Randmoness

Wasted Plotential - Ash Betrayed

Hello and welcome to Wasted Plotential, where we discuss the wasted potential of our favourite plotlines. (Though, I'd hardly call this one of my favourite plotlines.)

So, I have a tendency to leave a lot of comments whenever I read a story. Whether it's pointing out a mistake, complaining about very nitpicky things or just cracking a joke whenever I see the opportunity, I'm not afraid of sharing my opinions on any given story. So if you've seen my comments in any capacity, then this should come as no surprise to you.

"Ash Betrayed" stories just do not work, and I've made it my personal mission to get people to understand that.

If you're sat there thinking "what is an Ash Betrayed" story, then first of all - why are you even here? And second of all - I'll save literally years of your life by summarizing pretty much all of them:

Ash Ketchum returns home after losing a League. Which League depends on the story, but most of the ones I've read (Amour or not) have the Kalos League as the inciting incident. Ash returns home only to find all or most of his previous travelling companions sitting on his couch. What they exactly do and who does it varies but the one constant in all these is that they want Ash to give up on his dream of becoming a Pokémon Master. One of the parties overreacts and Ash ends up running to Oak's Lab to collect all his Pokémon and run off to live in the mountains. An unrealistic amount of years later, Ash is notified of a big tournament that all of his friends will take part in (regardless of whether or not their goals are tied to battling) and Ash goes there in disguise so that he can beat all of them up, which is justified because they all had a surgery that replaced their personalities with generic bad Trainer lines. He's also bound to use at least one Legendary, though most stories have him use dozens, as well as Aura.

There, that's the jist of Ash Betrayed stories. Like, all of the bad ones, bar none, follow this format almost bit for bit, regardless of how little sense it makes. Like, when the premise of your story can be destroyed by asking a question consisting of one word, you wouldn't expect for the concept to blow up now would you?

And I genuinely don't know why they're so popular. All I can come up with is that hundreds of thousands of people just… really don't like Ash and his friends, and this is their escapist fantasy.

This also isn't helped by the fact that in most of these stories make it so that everything Ash does, no matter how right or wrong morally, is treated as the absolute right thing, while whatever the so-called "traitors" do is described with so much malice you'd think they're murdering Growlithes every 5 seconds. And the fact that Ash has no remorse towards his former friends. Not that they're any better either…

I could stay here all day and talk about how Ash Betrayed stories suck and should all be locked away in whatever dimension Arceus sent Darken Edgier, but that's not the point. The point is, as I hope is apparent due to what show I'm parodying, to try and make an Ash Betrayed story that does work.

And thankfully, there is one that does!

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/11892094/1/Amourshipping-Clearing-his-name

This one story addresses almost all the issues I have with Ash Betrayed works and fixes them! Of course, it has a couple of issues of its own, but if you're thinking about writing an Ash Betrayed story, then please give this one some love and use it as a template.

Now, because I think this one is the pinnacle of quality for these types of stories, I'll be using it as a template for my own work, albeit with a few differences.

So, if I were to write an Ash Betrayed story, it would go a little something like this:

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