Pokemon Company gives love to trainers with new shirt line

Pokemon Company has always been weird with clothing. While the games like Pokemon Go, Pokemon Sword and Shield, and others have constantly thrown out clothing I’d kill to have, the Pokemon Company has always said, “sure but we won’t do that” and did their own thing. Much to my annoyance. In fact, if you look, most Pokemon themed clothing comes in one main style, a picture of a Pokemon, normally one of the top-20 most popular, dead center on a t-shirt. It leaves a lot to be desired.

But finally, clearly after reading my dream journal that I’ve been slapping against their office windows for a decade, they’ve created a line of shirts that celebrate the under appreciated trainers.

While these are still regular graphic tees with the trainer and their primary Pokemon plastered boringly dead center, the art on these shirts is stunning.

Now before we go into it, I want to point out one more gripe, you can either get these images on a white t-shirt or a black long sleeve. I don’t know who made this choice but it is AWFUL. White t-shirts look like cheap promotional material and black long sleeves were primarily designed to be worn under a more interesting shirt as wearing one by itself looks like you’re wearing a pajama top. But I digress.

According to The Pokemon Company’s press release this line contains the following trainers and their main Pokemon pal. The roster is:

"Allister and GengarBea and MachampErika and VileplumeGloria and SobbleLeon and CharizardMarnie and MorpekoMay and TorchicNessa and DrednawPiers and ObstagoonRaihan and DuraludonSerena and BraixenVolkner and Luxray"

So yeah, there’s a couple missing but there’s also a surprising amount here. And while I think Leon and Raihan are BEYOND boring, the majority of these characters are fantastic.

Obviously, we’re going to have characters like Marnie who, despite being so remarkably unimportant to the story of Sword and Shield has won fans over with her signature look and her inability to recognize that she accidentally created an antagonist gang with Team Yell.

Her design is my favorite out of this collection too. Morpeko (who is criminally underrated) shines as, surprisingly, the most colorful part of this design. And Marnie seems to be one of the few people that can pull off an unattached look while also seemingly floating in zero gravity.

Serena also has a winning design here. Serena is this fun character that I never fully appreciated until WAY after her time. While I always appreciated her role as the closest Ash will ever have a love interest and she was his first romantic kiss (if you want to ignore Latias), I didn’t truly appreciate how important that was until Ash’s final run in Pokemon Ultimate Journeys when he ran into her again only to have a bittersweet missed connection.

Luckily, her design makes up for their awkward romantic tension. The picture on the shirt is one of the few that look good with a white background and is absolutely popping with the positive energy Serena brought to the show. And also it’s good to see Braixan on a shirt as I’m sure this will be her one and only clothing appearance.

Allister’s is awesome too because, more often then not, the Ghost Type Gym Leader is conveyed as timid and scared and this image of him and his mighty Gengar conveys a type of confidence and power rarely seen on everyone’s favorite possibly-living Gym Leader.

The design is something you absolutely have to have on a dark color too as the whites of a t-shirt wash out this design and, honestly, if you don’t have Allister in the darkness are you even doing it right?

All in all, after looking at all these they all have fantastic designs but I genuinely hope they change up the colors as white t-shirts and black long sleeves are so boring. Their previous run of trainer shirts were so much more interesting as they used colored shirts. For example, my personal favorite:

The Pokemon Center Lady with Blissy. She never gets any love on the merch and it just makes me really happy to see her get her moment. Plus this design absolutely pops on purple.

There were other great ones featuring characters like Red, Blue, Cynthia and more, there’s also Skyla but the internet has made it so that there’s no way in hell you can wear a Skyla shirt without people eyeing you closely.

Anyways, these are some fantastic designs and I can’t wait to see if they make shirts with colors worthy of these fantastic pieces of art.