#coordinator haruka

Exhibit A: Their Parents.

it is REALLY easy to say “well dawn’s mom was a coordinator” and bam. we’re done. but i want to challenge you to not... do that. let’s look at may first.

may is the daughter of a gym leader and a ???? housewife i guess. one would assume that she naturally loves training and is damn good at it. but, not only was she not allowed to watch gym battles (which is why she and max were so excited to watch ash’s battle), but she turned out to be literally afraid of pokemon and only left the house to get away from them. she then ends up falling in love with coordinating because she sees that pokemon can be beautiful, graceful, and fun.

now dawn. dawn is the daughter of a top coordinator, and we know nothing about her dad. she looks up to her mother to the extent that she worried a lot about living up to her legacy, but not so much that it overly crippled her. it’s heavily implied that dawn didn’t actually spend much time training with her mom. johanna really emphasizes dawn’s need to learn on her own--we in fact hardly see her give advice even as she’s on her journey. dawn doesn’t break away from the “family tradition” per se, but over the course of her journey she worries less about living up to “mom” and more about being the best “her” she can be.

the important takeaway here is that these stories have a core theme in common: that your parents do not define YOU. and as such, this argument doesn’t really work. it in fact defeats the purpose of their entire arcs, and, even on a technical level it’s pretty flimsy for reasons i pointed out above.

Exhibit B: Glaceon was a brand new evolution.

honestly there’s not much to say here um. charizard beating aerodactyl. ursula with her flareon & vaporeon appeal. Kkngler in the pokemon league. Swellow to win that tournament. Pignite to beat Shamus.

not only is winning via recent evolution a common pokemon trope, but the very concept is that if you understand your pokémon well, you can easily adapt to this change and succeed.

if you need further proof, just consider when the opposite was the case. ash was so used to winning after evolutions that when turtwig evolved, he got overconfident and misused him because he didn’t consider how his body had changed. So in that case a lack of understanding hurt him.

but given that may explicitly wanted a glaceon, i highly doubt she lacked that understanding of what she was getting into. this is just a really flimsy excuse at best.

Exhibit C: Literally any nitpicking about the battle itself.

you guys. the characters aren’t real. the writers decide how the battle goes. the writers make these choices. and if you felt at all upset when ash lost the kalos league? then you understand.

Exhibit D: Dawn needed a win.

ah, yes. my personal favorite. (which is to say I hate hearing this and from this point forward will demand 10 USD from everyone who says it to me.) first, a reminder: may was participating in the wallace cup because she needed a win herself. this was a high-stakes battle for BOTH of them so honestly I’d LOVE to end the counterargument here but I have more.

the thing is, guys, yes. dawn needed a win. but there’s no reason, at all, plot-wise, that that win needed to be against may.

a better thing to do would have been to give her an opportunity to conquer someone like zoey; someone in her realm of rivals, who is a challenge for her, but who could easily bounce back from a loss.

“But ky, what about the wallace cup??? how would you change it?? wouldn’t may still lose?????”

actually, no. we can do one of two things with the wallace cup:

a) push it earlier. maybe even allow more cameos. this could possibly even be the start of dawn’s temporary downfall rather than the end, which would be interesting because she would write off that loss at first. well it WAS may. no big deal. can’t be mad about losing to someone so nice and experienced. and to paraphrase geoff, it would give sort of a parallel. this is what dawn could become. woulda been nice.

b) push it later. let dawn have her win, and put the wallace cup closer to the grand festival. it could be a BIG DEAL around the world because the wallace cup is considered like a “warm up” for all the festivals and one of the LAST opportunities to get a ribbon. competition is FIERCE. only the best make it through. dawn’s loss is far enough away from her past ones that rather than take it hard, she becomes DETERMINED to train up for the grand festival. woulda been nice.

And lastly, (Exhibit E): I want to address the issue of skill/talent.

may simply showed more growth in a shorter period of time than dawn did. that’s a fact. whether dawn had more experience with her mom or not, she still loved pokemon. was around them. had a sense of what she was doing.

but may went from being afraid to even pick her starter to competing in a grand festival on her first try (this included conquering cheating in that season at least twice). she then went on to travel more regions, become more seasoned and no--i don’t want to discredit dawn at ALL. but it says something about your talent and skill to be able to grow so fast, and may should only have kept going up and up. it doesn’t make sense that dawn would have surpassed her having only started her journey.

and like... is it so bad? to let your old character shine? what’s the point of bringing them back if not to celebrate them?

obviously people are still going to disagree with me. but i think it was a HUGE disservice to may’s character for her to lose. like, if they were going to do her wrong, then just. don’t bring her back.

When we combine this with Tian’s understanding of the Wallace Cup, it makes more sense for this prestigious event to be one that was a bit too much for Dawn starting out. But because it is a prestigious event, we cannot push it too early. I think it makes the most sense for Wallace to optimize his event in such a way that he anticipates his entrants of all calibers will have 2-3 ribbons in the current circuit. You want this ribbon to turn up the heat, but people can still catch up to you if you’ve won it, so don’t you dare get too comfortable with it.

To make this work with Dawn’s timeline, I would have Dawn participate in the Wallace Cup after having already won two ribbons. 

“Settling a Not-So-Old Score” stays where it is in canon (and you’ll note that Dawn won her first ribbon here). However, “Dawn’s Early Night”, which was supposed to be the start of her downward spiral, (would for one have to get a name change and) becomes a victory but does not have to change its place on the timeline. This means that this is where I’m placing the Wallace Cup.

Now, if you’re writing a Dawn, you don’t have to follow this, but I would imagine she does try to stay optimistic because a) she lost to May, who is kind of considered a talent for her age and b) she was competing against top coordinators and beyond so it’s rare to get so far in the Wallace Cup anyway. She tries to stay optimistic, but it’s Dawn. You know who her mother is. Which works well with canon because:

The next episode would then be “Team Shocker” where, to quote Bulbapedia, “she did not pass the Appeals Round for the second time in a row, due to being overzealous with Ambipom's Swift appeal out of desperation to make up for the previous loss.” And that devastates her enough to lead into her canon depression and later Maylene arc.