The 3rd episode of the new Pokémon mini series, Path to the Peak, is up on the official Pokémon YouTube channel. If you haven’t started the series, you need to. Its super cute and short. The series is about the TCG competative scene, but you don’t have to know anything about Pokémon to enjoy the series. Go check it out because trust me, you need this series in your life!
**This is going to have spoilers, so make sure you watch the series before reading this**
This series has been great so far. Obviously, they’ve changed some rules around to make the series more dramatic, but it doesn’t matter because the show is so cute and so much fun to watch.
Ava goes to internationals, and at this point in the story, she is undefeated in her local scene. Ava feels the tension and pressure that comes with undisputed, and this pressure affects how she looks at the game. What started as something fun that she did to make friends is now almost a burden because she doesn’t want to let her friends down. This shift in character presents creates an important moment in Ava’s character where she struggles between having fun and being the people’s champion. This episode deals less with Ava having fun with Oddish and more about Ava dealing with the anxiety of competing on a larger stage. This is a very powerful and relevant human experience that has been illustrated perfectly in a cute ten-minute cartoon.
I like that Ava loses this important match because it paints her as an imperfect character. Although she might be the best in her scene, she still has a lot to learn about the game. The loss gives her an adversity she has to overcome, a goal she needs to work words, and room for improvement. Will this be enough to make her quit the game? Will she leave Oddish behind to play a meta deck? It’s frustrating that I have to wait a week to find out how she reacts, but the series has done such a good job of making me love Ava as a character, that I am willing to wait.
I understand that this might be a little too deep of an analysis for a cartoon, but I love it and want it to be successful. I’ll try to do one of these for all future episodes, so make sure you like comment, subscribe, and share this with your friends! See you next week.