Pokémon's Female Characters Are Getting Better — But the Competition Has Lapped Them

If you spend any time on anime forums or social media, you'll notice a recurring conversation about how women are written and portrayed across different series. It's a legitimate discussion, and one that the Pokémon anime can't really sidestep — not when it's been running for over 25 years and has introduced dozens of female characters across that span.

Here at PikashowHD, we stream a lot of anime. Which means we've got a decent view of the landscape — where different shows succeed, where they stumble, and how Pokémon fits into the broader picture. The honest answer? It's complicated. The franchise has grown. It's also got real catching up to do.

Where Pokémon Started: The Misty Blueprint

Misty was the original female lead of the Pokémon anime, and she set a template that both helped and haunted the franchise for years. She was tough, competitive, and had a clear personality — good things. She also existed largely in Ash's orbit, defined as much by her relationship to him and her running conflict with her sisters as by any independent narrative of her own.

She had ambitions (becoming a Water Pokémon Master), but the show rarely put those ambitions front and center. She was a companion. A supporting player. The show treated her story as secondary, which was pretty standard for late-'90s kids programming but looks limiting in retrospect.

The Evolution: From Companions to Protagonists

To the franchise's credit, the female characters who followed Misty were often given more internal complexity. May had a genuine arc about discovering her own passion for Pokémon Contests rather than battles — a path she chose independently. Dawn was similarly motivated by personal goals. Serena, arguably the most developed female companion in the entire series, had a storyline about identity and self-determination that was genuinely compelling.

The Pokémon Horizons era has pushed this further by centering a female character — Liko — as a co-lead with real agency and an ongoing mystery tied to her own backstory. That's meaningful progress.

But progress relative to where Pokémon started isn't the same as progress relative to the current anime landscape. And that's where things get interesting.

What My Hero Academia Is Doing Differently

Take Ochaco Uraraka in My Hero Academia. On the surface, she has some of the same structural challenges as Pokémon's female leads — she's introduced partly through her connection to the male protagonist, she's given a romantic subplot that can occasionally overshadow her professional development. But the show consistently returns to her internal life. Her motivations are economic and deeply personal. She has scenes that have nothing to do with Deku. She makes tactical decisions under pressure that define her as a hero independent of anyone else's story.

More significantly, MHA has characters like Mirko — a pro hero who is ferociously capable, physically dominant, and written without any romantic softening of her edges. She exists in the story purely on the terms of her own strength and choices. That kind of character is largely absent from the Pokémon anime.

Demon Slayer and the Question of Physical Agency

Demon Slayer has a genuinely interesting dynamic when it comes to female characters. Nezuko occupies a unique position — she's powerful, she's central to the story's emotional core, but she's also literally silenced for most of the series, which creates a complicated reading of her agency. At the same time, characters like Kanao and Shinobu are given real combat roles, real backstories, and real emotional weight that doesn't depend on their relationship to male characters.

Pokémon, by contrast, tends to keep its female characters in supporting roles during major battles. Companions like Serena and Lana have their moments, but the climactic confrontations almost always center Ash. Even in Horizons, where Liko is a co-lead, the narrative balance is still being worked out.

Attack on Titan Sets a High Bar

If you want to see what it looks like when an anime genuinely refuses to treat female characters as secondary, Attack on Titan is worth studying. Mikasa Ackerman is arguably the most physically capable character in the entire series — not the most capable female character, just the most capable, full stop. The show never frames her power as exceptional for a woman. It's just exceptional, period.

Hange Zoë is another example — a character whose gender the manga deliberately leaves ambiguous, and whose entire identity is built around intellectual obsession and tactical brilliance. These aren't characters written around a female template. They're characters who happen to be women.

Pokémon isn't really operating in the same narrative space as AoT, and that's fine — they're wildly different shows with different audiences and goals. But the contrast is worth noting because it illustrates what's possible when a creative team decides that gender isn't a limiting factor in how characters are written.

What Pokémon Gets Right That Others Miss

Here's the counterpoint, though: Pokémon's female characters are rarely sexualized in the way that's unfortunately common across anime as a genre. The show's target audience is younger, and its approach to character design and relationships reflects that. You're not going to find the kind of gratuitous fan-service content in Pokémon that appears in plenty of other popular series.

There's also something to be said for how consistently the franchise portrays female characters as competent Trainers, Coordinators, and competitors. Cynthia, the Sinnoh Champion, is one of the most formidable characters in the entire anime — she's respected, she's feared, and she's never reduced to her gender. Diantha carries similar weight in Kalos. These are female characters written as the best in their field, full stop.

The Gap Is Closing, But It's Still There

Pokémon is a franchise built for broad accessibility, and its approach to female characters reflects that priority — safe, positive, rarely challenging. That's not inherently wrong. But if you're spending time on PikashowHD watching across different series, the contrast becomes clear: shows like MHA, Demon Slayer, and AoT are writing female characters with more complexity, more physical agency, and more narrative independence than Pokémon typically manages.

The good news is the direction of travel is right. Liko in Horizons, Serena in XY, Cynthia across multiple arcs — these suggest a franchise that's at least asking better questions about how to write women. Whether it fully catches up to what the broader anime landscape is doing is a story still being written.