It's too bad the comment sections on the episodes are turned off, I would have liked to see how people were reacting to the episodes. Some people may be seeing these eps for the first time, or others who hadn't rewatched them in a decade or more. I also wanted to see if any genwunner/misty fans would show up and rage there, and I would have "educated" them about the anime like I did on forums over the last 20+ years, and nowadays on social media like twitter/reddit/youtube/tumblr, etc. But I understand kids shows on youtube uploaded officially usually have comments turned off to prevent anything inappropriate being said on official channels.
Even with the quotation marks, saying that you'd educate other people like that comes off as rather rude and condescending, especially when it's not your self-appointed duty to confront Misty fan, or educate them as you put it. I'm rather baffled at your obsession with Misty fans, but maybe wanting to confront them about it is part of the reason why you keep focusing on them and Misty.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if there would be any noteworthy amounts of rage comments about Misty leaving even if they did allow comments. I'm sure that there are still people who don't like that it happened. There are plenty of Misty fans out there and I have seen people saying in YouTube Community posts that they miss Misty. But would be still be the kind of rage like there was back when AG first started? After twenty years, I highly doubt it. I think you'd be more likely to find people commenting on Rachael Lillis after her tragic passing last year, especially near the end of the original series, than still being upset over Misty leaving the cast.
I don't really blame them for not allowing comments on these videos. Not only because they wouldn't want anything inappropriate being said on their official channels, but it would be such a hassle to moderate the comment section for hundreds of videos. It just wouldn't be worth all of the work and hassle. At this point, I think that the Pokemon video game community is more toxic than the anime community. It's hard press to say that you like most modern main series games, but there's still plenty of toxic aspects of the Pokemon anime online community too.
Speaking of the second ep, I'm surprised Team Magma is introduced as early as the second ep, like the earliest introduction of a villain team in the anime...and then the writers just squandered the whole Magma/Aqua plotline as the series went on. I'm still bummed about it to this day, they could have easily followed the game plot for their appearances and given us a 5-part conclusion with Steven and Rayquaza showing up, and good animation for the Groudon/Kyorge showdown, as well as showing them go to Mt. Pyre to get the orbs.
At the very least, XY's Mega Evolution specials did give us the epic Groudon/Kyorge/Rayquaza showdown with Steven showing up we wanted, it only took 10 more years to get there.
Yeah, as much as I like AG, how they handled Team Magma/Aqua was pretty bad. I think that the writers were eager to tease Team Magma since this was the first new evil team introduced in the main series. They couldn't really adapt much of the storyline for G/S since that involved Team Rocket trying to find Giovanni and since they skipped the confrontation with Giovanni during the Kanto arc, there wasn't much they could do with them. Here they had two new evil teams that they could adapt from the games, but they mostly just appeared occasionally during the Hoenn arc, not really adapting the storyline from the games well or even having their appearances building up to the climax. They didn't have to do a complete one to one translation of the games. I think that the anime tends to work better when it does it own thing while still using the games as a blueprint for their storylines, such as the Team Galatic storyline in DP. But the Team Magma/Aqua storyline doesn't really work either as its own thing or as an adaptation from the games. They didn't even confirm that Team Magma/Aqua had disbanded until a few episodes later, which was a strange move.
I still remember being shocked when both teams just suddenly had Legendary Pokemon. They weren't Team Rocket trio levels of incompetent, but their episodes throughout AG just didn't make me think that either team were strong enough to overpower Groudon or Kyogre. Admittedly, I didn't really have a problem with Steven not being included. Treating the Hoenn Champion as a generic one off character was a bad move, but I just didn't find him to be that interesting, even with the original R/S games in mind. I understood more as to why fans really liked him in OR/AS and it was still cool to see him get more attention in XY, but I didn't mind not including him in this two parter. I kind of liked Lance taking Steven's role. It was a nice bit of continuity, something that would become a bit rarer with later series, and it was kind of cool to see how he trained his Gyarados after the Lake of Rage two parter. Removing Rayquaza was a huge shame though. I don't think that the climax needed five episodes, but a better two or three parter probably would have worked.
One aspect about AG that I remember liking was how it really did feel like a fresh start. Ash starting a new team with just Pikachu really did feel like we were starting over again and at the time, that made the series feel pretty refreshing. It's hard to really capture that kind of feeling again when the rotating cast and Ash getting a new team became the standard, but I do remember feeling that way when watching AG for the first time back in the day.
