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Since Gou’s VA also voices the new Pokédex, I like the headcanon that Gou became a young professor and voiced the new Pokédex as a side project 🤭🤭💕

First and foremost, what interested me was that Friede had an actual proper job before this. When I think about Pokemon Professor, my mind goes to the likes of Professor Oak and Elm that have their own research labs. Of course so long as they were an expert in a particular field and researchers in their own right, they didn't need a base of operations so to speak. To my knowledge, usually they were 'self employed' as in they didn't work for someone. Seeing Friede as he is now, it's hard to picture being under someone's employment. It doesn't suit him, and as we'll learn later, he's not meant to be cooped up in a laboratory doing research all day.

We know from Episode 13 that the Brave Asagi was created from Ludlow's fishing boat so it's implied that Friede, Orla and Ludlow knew each other from before the formation of the Rising Volt Tacklers. We learn that Friede and Orla were childhood friends that used to live in Kanto before Orla moved to the Hoenn region. What prompted Friede to be in Paldea might be related to that job he recently quit but what I want to know is the exact relation between Ludlow and Friede.

Ludlow is clearly trying to cheer Friede from his slump. This speaks of a familiarity between the two and given their massive age gap, a part of me wonders if Ludlow is actually Friede's biological grandfather. He refers to Ludlow as Gramps but that could simply be how he addresses someone who he's close and familiar with. Still, the way Ludlow speaks here implies that this Friede has been coming here to fish for multiple days. Ludlow sees that someone as young as Friede should go and seek opportunities with his own two hands instead of wasting his days away. I really like seeing this and hope we'll get to learn more about Ludlow in future episodes.

Here, there's multiple things that caught my attention. We now know for certain that Lucca was Friede's old school teacher. That's the connection that the had, and one that lasted for years after Friede finished school. They likely had a good bond seeing that Charizard was super friendly to her, not to mention that she kept up to tabs with Friede's life seeing that she knew he quit his job. Friede said she hadn't contacted him in years thus giving me the impression that she had her connections because Friede doesn't give me the vibes of someone who'd use social media and post everything about their life.

It makes me wonder just how much Friede looked up to Lucca. Teachers who left an impact on you tend to last even long after you've graduated I find. It seemed that Friede shared his dreams of becoming a Pokemon Professor to Lucca, so much so that she recalled just how happy he was. I'm hoping someday we could get more insight on that.

Alright, this is going to veer heavily into personal interpretation and headcanons. From the way that Friede spoke about himself being a genius Pokemon Professor where there's nothing that he didn't know about these mysterious creatures doesn't sound like an empty boast. If we considered how he did the Professor Friede segment at the end of the episodes, he'd be on the same footing as Professor Oak, one of the most well known professors of all time. I imagine had he actually done that, then it couldn't just be hosted by any professor. It needed to be by a professor who truly knew a lot about Pokemon.

Friede believes himself to be a genius Pokemon Professor (as he stated this once or twice more throughout the episode) where he knows all that is to know about Pokemon but now he's in a rut and he doesn't know what to do with his life.

Now I've mentioned a few times before that I personally headcanon Friede to have undiagnosed ADHD. To me, Friede just feels like a burnt out gifted kid.

Given the ambiguity of his age yet he was considered a fully accredited Pokemon Professor that had a job before Lucca made that phone call and he looks like he's in his late teens to late twenties, picture this:

You have a strong interest in Pokemon. You happily tell your favorite teacher that you're going to become a Pokemon Professor to do all kinds of research. You are genuinely intellectually smart and loves learning about Pokemon so you go through years of study, pushed by your drive to learn everything and believing you've done so when you became a Pokemon Professor. You were eligible to be hired on as a company researcher, finally showcasing how you earned your credentials. But you learnt that it wasn't all that cracked up to be. You're putting what you've learnt into practice but being cooped in a lab, analyzing data just didn't sit right to you. Instead of forcing yourself through it, you decided that the better course of action is to quit. Hey, you found your freedom at last! After all those years of hard work, might as well take it easy yeah? Still, this is what you've been working towards. That's all you knew what you wanted to do since you shared your dream to your favorite teacher. You have the credentials, the knowledge and the means to do whatever you want but... you're just bored? Maybe not bored but there's just nothing interesting. You've worked hard to achieve your dream but did you consider anything aside from it? Now that you've realized that you're not really suited for researching in a lab, what can you do?

So the gist of it is gifted kid that worked hard towards becoming a Professor discovers that it might not be suited for him. That realization leaves him falling into a rut because he doesn't know what else he can do. He likely never considered the possibility of it not suiting him thus he doesn't have a back-up plan.

In that sense (and again, this is personal interpretation and a touch of self projection) I kind of relate to him. Going through school with good grades being fixated on multiple topics, thinking that this is what I want to do when I studied for my degree because it felt like the natural progression at the time but then finding out that it's not really suited for me. I've hit that wall and still in that figuring out what I want to do stage so seeing how Friede developed in this episode gave me hope that perhaps I can find that spark like him one day.

Anyway I just wanted to point this out cause this made me laugh.

Narrator voice: Let him cook. He will in fact one day imagine and experience it.

Friede would have dismissed that Pikachu entirely because he's still in that mindset of I know all that is to know about Pokemon. What I love about this scene is that for the first time since that flashback, there's a spark in Friede's eyes. He's likely experiencing excitement from have his interest piqued since he quit his job (or maybe even longer than that), to see something that he thought he knew existing outside this neat checkbox of a Pikachu's type, habitat, moves, etc.

Also I love how from his view, it looks like Pikachu's falling when it fact he's ascending. Friede's fallen into a rut but this is his first glimpse of eventually seeing a future where he will ascend high and free alongside Cap.