Excessive/performative hate for Gen 1 is rapidly becoming just as passé and annoying as excessive love for it.

Many of us here likely grew up hearing constantly from lapsed fans that the first generation was the only one that mattered. Especially in terms of Pokemon designs, everyone who liked games like Black and White upon release remembers being endlessly badgered about “it’s literally just a trash bag / ice cream cone”.

To this end, I think it’s totally fair to say things like “Muk is just purple goo” or “Voltorb is just a Pokeball” as a counterclaim, to demonstrate that the series has always had that type of design in it. But years and years of this kind of statement I think has convinced some people that comparative simplicity of the earlier generations’ designs is some kind of objectively bad quality. Like more simple = more bad.

It’s to the extent that there’s now a constituency of thousands of people (often younger fans) who go around online saying things like “Charizard is a bad design”. Now of course, no one is required to like any given Pokemon, but it all strikes me as wildly inorganic. I’ve always been a Bulbasaur guy, but for two straight decades Bulbasaur was seen as kind of the third wheel of that trio. Nowadays, most online polls show the ___saur line winning handily.

I don’t think any of this would have happened if TPC and Game Freak had not placed a wild overemphasis on Charizard between 2013-2020, and I think a similar phenomenon is happening with Gen 1 as a whole.

Again, you obviously don’t have to like Charizard, and you don’t have to even like Gen 1. But I do believe that some statistically significant percentage of the dislike you see towards them in the online fandom is sheer contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake.