The recent announcement of the major impending changes to the Pokemon anime and just the general vibe of the IP going through a big transitional period right now for better or worse has got me wondering more than ever about something that's been on my mind for a good while.
How is Pokemon Adventures/Pokemon Special still going in its current form?
Seriously. For a moment, let's just stop and review the facts, which I myself overheard secondhand by one or two people who still kinda sorta not really care.
-Shopro are bastards and mercilessly crush any Pokespe Youtube content from being produced via copyright nukes
-At the same time they essentially do zero promotion on their own accord, with nothing on the official Pokemon youtube channels or anything like that. This leads to a terrible information vacuum that makes even learning about the manga's continued run and finding where to read it hard
-Partially as a result of this vacuum and partially as a result of what appears to have been a genuinely severe decline in quality at some point, the public attention given to NuPokespe seems minimal. I've dunked on late-stage Ash Pokeani in the past, but that at least had a very clear, engaged and active core nucleus of fans right down to the end. Meanwhile, even
Serebii stopped posting updates on new Pokespe chapters a good while ago, and anecdotally the hardcore fanbase for anything past circa Diamond & Pearl seems effectively nonexistant.
-All of this is topped off by this manga having seemingly been put through some of the most crippling and persistent production problems of ANY branch of the franchise in the past decade. Look no further than the fiasco that was the BW2 arc to see what I mean: That was put on so many hiatuses and took so long to resolve that one of the later chapters references
Colress' cameo in Sun and Moon.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but right now all I see is a diseased relic of a manga that is begging for at the very least a drastic overhaul, if not being outright shitcanned and replaced with something better. What that better thing would be, I cannot definitely say outside some scattered pointers. What I do think of as a particularly stark contrast to this dismal state of affairs is the ongoing IDW Sonic the Hedgehog comics, which for the past 5 years have produced characters and storylines so acclaimed that the videogames are
steadily adopting some of their
elements. I don't even know if they've announced a Scarlet & Violet chapter, but if they haven't then I can only hope for the sake of the clearly horrifically overworked mangaka that amidst all the restructuring and revamping basically every aspect of Pokemon is going through right now that some higherup takes a good look at all this and determines that there's more that can be done outside of letting it shamble on for another generation off the inertia and apathy that increasingly seem like the only satisfying explanation for its continued existence.