The Most Terrible Things Ash Ketchum Has Ever Done

One of Ash's most irritating flaws is also so well-known that it's become a running gag among fans: he is unbelievably bad at being a Pokémon trainer.

On one level, that's pretty understandable. He is, after all, the viewpoint character that kids are meant to identify with. So the fact that he needs to have literally everything about the world around him explained in crushingly simple terms is just a way to get information to the impressionable audience. Plus, despite starring in a TV show that has racked up 992 episodes and 24 movies, Ash is still only ten years old — which, incidentally, means that each day of Ash's life has encompassed an average of three episodes of the cartoon. With that much happening, it makes sense that he might get a little overwhelmed.

And yet, the first thing we learn about Ash is that becoming a Pokémon Master is the only thing he has ever wanted. If you're going to dedicate your entire life to a single goal, maybe you could bother to learn one thing about it. And yet, even the simplest things like "fire beats grass" seem to slide right out of his head without leaving any impression. He once had to ask his Pokédex what a Koffing was after seeing one at least three times a day when he was attacked by Team Rocket, and even his own 'Dex once called him stupid. That's pretty harsh, but the fact remains that he refuses to make anything beyond the slightest effort to learn something. 

Of course, if you could breeze through the entire Pokémon League without ever needing to know anything, you probably wouldn't bother to learn, either. Which is exactly how it works for Ash.

In the games, making your way through League requires you to defeat each Gym Leader. You have to figure out which types are stronger make a varied team that can handle any threat — or at least one that's high-level enough to brute force your way to a shiny set of gym badges. Ash, on the other hand, just blunders his way through so pathetically that he tends to get his badges out of pity rather than skill.

Of the eight original Kanto Gym Leaders, Ash only truly defeated three, and even those came when he begged for a second chance after causing his so called "best friends" to get the crap kicked out of them the first time. The rest of the gym battles saw Ash getting help from other trainers, getting the badges in return for dealing with bad guys or running errands, and, in the case of the Earth Badge, literally having it fall into his hands after sending Team Rocket blasting off again, without ever coming within a mile of the actual gym leader. The nice thing, though, is that there were actually consequences to this one: since Ash never had to get better, he never developed the skills he'd need in the League, and wound up turfing out of the tournament in the early rounds.

Despite the pretty rocky start, Pikachu and Ash developed a lasting friendship, which is especially impressive when you consider how rarely that happens in a relationship that starts with one party putting on rubber clothes and tying the other up. Usually, you at least have to get dinner and a movie before you get to that point.

It wasn't all smooth sailing, though. Once again, Ash's desire to win battles trumped any lessons he'd learned about friendship when he took on Lieutenant Surge at the Vermilion City Gym. As his name implies, Surge was a specialist in Electric types, and rather than catching a Rock type to give himself an advantage — or even borrowing one from Brock, who was right there — Ash decided to just toss Pikachu at him and hope for the best. Unsurprisingly, Pikachu got stomped by Surge's Raichu, being so badly injured that he wound up in a (weirdly human-sized) hospital bed, with Ash waving a Thunderstone in his face.

To be fair, Ash did tell Pikachu that he didn't want to make him evolve into Raichu if he didn't want to. On the other hand, he also spent the minutes before that complaining about how they could win if Pikachu would just try harder, while sitting next to his injured Pokémon in a hospital bed. Even after Pikachu refused to evolve and slapped the Thunderstone out of his hand, Ash kept it around, you know, just in case. In other words, Ash told Pikachu he was nothing special, and then a few weeks later asked if he wanted to maybe change everything about himself because he wasn't trying hard enough. Real nice, Ketchum.

Every Pokémon trainer is well aware that one of your primary goals in the game is to help Professor Oak complete the Pokédex by catching as many different Pokémon as you can. It's so important that "Gotta Catch 'Em All" became the catchphrase for the entire franchise. For Ash, however, it's barely even a suggestion.

And honestly, that part's fine. Plenty of trainers focus on just getting the ones they like, and actually completing the 'Dex is pretty rare. Where Ash goes wrong isn't in the fact that he only catches four or five Pokémon in every region, it's that he once caught 30 of the same one–and then dumped them all on Professor Oak. Which probably wouldn't be a problem if they hadn't been Tauros, meaning that Ash basically sent his kindly old neighbor a herd of stampeding bulls.

If you don't remember that happening, that's okay. The episode where Ash captured them was actually banned in America and never translated thanks to a scene where a bad guy pulled a gun on him. Still, while it might be easy to gloss over smaller events from other banned episodes, 30 Tauros are a little harder to ignore, especially once they start rampaging through the Professor's laboratory, smashing up walls and nearly trampling Ash's mother in the process.

If we're being completely fair about this, Ash's boatjacking and attempted drownings were technically accidents — although if you've ever accidentally stolen a boat, that's a story we absolutely want to hear. But while it's both easy and correct to think of Ash as a bumbling idiot, that kid also has a mean streak a mile wide.

For evidence, look no further than the end of "Primeape Goes Bananas," in which Ash throws his newly caught Primeape into a pit with Team Rocket with all the murderous glee of someone tossing a grenade into a foxhole. Again, there are some mitigating circumstances — Team Rocket had pretty much been trying to murder and rob Ash for about 25 episodes at this point — but Ash had just witnessed firsthand how dangerous this particular Pokémon could be. It doesn't just beat up the other Pokémon, it takes on the humans, too, sending Jessie face-first into a boulder, and punching Brock so hard that he lands in the next county.

That's what Ash throws into the pit with them: a creature so hateful that the latest version of the 'Dex claims that it "has been known to become so angry that it dies as a result," and "It will never forgive opponents who have angered it. Even after it has beaten them down until they can't move, it never ever forgives." That's not an inference. That's actual canon.