An inherent bias in Pokémon?

Disclaimer: Not alleging anything serious. Just pondering if there’s some baked in bias that’s present due to a target audience or something.

Coming largely from the game side of things, it’s not newsworthy to talk about how some fans focus heavily on female characters in a certain way. Gaming tends to be male-dominated, so while unfortunate in some ways, it’s nothing novel. (Let’s not get started on things like Pokémon Masters and the endless Cynthia things, lol.)

But I kinda feel like it translates to the anime as well.

Not to retread too much but we know that Ash basically subs in for every male protag, but the female partner is also present, though often related to something less battle-oriented.

This is present even in HZ where Liko is the main character with Roy as the second main. I do find it more balanced than before but the inference is still kinda present in my mind.

This past episode mentions >!Kieran!< which is nice, but it’s strange how we got almost every major female character from Scarlet and Violet. Like, I don’t even think popularity polls would warrant not including characters like Arven and so on. It’s not entirely one-sided, but it does feel skewed.

It’s just a bit weird.

Maybe it’s not that—and it’s just the writers and devs just wildly predicting who is most appealing and assuming incorrectly…