Ass Pull / Infinity Train: Seeker of Crocus

• Something that carries over from the original trilogy; the story reveals that it's possible for people inside the Train to interact with the people from outside of it. Not only does this trivialize the entire concept of the Infinity Train - which is that people are isolated from their friends and family until they get their numbers down to zero - but it makes the Train's status as a mystery to the Pokemon World even more absurd, since the Pokemon World already has technology capable of traveling through the multiverse, so the Train should be more well known outside of former passengers.
• Chloe's cloak being able to convert the Mirage Pokémon into Denizens and free them from Dr. Yung's control can be seen as this. While the cloak was implied to be stronger than in the original continuity, converting artificial beings into Denizens seems a bit too much for what's allegedly still Act 1, not to mention the obvious implication that it was one of the only ways to stop the escalating conflict. Then, when the story tries to claim that Chloe handled Dr. Yung better than Ash did, it falls a little flat. Sure, one might uncharitably see the Mirage Mew's intervention as a cop-out, but "just happening" to have a cloak that can instantaneously turn Dr. Yung's entire army against him isn't any less of a Deus ex Machina. Even the story concedes to that point, as Ash later says that he and Chloe were about equal in handling Dr Yung.
  • Likewise, the Cloak being able to look into a person's soul outside of the Train reeks of this, since at least the Mirage-Denizen conversion happened within the Train. There's simply no excuse for the Cloak to be able to transcend dimensions.
• The story eventually reveals gods and demons exist in the Train. Ignoring the thousands of questions this brings, it's clear that they just exist to explain why the Cloak is so powerful, and make Chloe seem more overpowered than she already is.
• Gloria is revealed to have lost her reflection due to a past brutal analogy. This was never hinted at prior to the reveal, and only gets brought up after Gloria made her damning analogy and got a rightful callout from Professor Cerise, making it seem less like an important moment for her and more like a desperate attempt by the narrative to absolve her of any responsibility regarding her honesty.
• During the Unown Arc, a couple of Unown letters fall near Parker, and end up creating an Unown copy of Chloe as a result of his strong desire for her to come home. Even if Parker wasn't the Base-Breaking Character that they are, most readers agree that the sequence of events that lead to this happening is too contrived to be believable.
• Ash ignoring the Rainbow Rocket invasion and stating that his friends can "handle it" comes off as just an excuse to raise the stakes. And feels extremely out of character for the boy who has multiple times risked his life without a second thought for others, could easily travel there and back, and is the Champion of Alola ergo the strongest trainer in the region! The later revelation that Nanu and Burnett told him to stay out of Alola for his safety might also count as this, if not for the fact that such a conversation was never even hinted at before the reveal.
• Harmonic Storm's existence can come across as this to those who don't know about Specter and Easter's history from Orange Lily. Considering the fact that everything we hear from the duo is how they treated each other horribly (with Specter being slightly more at fault, though Easter isn't entirely blameless), the fact they seem to be on such good terms that they can fuse makes it seem like it comes out of nowhere. Even without that however, the fact that Passenger-Denizen fusion is something that doesn't get foreshadowed at all before it happens can make it look like it came from nowhere, especially since only Specter and Easter are shown to do this.
• It's eventually revealed that Elipzo has forces outside of the Infinity Train, and that Tokio's Nurse Joy is one such member. Not even taking into account how Elipzo was never implied to have anything that allow them to do this, to have Tokio land in the one Pokemon Center with the one Nurse Joy who's part of Elipzo seems like something that would only work under a mountain heap of coincidences and bad luck on Tokio's part.
• Before his talk with Chloe next chapter, Goh ends up meeting Hannah and Daiki who end up revealing that Chloe's battle with Ash was only seen as lame by her classmates, while everybody else thought it was cool that she at least tried. While it's perfectly reasonable that not everybody would have the same opinion on the Ash versus Chloe fight back at school, the fact that this was never mentioned by any of the other students or teachers is highly questionable, especially since this is coming from characters who were never referenced beforehand despite having had some history with Chloe.
• Alongside the reveal of students that thought Chloe was cool for trying to fight Ash, it also reveals that she once submitted a horror story to a magazine contest, while they would be too scared to post anything on the school newspaper. While the former is something that did happen in the original trilogy, neither it nor the school newspaper were ever mentioned beforehand, with all pointing to Chloe keeping her stories to herself after it failed to get her classmates' attention.
• The Palimpsest Car reveals the existence of Moonlight Passengers, people who somehow managed to enter the train despite not being at a crossroads for the train to pick them up. Even without considering the lack of foreshadowing to this idea, it slightly undermines the Train's existence as a mystical endless train, implying that anybody could eventually show up for one reason or another, trivializing the whole number and self-development part of the train.
