Pokémon: Path to the Peak is an animated Pokémon web series centering around the trading card series, whose first episode premiered on August 11, 2023. It is animated by TAIKO Studios, the same studio that created Bidoof's Big Stand.
Ava, a young girl who has just moved to a new town, gets involved with the local Pokémon TCG club and finds that she has a knack for the game.
Episodes:
This series provides examples of:
- All for Nothing: Zigzagged. In order for Ava to compete in the finals of Internationals, Joshua and Celestine trade their cards to replace Ava's lost deck. Unfortunately, Ava loses in the final round. However, Ava continues to use the replacement deck at Worlds and manages to win, doing justice to her friends' sacrifice.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents:
- Ava's dad basically becomes a Fanboy when he goes to the regionals and gets a Pikachu hat to wear. And then Celestine has a match against him to take him down and taunt Ava. Later, in the third episode, he excitedly sings "Pokémon World"note and embarrasses all three kids...before they jump in later.
- Ava's mother also qualifies in the second episode, when she packs Ava a heavy backpack that nearly knocks her daughter over and loudly whispers in front of the club that she packed baby powder for Ava's rashes.
- Ambiguously Brown: Ava and Celestine have tanned skin but no defined race, as opposed to Joshua being unambiguously Black.
- Alpha Bitch: Celestine before her Heel–Face Turn. She mocks, belittles, and downplays Ava every time she appears, to the point of almost psyching Ava out of not participating in the regionals and defeating her dad in seconds.
- Ancestral Weapon: Of a sort. Ava's deck is her mom's old one. Joshua even remarks that the cards are "retro". Sadly, in Episode 3 she loses all her cards except Oddish when they get blown away by wind.
- Animals Hate Her: After Ava's disastrous time at the bee club, the bees later return to claim her ugly cake and fly away with it.
- Bait-and-Switch: After Celestine and Ava's final match, Celestine storms over to her victorious opponent, seemingly about to put her on blast...before congratulating Ava on her victory and offering her a friendly handshake.
- Big Bad Ensemble: Team Falinks; the professional youth team with players who don't follow the meta because they are the meta. Their leader Edgar Troy is the main antagonist, who looks down upon any and all players his team and himself have beaten - and toyed with - easily.
- Big Entrance:
- Ava does this twice. First, after her bad first day, she kicks open the house door and storms inside in a huff. Second, when she returns to the Pokemon Club, reinvigorated, she flings the door open hard enough to slam it...before politely requesting a rematch.
- Joshua introduces himself to Ava by opening the door dramatically and shouting, "Challenge accepted!" He kicks down Ava's door in the second episode as well.
- Edgar summoning his ace Pokemon gets hyped up both in Ava's imagination and in the actual game. First, the rest of his team groups together and stomps in unison like an approaching Kaiju. Then, Ava imagines the Pokemon appearing outside the dark stadium, barely illuminated by lightning. Finally, a massive Groudon jumps into the stadium and gives a Mighty Roar as Edgar slams the card on the table, the announcer hams up the move, and Ava looks on in shock.
- Bumbling Dad:
- Subverted. In the first episode, Ava's father makes the mistake of carrying too many moving boxes at once and breaking some plates, giving the impression that he'll be like this. But after Ava's disastrous first day, he ends up being more perceptive than her mother when it comes to Ava's bad mood. He proceeds to comfort her and train her in how to play the TCG properly.
- Exploited in the second episode. Celestine duels Ava's dad in an attempt to taunt her, and he proves to be woefully inexperienced against a regional champion.
- Call-Back: Joshua invites Ava to the club by using a papercraft Pikachu labeled TM 10. The final episode sees Ava leaving two of her own in Joshua and Celestine's lockers as a sign she's snapped out of her Heroic B So D.
- Canon Foreigner: While most of the cards seen in the series are recreations of real ones, a few ones stand out as being apparently made up for the series and not available (yet) in the real card game. This includes Ava's Spoink, Vileplume, Darkrai ex and Bellossom ex, Celestine's Mismagius ex, and Edgar's Falinks ex and Groudon.
- Catapult Nightmare: In the second episode, Ava fell asleep the previous night while making a new deck and has a nightmare about being chased down by Celestine in the form of a Mismagnius. Also counts as Anxiety Dreams.
- Child Prodigy: Ava and her TCG skills. Well, she started off very rough, but she quickly climbed up to stardom after her dad taught her to use her imagination to boost her confidence.
- Creator Cameo: Episode 4 has Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara appear at Worlds and give Ava her winning trophy.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Joshua starts off his match against Ava normally before he goes all in with guns blazing and takes her down easily.
- Drama Queen: Ava's mother in the fourth episode when she reveals that she used to play the card game professionally. The reveal before the flashback starts is accompanied by an extreme close-up of her face, her opponent is portrayed with a demonic-sounding voice, she gives a dramatic, slow-motion scream when he beats her, and she's blowing her nose and crying loudly when we cut back to the present.
- Decade-Themed Filter: When Ava's mom flashbacks to when she was a kid, the camera filter shifts from 2020s HD to the sort of grainy quality common in late 90s-early 2000s home video cameras.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Celestine's Heel–Face Turn is caused by Ava beating her at Regionals.
- Eating Lunch Alone: After failing several school activities, Ava sadly eats her lunch alone in the cafeteria.
- Elemental Personalities: The characters use decks with predominant Pokemon types that reflect their personalities.
- Ava's is Grass, showing her growth.
- Joshua's is Electric (Lightning), fitting of his energetic nature.
- Celestine's are Ghost Pokemon (Ghost does not exist in the TCG, and her deck is mostly Psychic), showing how she may be scary and intimidating but very friendly when you get to know her, like actual ghosts.
- Tonio's is Normal (Colorless), as his role as a one-off character but otherwise a nice person.
- Edgar uses Fighting, like his competitive nature.
- Embarrassing Slide: During the montage of Ava's successes at the beginning of the third episode, Celestine gets angry to see that Joshua posted a picture of her wearing a facial mask on the internet.Celestine: I can't believe you posted that!
- Everybody Knew Already: In episode 4, Ava's mom reveals that she was a former professional Pokémon card player. Ava tells her shocked mother she already knew since she figured out the old cards belong to her.
- Failure Montage: In Episode 1, there's a montage of Ava trying and failing to do beekeeping, cooking, and archery at her new school.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: In Episode 3, Celestine realizes something is up when during the final match she sees members of Team Falinks whispering and grinning among themselves, moments before Edgar pulls out an Iono card and wipes out Ava's seeming lead.
- Foreshadowing: During the third episode, Celestine and Joshua take Ava to the balcony of the hotel they're staying in to help Ava relax before her big match the next day. When Ava sets her box of cards down, there's a brief shot of the box shifting in the wind as a flower petal blows by. Moments later, Ava is crushed to see all of her cards blown away.
- Graceful Loser:
- When Ava wins their rematch, Joshua is nothing but excited for her.
Joshua: (happily) She straight up destroyed me!- After Ava and Celestine duel in the regional championship and Ava wins, Celestine clenches her fists and looks as though she’s about to blow her fuse... before cheerily congratulating Ava and thanking her for a challenging match.
- Edgar himself concedes on good terms with Ava when she beats him in the final episode.
- Heads or Tails?:
- When Tonio calls for Ava to pick a side for a coin flip, Ava indecisively spends the whole time the coin is in the air switching between picking heads or tails. She finally settles on heads... and it lands tails.
- Ava and Celestine's climactic duel comes down to a coin flip. This time it lands heads in Ava’s favor, winning her the regional.
- Heel–Face Turn: Celestine goes from the villain of episode 2 to one of Ava's best friends and supporters.
- Heroic BSoD: Happens to Ava twice:
- Ava enters one in the third episode after all of her cards are blown away. She wakes up the next day with little sleep, and she's despondent from crying when her friends come to check on her. She snaps out of it when Joshua and Celestine sacrifice their own decks to help her rebuild hers.
- She also enters a serious funk after Edgar destroys her in the International finals, ignoring the notice that she was accepted to compete in Worlds and preparing to throw away her Pokémon stuff until her mom relates her own bad loss as a girl. This reminds Ava that having fun is what counts, reigniting her motivation.
- Heroic Sacrifice: A variation. When Ava's cards get blown away by the wind, leaving her without a deck, Joshua and Celestine voluntarily trade away all of their own cards with other people to get the cards needed to rebuild her deck.
- Huge Schoolgirl: Downplayed in that Celestine isn't taller than any adult characters, but she is noticeably taller than both Ava and Joshua despite being ostensibly around the same age.
- Honor Before Reason: Joshua finds it unwise for Ava to attend regionals without a deck optimized to the meta. Ava replies that she's included a Com Mon like Oddish simply because she likes Oddish.
