Now That You’re Here

I understand why some might feel some level of animosity towards amourshippers because especially during xy’s run amourshipping was an almost inescapable and a lot of people in the amourshipping fandom were very intolerable towards other ships. But as xy has ended and Serena and or amourshipping has become more divisive people have seemingly stripped every ounce of nuance and the main consensus has become amourshippers and Serena fan bad. It’s completely poisoned the well and now unless you are in a specific fandom space for amourshipping you are basically inherently painted in a bad light for just liking a thing.

It’s gets to a point where people push certain narratives or rhetoric about amourshippers that’s just generally not true. Specifically when people insinuate that amourshippers are basically weirdo’s who project themselves on to the characters to try and live out these weird fantasies I guess. A lot of people don’t find issues with this as they probably feel like it’s punching up because amourshipping and Serena are still very popular,but it gets to a point where people are just fine with shitin on others for daring to be positive about Serena or amourshipping.

Like I tend to see a lot of people share there experiences with being basically alienated from certain general groups that talk about the anime. Personally speaking I’ve been dm’d before by random people that felt it was necessary to tell me personally why amourshipping is one sided or that Serena in the anime sucks.

I’m honestly just ranting at this point because it’s become very frustrating trying to talk about shit that you like without some dork in your ear trying to tell you that it’s actually bad and that you’re "delusional"

People just need to chillaxe especially because these are fictional characters and the fact that the anipoke fandom has some people that will call you out your name and then try and pull the whole "well amourshippers are the actual toxic ones" card is wild to me.

To start off I wanna say that I think that the showcases are far from perfect and personally I think the performances are one of the more flawed things in the XY anime. Despite XY’s tight and for the most part really good writing I think the showcases are an aspect of the show that could’ve been explored/executed better. The goal of this post is to kinda go through a lot of the common criticisms of the showcases/performances receive and try and put things back in perspective. It feels like a lot of the time the fandom can be extremely harsh to the showcases and while again I don’t think they were perfect by any means I do think that they are vastly overhated,with the hate stemming from some not so great criticism.

The first criticism that gets kinda thrown at the showcases is that they’re "copy and paste contests" and I think this one is a bit self explanatory on why it’s kind of a bad criticism is that they literally just aren’t. Sure they have some similarities between them,but just outright saying they are just blatant copies of contest is a stretch. The showcases have tangible differences that separates them. Like People often think the whole point of the showcases is to be pretty,some even going so far to say that they are just popularity contests. They aren’t popularity contests considering we have an episode and character that kind of addresses this. Amelia is a character introduced to be a temporary rival for Serena and it’s established that Amelia is kind of a nepo baby with more connections,but even despite that Serena still wins kinda proving that they aren’t just theses beauty pageants that are biased. Palermo even explains that being the kalos queen isn’t about being the most popular but more about being able to connect with and inspire others while expressing yourself. Also by contrast contest seemed to be more about technical skills without necessarily being able to inspire and connect with the audience.

The next criticism I see a lot is how some people feel as though the showcases are just "sexist" versions of contest,this stems from the showcases being presented as something that only girls usually do. This claim is one that requires more nuance,nuance that most people aren’t willing to discuss,but nevertheless this criticism is again often just thrown around without much explanation. Especially because this is kind of a serious critique considering that it implies that the showcases are something that’s contributing to pushing potentially harmful stereotypes and gender roles I think that people just throwing this around Willy nilly is unhelpful. I don’t believe the intentions of the showcases was to push some sexist narrative as it’s seems more likely that the showcases are just based off of Japanese idol culture. Im not an expert on idol culture but from what I understand it’s seems that they share a lot of similarities with the showcases with things like emphasis on cool presentations and audience participation that seems to be more likely than just straight up sexism. Also idols tend to have gender based divisions which probably explains why the showcases we see don’t have any males as that’s probably its own thing.

Now the final thing I want talk about is less of a criticism and more of a issue of specific discourse online. It kinda seems online with the inevitable discourse about who or what is better it’s seems as though the way In which the showcases are compared with the contest is a bit unfair. Like something you’ve might of heard online when it comes to comparing the two is that showcases aren’t as fleshed out as contest to which the claim is technically true and is something I agree with to an extent,but the context surrounding why that is,gets ignored. For comparison the contest appear in at least three series with them being a Focus in both AG and DP and both of those series are some of the longer series in the Pokemon anime with them having closer to 200 episodes. The showcases only really appear in XY and that’s also the only time they are a focus and with XY being one of the shorter series in the anime expecting the showcase to be on the same level of contest in terms of being fleshed out is unrealistic. This doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to criticize or compare the two,but the context should be included to prevent any disingenuous versions of the conversation.

In the end there’s nothing wrong with disliking the showcases and preferring the contest isn’t really the problem. The real issue is the way in which people criticize the showcases because just dumbing it down to fit a narrative that doesn’t actually make for good criticism just minimizes the goals the showcases were trying to accomplish and it makes you sound like more of a blind hater than someone with an actual opinion (but then again there are a lot of hatin ass dudes in this fandom aren’t there?)

We’ve been loving frank