It's even in the name: Pokemon is about Pokemon. Pikachu, Charizard, Mewtwo. Lucario, Greninja, Mimikyu. Over a thousand species and counting,🦩 and collectively they're responsible for the success of one of the biggest franchises on the planet.

But what about those weird human-looking characters? You know, the humans? There are hundreds throughout the games, and thousands across the incredibly long-running anime. Today, we'll be looking toward the (original) anime especially, where dozens of non-Pokemon denizen𒁏s received ample characterization for decades.

33 Sophocles

Ash's journey to Alola came packed with the largest core cast of characters in any given era of the anime. Some fans praise this generation of the show for managing to bring such a diverse group together and prov🧔ide a measure of development for them all.

Sophocles is the weak link of the gang, and ultimat🦹ely, the weakest link on this list. The Sun & Moon seasons were clearly pitched as an ensemble approach, but Soph🎶ocles never changes. He's tedious at the best of times and downright frustrating otherwise. The writers may have intended to remind us, through Sophocles, that not everyone is an Ash-tier hero. Some fear the unknown. That's totally fair, but it could have been conveyed through someone far less irritating.

32 Cilan

For the entirety of the Pokemon anime's first eras — Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh — Ash and Pikachu's male counterpart was Br📖ock. His departure after all that time left an even bigger hole than Misty's did, and it was inevitabl𒈔e that any new male traveling companion would be compared to Brock. It was a tough hill to climb, and Cilan completely flunked it.

Cilan's entire shtick is food. He's a great chef, you see, and hey, that's good. It comes in handy when the team is starving, to be sure. But that doesn't give Cilan a license to never shut up about it. Food puns are this kid's currency of choice, and he trades them relentlessly to the chagrin of pretty much every viewer who ever got through Best Wishes (the Black & White era) despite this dude's every effort to thwart their goal.

31 Max

Pokemon is a show primarily written for children, and most of its main characters are children. (We'll ignore the fact that Ash has totally been adventuring for over two decades, that 1,200 and more episodes have occured while he's 🦩"ten" somehow, and that some of those episodes even accꩲount for several days on their own... OK, perhaps we aren't ignoring it after all.)

Back on track, then. If these perpetual kids, Ash and his friends, are the stars, then the only way tಌo write a kid who isn't bizarrely grown in mentality and oddly capable in matters of liberty is to create someone even younger than the rest. We can forgive Max, May's seven-year-old younger brother, for being immature. He is, after all, seven. And a more believable seven than his sister's ten.

That doesn't mean we🐟 have to accept just how annoying this brat can get. It's a teaching episode, sure, a moment to learn from, but the highlight example of the sorts of things Max brings to the show during the Hoenn era is how he pilfers all of Ash's badges when Ash defeats his Max's father. Refusing to accept his dad isn't some deity is just another Tues💝day for this kid. Max never really progresses past this, even if the writers seem to insist otherwise.

30 Lana

Lana is... fine. She's another member of Alola's schoolhouse squad, the smallest of the bunch and easily the biggest lover of the open seas. Most of the time she's kind of a blank slate, a siphon for the plot so that other characters🐟 can handle the situation.

The girl picks up the pace a little at seemingly random intervals, when she's momentarily revealed to be trolling her friends in conniving ways. That may sound bad, but it's pretty much the only thing about Lana we can routinely remember, let alone chuckle over. File 𓂃this one under flat.

29 Clemont

Cilan failed to re🐠place Brock, and Clemont didn't pull it off, either. But compared to Cilan, who is replaced directly by this spunky, tech-obsessed Kalosian gym lead❀er, Clemont is a breath of fresh air.

It's important that we reiterat𒅌e, Clemont's only really that breath of fresh air relative to his predecessor. He's got a bit of Sophocles in him, which is never a compliment; Clemonꩵt's sudden bouts of fear and trepidation are rarely entertaining. The shtick with him building contraptions to assist the team, only for his inventions to inevitably falter, grew old a quarter of the way through the X & Y years.

The best thing we can say for Clemont is that he's better than he might have been 🥀in other eras of the anime. X & Y gets pretty intense sometimes, forcing us to see the better side of this young inventor when it does.

28 Mallow

It seems like Sun & Moon's oversized posse is dropping practically one after another. Perhaps they're just so mu൩ch better together than when considered separately? R💖egardless, Mallow is another fairly ho-hum addition to the anime.

It's kind of neat that Mallow balanc🔜es her studies with helping out at her father's restaurant. There's a bit of intrigue over whether inheriting the ꦉfamily business is really what she wants from her future, but it's never quite resolved, because so few of Sun & Moon's cast ventures wayward from their home turf at any point.

27 Matori

Matori's a 🦩name you might not have heard of before, particularly if you quit watching the Pokemon anime after Hoenn. Introduced as a recurring threat during the Sinnoh era, Matori is a whipsmart and devious member of Team Rocket who is designed to instill the sort of fear in her foes that Jessie and James are just too bumbling and pure to achieveꦡ.

That sounds great on paper, but in reality, Matori is a fairly mixed bag. Sometimes, 🏅she's great, with presence and cunning. Too often, she's outplayed by Ash and friends in the most absurd ways, even by Pokemon anime measures, to the point that her very brief moments of darkness are all but washed away.

It's nice to see her factor into several er🐽as, and it's good to have a "real" Team Rocket threat, but Matori is just not as smart as she ought to be. She's also far too😼 infrequent to leave a lasting impression.

26 Bonnie

Bonnie is Clemont's🐠 little sister. Like May's little brother, Max, she tags along with the team, raising a would-be trio to a quartet. Unlike Max, Bonnie has some semblance of sense to💫 her. The recurring joke where she attempts to marry her older brother to female guest characters is always worth a chortle.

The problem is that she has basically nothing especially noteworthy about her, from the beginning all the way to the end of her tenure. It's fine to be fairly one-note, given her age andও disposition, but by default it makes Bonnie kind of uninteresting.

25 Tracey

When we mentioned earlier that Brock was Ash's traveling compoanion for four full back-to-back sagas, that was admittedly a bit of a misnomer. For the span of around 33 episodes, primarily during the original series' made-up Orange Islands arc, Brock was busy elsewhere and "Pokemon watcher" Tracey did the best he could to make u꧂p for that fact.

He isn't around long enough to leave much of an impression eitehr way, but Tracey does get a nifty write-out in the form of being pe🍎rmitted to begin working as an assistant to his idol, Professor Oak. This also lets him pop in every couple hundred episodes (truly, t🌺his is a long anime) to check in with Ash and the others.

24 Iris

After 🐻Misty left at the end of Johto, May took over her role. After May, it was Dawn. And after Dawn, as Ash h🍌eaded into Unova and the Best Wishes saga, it was this gal.

Iris shakes things up after both May and Dawn, both of whom we'll cover a bit later in our list, have the goal of winning Pokemon contests. Unlike her predecessors, Iris is all about Pokemon battling, which could have led to a pretty special dynamic with Ash. Sadly, Best Wishes' overall lac🐽k of oomph works to her detriment, and we're left with someone who doesn't advance much beyond a few threadbare sওpotlight episodes.

If anything, seein🎶g a more mature Iris a handful of times in Pokemon Journeys has helped her more than much of her own era did.