• Chapter 45 reveals more about Goh and Chloe's past: during a ghost hunting trip in Kalos, Goh nearly drowned as a result, and Chloe, while going on a quest to save him, showed no concern or remorse over how he nearly died that it led to his parents to try and keep them apart. This revelation was never foreshadowed at all in the entirety of Act 1, and it contradicts the constantly-mentioned fact that Chloe simply does not like Pokemon.
  • Furthermore, Goh's parents having grown to hate Chloe for the above moment and lying their son to keep them apart. Goh's parents didn't appear once before chapter 45, where the past gets revealed, and the way it's written makes it come across like yet another attempt to absolve Chloe of any wrongdoing at the expense of another character, and completely ruins any positive or sympathetic traits they had.
• The reason for Goh and Chloe going into the woods in the first place? The Cerise and Fujihachi families decided to take a vacation to Kalos. Ignoring the fact the latter family has had so little presence it doesn't suggest they were close to the former, that the families would even decide that Kalos, a place whose woods are said to be haunted, was a good vacation spot feels like a move too risky even for them.
• Also regarding the flashback, it turns out that Goh chastising Chloe for not having a dream originally happened here, with him snapping at Chloe as she shows concern over him looking for a Vivillion. While this does have Chloe's reaction to the comment make more sense than if it had been a one and done deal, the idea that a seven year old would not only be so sure about having a dream but even call out someone else for a lack of it seems a bit farfetched, even if Goh's the one saying it.
• During their talk at the Harvest Moon Car, Chloe tells Goh that his quest for Mew made him popular among their classmates, despite the fact there were no prior hints of this popularity and contradicts both the story's constant showcasing of Goh as a pariah and Hannah and Daiki's statement in the previous chapter that his classmates hated him.
• Also from their talk in the Harvest Moon Car, Chloe reveals that the reason she decided to become a powerful badass warrior on the Infinity Train was because of Goh, as she thought that he would like her as a friend if she acted like that. The problem is that the story doesn't give this interpretation at all; if anything, the story seems to go with the interpretation that Chloe became a powerful warrior to both shut up the people who bullied her back home and to ensure nobody would ever hurt her again, with Goh having next to nothing to do with it.
• Near the end of the Harvest Moon Car, we end up learning why Allighieri, who at that point had been gung-ho in attacking Chloe, is so quick to attack her: some time ago, he encountered a passenger and denizen duo known as Armand and Nal, and it was Armand, the human, who defeated him. This was never foreshadowed prior to the revelation, and considering how he was a Hate Sink in his entire presence up to that point, giving him an actual reason to attack Chloe seems rather superfluous for a character who's meant to be hated.
• The climax of the first act involves Chloe and some of her allies showing up during the Unown attack in order to fight back against Sara and her Unown-spawned Shadows. Communication being possible between the Infinity Train and the multiverse and the former still being unknown was already farfetched, temporarily sending people back to their homeworld just blatantly trivializes the entire point of the train in the first place.
• Also from the climax of the first act, Parker discovers the weakness of the Shadows by approaching one and accepting it. The fact that Sara would make the entities work the same way as their game counterparts comes across as OOC for them, since it's made very clear they want nothing more than to make people suffer, and Parker being the one to figure out how to beat them just seems like an extra middle finger being given to the adult characters for not being useful at all across the first act.
• Sometime after Mallow discovers her idea that "there weren't trains in Alola" wasn't correct, it's revealed that Elipzo brainwashed her during her Train trip so that she couldn't find anything train-related in her research. Elipzo being involved on why she'd think about it in the first place across as a needless attempt to turn a simple mistake on Mallow's part into something more complex, as well as a needlessly complicated way to circumvent what was originally a narrative error.
• The Harvest Moon Car eventually reveals that Goh has been transferred to another class since his original teacher was fired and his classmates got expelled, and his new teacher wants him to come pick up his homework himself. While it's understandable that Goh would be transferred after everything that happened, the fact that, for a story that puts a huge focus on the school side of the story, this important revelation is relegated to an in-passing mention by Daiki makes it come across like another attempt by the story to overly glorify Chloe's status as a homework delivery girl, and demonize Goh for not treating it like something important.
• Firefly Funhouse Car chapter 5 has the revelation that Goh has paperwork done for a special accomodation where he only needs to go to school to take tests, and is shown to be doing fairly well as a result. Not only does this revelation make Miss April, his former teacher, come across as a much better teacher than her replacement Miss Valente, who's ignoring this paperwork to force Goh to be like every other student, it basically decimates the school plotline in its entirety, showing that over multiple months in-universe, and over a year out-of-universe, of calling out Goh over not going to school were null and void all along.