Pokemon: Ash’s Butterfree gave me abandonment issues and it’s back after 25 years

Ash and Pikachu are done. The iconic protagonists of one of the most famous animated series in the world are through. 25 years after it debuted, Ash and Pikachu are hanging up their Pokéballs. A special 11 episode series is set to air, titled Pokémon: Aim To Be A Pokémon Master, and will be the grand finale of Ash’s adventure. Now that he’s finally become Pokémon League Champion, his story is coming to a close.

Even if you haven’t watched the Pokémon anime in the last two decades, it’s still a weirdly emotional moment. The Pokémon series has been a constant in the lives of pretty much all millennials. Even if you weren’t watching, you knew it was there, still thriving, still going on, ready for you to return to it if, for some reason, you ever felt the overwhelming need to regress into your 12-year-old self. It was a reassuring constant in life even when you weren’t thinking about it, like the days of the week, the inevitability of death, or The Simpsons.

The thought of a world without Ash and Pikachu exploring and finding new Pokémon to befriend is a dark one indeed, but it doesn’t need to be entirely gloomy. Instead of focusing on the absence they’ll leave behind – to be filled by new Pokémon protagonists, Liko (Riko?) and Roy – we should be remembering the memories they left us with, and like many 31-year-olds with depression, one of my main memories is of Butterfree.

Butterfree is an iconic Pokémon that many trainers will remember can evolve from a Caterpie, into a Metapod, and finally into a Butterfree by level 10. That was the earliest full evolution available in the first generation – right next to Beedrill – and Butterfree was unquestionably one of the most capable Pokémon you could get early in the game thanks to its access to Psychic-type attacks. But it’s even more memorable in the series.

Caterpie is the first Pokémon that Ash catches by himself, after significant goading from Misty. Over the course of his journey through Viridian Forest, Ash manages to evolve that Caterpie into a Metapod, and finally a Butterfree, making it one of his strongest Pokémon, next to a Pidgeotto he also catches in the area.

Later in the series, Ash nearly trades Butterfree for a Radicate, a decision he severely regrets and takes back. It’s moments like this that let us, as an audience that was barely ten years old at the time, understand how much Ash cares for Butterfree. In fact, Ash cared so much that trading back got the squad caught on a sinking ship with little time to escape.

The climax to Butterfree’s story arc comes when Ash finds a group of migrating Butterfree that are all pairing up before moving on in life. Ash allows his Butterfree to join with the group to socialize, but it quickly becomes attached to another Pokémon, and Ash has the tough decision of letting Butterfree go.

Years on and this still nearly brings tears to my eyes. This was the first time my pre-adolescent brain had ever been subjected to such emotions from a TV show, and I cried every single time it aired. I also couldn’t turn away every single time it aired. For a generation that had been raised on static cartoons that always returned to the status quo at the end of the episode, a scene like this, one that permanently changed the show by pushing forward some kind of emotional growth, was incredibly impactful. In 2022 you can argue that it was hardly nuanced or subtle, but in 1998 it was an emotional gut punch for any ten-year-old. That was the first time I ever cried because of watching a TV show or movie.

If it had ended there and we never saw Butterfree again, it would’ve remained one of the defining media moments of a lifetime for me and many more Pokémon fans around the world, but no. The Pokémon Company and anime series isn’t content to just leave things there, with my sentimental rambling being the only way to revisit this nostalgic moment. Instead, Butterfree came back for a final goodbye.

In the credits sequence for Pokémon Journeys episode 136, the final episode of the series, we see loads of familiar characters get reunions with old and new favorites, but none of those hits harder than a silent scene where Ash stands at the end of a path overlooking the water, as his Butterfree, the first Pokémon he ever caught, waits for him. It’s a moment 25 years in the making, and nobody expected it to hit quite like this.

The Aim To Be A Pokémon Master series might be Ash’s final adventure in the world of Pokémon, but this bittersweet reunion was all the closure I personally needed to say goodbye to Ash and Pikachu.

Well, some answers about the GS Ball would be nice, but we take what we can get.