- I Let You Win: In their second duel, Edgar Troy scoops (concedes) the first round of his match against Ava. But unlike the first round of their previous duel, where he was genuinely outmatched by Ava's lucky start, the second time has him surrendering with the upper hand instead.
- Inner Thoughts, Outsider Puzzlement: When Ava takes her dad's advice to imagine she's battling with her Pokémon for real, she begins translating her actions in the card game into her imaginary battle in her head. When she pauses dramatically to think through her options or sees her cards affecting the world around her, the scene cuts to the other kids' perspective to show that she's zoned out and staring at nothing, much to their confusion. Fortunately, this doesn't mess up her gameplay whatsoever.
- Instant Web Hit: The video of Ava beating Celestine in Regionals goes viral with over a hundred million views by the time of Internationals, making her a celebrity in the TCG community.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Edgar Troy scoops (concedes) his first round against Ava when she gets a lucky start that he implicitly can't counter. However, it may also have been to make her let her guard down for the following rounds. He does this often.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During the final episode, Ava's mom reveals to her daughter that she used to play the card game professionally too, and the screen cuts to a flashback of her mother as a teenager. When Ava reveals that she knew already, the teenager in the flashback asks, "What? How?" in unison with the mother in the present as the camera zooms in on the teenager.
- Lightning Reveal: The first look Ava and the audience get at Edgar's ace Groudon is when she imagines a lightning bolt illuminating the darkened stadium, revealing its presence outside of it.
- Like Parent, Like Child: Ava's parents used to play the TCG, and she gets into it as well.
- The Mentor: After her loss to Joshua, Ava's dad further tutors her in the game, and it's thanks to his tutelage that she manages to not only beat Joshua in their rematch, but everyone else in the TCG club.
- Mood Whiplash: In episode 3, an adorable scene of Ava, Celestine, and Joshua whooping with joy and hugging each other on the hotel balcony suddenly screeches to a halt when all of Ava's cards are blown away by the wind.
- Mr. Imagination: Ava's dad likes to do this when he plays in a TCG against Celestine. He gets trounced for his troubles while he twirls his fingers around his Pikachu hat.
- Ms. Imagination: Ava's dad teaches her to simply imagine Pokémon battles through the TCG in order to get better at it. Though it helps her get better at the game, it also causes her imagination to go haywire while everyone else just sees her acting strange. From there, any battle with Pokémon in them is shown through her point of view.
- Mundane Made Awesome: While not quite on the same level as the anime, the Pokémon club treats TCG battles with the same intensity as a battle between actual trainers. Ava's father actually encourages her to take this mindset and imagine she's battling for real in order to get better at the game. Ava takes it so far that she starts zoning out in mid-game as she imagines everything in the battle happening around her. And it helps her win too.
- Mythology Gag:
- Joshua leads Ava to the Pokémon club with a papercraft Pikachu marked TM10. In the core series games, TM10 is most frequently the TM for the move Hidden Power, representing Ava's latent potential at the TCG.
- Ava's mother packing things for her when she's going to regionals, telling her she packed baby powder for her rashes, and all this happening in front of a crowd of Ava's friends, is very similar to how Ash's mother saw him off on his journey. Just replace baby powder with underwear.
- In the third episode:
- While Ava's viral video is showing, there's a thumbnail with a Bidoof that heavily if not outright resembles the same one as the studio's previous work.
- The studio gets to use Lucario again, which screws over Ava in the third match against Edgar.
- While on the car ride to Internationals, Ava's dad breaks into singing "Pokémon World", the second English anime theme, and after initially finding it cringe, the kids all join in too.
- The little girl refers to Ava's deck as the "Oddish & Friends" deck, a name that matches the ones of the three starter decks from Pokémon Trading Card Game.
- In the final episode, the studio puts both a Bidoof and a Lucario in the same scene, showing the imaginary Pokémon celebrating with Ava's classmates her victory against Edgar.
- Never Tell Me the Odds!: Before their match, Edgar brags to Ava that he calculates her deck has a 72 percent of failure. Ava presses on bravely anyway, but it turns out Edgar's math was accurate as he defeats her 2 to 1.
- New Kid Stigma: Ava is new to her school, and thanks to her mishaps while trying to join the other clubs, the other kids don't want her sitting with them at lunchtime.
- No Full Name Given:
- Ava, Joshua, and Celestine's last names aren't revealed, much less so for the adults involved.
- Edgar averts this by having his last name given (Troy).
- Oddball in the Series: Unlike most Pokémon media, Path to the Peak takes place in the real world where Pokémon are fictional.
- Opponent Instruction: Joshua spends the first battle against Ava teaching her the basic rules about how the game works, before he crushes her immediately.
- The Power of Friendship: When Ava's backed into a corner during the final match of regionals, she begins panicking, only to see her fellow club members holding up their coins and cheering for her, giving her the courage to keep going.
- Phoneaholic Teenager: Inverted. Aya's mother is constantly distracted by her phone and computer throughout the entire short, barely noticing when her daughter storms into the house after her bad day. She only interacts with Ava once in the first episode to tell her to throw her old Pokémon cards away, though by the second episode, she's more talkative.
- Pubescent Braces: When we see Ava's mother as a kid, she's wearing a set of braces combined with Nerd Glasses.
- Shown Their Work: All of the cards shown in the current day (with the exceptions of Ava's first deck) are their real-life incarnations from the Scarlet and Violet meta. For example, the Iono card is as busted as it sounds. Not only does it force both players to put all their cards to the bottom of their decks (making those cards virtually impossible to reach), but they can only draw the same number of cards as their prize cards. An unprepared opponent who doesn't expect the card to come up can quickly get taken down. The card itself is a staple in many professional players' decks that it's unheard of to see a deck without it in modern championships.
- In episode 4, Ava's mom had a bad defeat that ended with a Shining Pikachu from EX Holon Phantoms, several generations before the current meta.
- Shout-Out:
- When Edgar plays Groudon the legendary enters the imaginary battle in a manner akin to Godzilla even letting out a roar almost exactly like the kaiju's.
- Ava's Bellosom is clearly channelling Goku using his Kamehameha as it charges up and fires Solar Beam.
- Signature Mon:
- Ava is closely associated with Oddish, and she even brings a plush of one to her battles much like how International and Worlds players bring plushes of their signature Pokemon to the main stage.
- Joshua's is Jolteon.
- Celestine's is Mismagius with it even being on her playmat.
- Falinks for Edgar Troy and the rest of Team Falinks.
- Slow "NO!": Both Celestine and Joshua let out slowed down "Noooooo"s as they're beaten by Team Falinks.
- Sole Survivor: Ava's Oddish card is the last of her original deck to stay in her possession after the other cards are accidentally blown away while she's on the hotel balcony.
- Sore Loser: The members of Team Falinks downplay this; they still shake Ava's hand, but say nothing and look very angry as they do so.
- Spirited Competitor:
- Joshua loves battling for the sake of it, not even getting mad when Ava manages to win, and instead hypes her up to everyone.
- In the final episode, Ava encourages Edgar to play the game for fun instead of just winning. He does become this after a few turns into the deciding game.
- Spoiler Cover: The poster, seen above, makes it pretty clear that Celestine isn't going to be a villain, since she's shown alongside Joshua with a friendly smile. Sure enough, while she's Ava's final opponent at regionals, she ends up a friendly rival by the end. The poster also prominently features Groudon which turns out to be Edgar's final Pokémon.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Ava looks almost exactly like her mother save for their differences in hairstyle and her mother having a slightly darker skintone.
- Time Skip: Roughly a couple months pass between Episodes 2 and 3, enough that Ava has become a viral sensation and even has a fanbase.
- Turn of the Millennium: As Ava's mom loses to a Shining Pikachu from EX Holon Phantoms in their flashback, the game took place at minimum during 2006.
- Un-Confession: In Episode 2, Ava's mom is just about to tell Ava something important before Ava interrupts her by saying that the internationals is just a short drive away. Whatever Ava's mom was trying to say, she doesn't bring it up when she has the chance to speak again. In the final episode, what Ava's mom wanted to say was that...she used to be a player for the Pokémon TCG. Ava is not surprised in the slightest for obvious reasons.
- Victory Is Boring: Implied for Celestine, as she tells Ava that the battle they had in which she lost is the most fun she's had during a battle in ages.
- The Worf Effect: Joshua and Celestine, both shown to be powerful players in their own rights, and the latter being a Regional champion, are trounced in the first round of Internationals by Team Falinks.
- Your Size May Vary: When Groudon is first seen in battle, it looms over the stadium. Moments later, it's in the arena and much closer to its canonical size of 11 feet instead the Kaiju size glimpsed earlier. Justified because the battle takes place in Ava's imagination.
