>>58256740
>>58251134
>Noland and Anabel are meant to be a gender flipped mirror of Ruby and Sapphire's relationship
>a repeat of the Wallace-Winona hostage situation
Ok this is insane, I've never seen it that way before. I'll go reread those parts, but it's true there's already some parallels in the Emerald arc from RS so it's not impossible.

I just never gave a shit about the Frontier Brains here before since like most volume readers, I didn't know the context of the Emerald arc initially being some gag routine between the Brains and Emerald. In context of the final volume version where the story turns serious later, it just looks like the Brains are randomly just being dicks to a 10 year old, so now a lot of people hate the Hoenn Brains for that. Though the original magazine runs are usually just shitty first drafts of the final story so they're usually worth ignoring in most cases.