#bw005

this is Ash and Iris’s first meeting with Cilan! since they’ll all become traveling partners soon after this, and close friends a little while later, it’s really interesting to look at what their very first interactions as a trio were like!

for starters, Ash starts the whole thing off by challenging all three Leaders at once, when usually challengers pick to battle either Chili, Cress, or Cilan, which is another thing that really shows just how excited Ash is to be experiencing every single thing about the Unova region. he’s not going to go halfway with his very first gym battle in the region, he wants to have the most high-intensity battle possible! so of course he challenges all of them, to see what they and their Pokémon are like.

Once the battle starts, he picks Tepig! he says that this is because he promised Tepig that it’d be his first pick in his first gym battle (you kinda get the feeling that some stuff happened off-screen with Tepig, both because of this and because later in bw006 Ash mentions meeting Accumula Town’s Joy, which is not something that happened onscreen). So I feel like, right off the bat, this battle (being Ash’s first formal battle in the region) is really making sure to re-establish a lot of Ash’s usual battle traits like choosing Pokémon for personal reasons rather than for stuff like type advantage.

similarly, Tepig’s battle with Pansear re-establishes Ash’s general battle style, being extremely crafty and making good use of both the opponent’s Pokémon’s missteps and the terrain. I wanna say that this is specifically indicative of Ash’s battle style post-DP, making use of some of the Contest strategies he picked up from Dawn, but I’ve also realized I remember almost nothing of his battle style pre-DP so I can’t actually say for sure. But I definitely feel like grabbing Pansear’s tail and swinging it was a very contest move.

And then after Tepig wins he pets it and it’s cute :) . he also specifically calls Tepig “persistent” which is really fitting given that this is right after Tepig bounced back from being half-starved to death.

and then there’s Pikachu VS Panpour. this one was just kinda sad. I kinda get the feeling that, despite acting otherwise, the initial loss against Trip and the whole Zekrom fiasco really threw both of them off and out of sync, battle-wise. like they just seem to be having a hard time keeping it together, and it’s specifically a them problem because Ash battles just fine with the others.

then the last match is Oshawott VS Pansage, and it did take me a minute to figure out why he’d specifically chose Oshawott for this one but then I got it. I think he was trying to boost Oshawott’s confidence — he knows that Oshawott is strong and can be quite brave (there’s a flashback to when Oshawott saved Pikachu and Axew from Team Rocket after these screencaps), and that Oshawott just needs some motivation to be able to consistently draw on that bravery. (it pays off, but this was a really big gamble… if Oshawott had lost, it not only would’ve been a real hit to its confidence but also probably would have put a strain on Ash and Oshawott’s relationship, given that Oshawott would have lost at what Ash knew was a disadvantage.

Luckily though everything winds up going fine, and Oshawott does get a confidence boost overall because of how successful the ‘blocking attacks with his scalchop’ strategy is. (Something something bond)