The first season’s plot to the animated series is basically summarized by that /chan/ post.

The pokémon craze came out when I was starting middle school, and it was everywhere (I played the first game, beat it, and moved the fuck on). Looking back from college age on, I’d notice how messed up the whole “universe” of Pokémon is, throwing kids out of their homes to “walk the earth,” ALONE and with little-to-no means of feeding themselves, all while poaching wild animals left and right, caging them in minute prisons, and only letting them out to cockfight each other or perform some manual labor like something out of the Flintstones.

Only japan could produce something that fucked up.