YMMV / Pokemon S 1 E 80 Friends To The End

• Broken Base: As to be expected, this episode started the trend of 'Ash loses at the league to someone who loses in the very next round'. Was it actively justified here considering Ash really did deserve to lose since he didn't actively train his Pokemon in Kanto and relied on pure luck and pragmatism for most of his battles? Or was it just a lazy copout by the writers to keep the Strictly Formula nature of the show so far ongoing rather than shaking things up if he would have won?
• Broken Aesop: Even if Ash had trained his team, it still doesn't change the fact Team Rocket interfered and were unusually persistent thus causing Ash's team to be worn out.
• Informed Wrongness: Ash is kidnapped by Team Rocket before his semifinal match at the Indigo League. He manages to escape and make it in time, but half of his team (Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur and Pikachu) becomes weakened and exhausted in the process. As a result, his Pikachu and Squirtle are quickly taken out, and due to Kingler, Muk, and Tauros still being in Professor Oak's lab at time, he's out of usable Pokémon other than the perennially disobedient Charizard. Charizard takes out his opponent's Charmander but refuses to fight the opponent's Pikachu, resulting in Ash losing the League match and the tournament. When Ash is in the dumps in the next episode, he's told that he's being a crybaby and his loss was entirely his fault for not properly training Charizard beforehand. Again, Ash's party had been unfairly limited before the battle, and he wouldn't have used Charizard if it hadn't been for that fact and wasn't given any time to switch Pokémon. Also, for those paying attention, Charizard pretty much just decided he was hotter shit than his trainer for no reason at all starting from the episode after he evolved into Charmeleon and only obeyed Ash once in the intervening thirty-five episodes. Ultimately it would literally take a Near-Death Experience for the big lug to even consider listening to his trainer again.^note This arc was probably meant to adapt the games' Morale Mechanic where traded Pokémon above certain levels will randomly disobey PCs with insufficient numbers of gym badges, but by that logic Charizard should have started obeying Ash again when he won an Earth Badge in Viridian City at the very latest. Worse yet, Misty and Brock didn't lift a finger to help find Ash when he went missing, nor did anyone in the League, who sat on their hands waiting for (and almost disqualifying) him when just yesterday a group of thieves tried to steal everyone's Pokémon.
• Once Original, Now Common: Back in the day, the fact that Ash lost the league was actively a major shock to the community, but actually received rather positively, as 'scrappy underdog actually LOSES whatever major sporting event they're in' was nigh-unheard of back in The '90s and was considered to be a nice breath of fresh air. It also helped that the loss actively served as Character Development for Ash, as he did ultimately learn from it and take a more pro-active approach to Pokémon training from then on. However, as the years went on more shows in the Turn of the Millennium started to parrot that Aesop to the point of being suffocatingly nihilistic and Ash's repeated losses becoming not only increasingly ridiculous and contrived, but more and more obviously done just to keep the Strictly Formula nature of the show ongoing, which also contributed to the fandom seeing Ash as a Memetic Loser.

---