so the idea I don’t want anyone to say anything bad abo it this series feels very tipsy turvy. When it comes right down to it we live in an age where people pay attention to stuff like this and I kind of don’t blame anyone for looking at certain patterns of behavior (I did myself as a child watching BW *Iris getting called N-word/B*tch once again on a YouTube video for example or her being othered and excluded from PokeGirl art/conversation/appreciation*) Hell even the fandom had a whole ass controversy about ambiguously brown-skinned character Nessa (the fandom certainly showed much of its antiblackness). Honestly, I really don’t think most people criticizing these characters are this way but like I said I do see why people side eye fandoms with this crap and I do see why it can get exhausting especially when it’s person attacks about appearance or gender or buzzwords like “bitch” or some mental health-related thing.
