A large amount of older fans wanting Misty to return or having her as their favorite heroine doesn't automatically make her likely to come back, since the objective for the show is still mainly to fleece parents of their money to purchase merchandise for their children. You could make the argument you're attempting to make for literally any character in the show outside of Ash, Pikachu and maybe Team Rocket, although the latter haven't been in every Best Wishes episode and were on the chopping block in Johto from Shudo's own accounts. Every character sans Ash and Pikachu are placeholders for the next on this show, I'm baffled that you'd think this moniker only applies to one of the most popular characters.
Brock didn't have to stay after Johto either yet he was kept for seemingly no reason at all. Even if May or Dawn were still introduced, Misty could have stayed on the sidelines. Maybe Misty would have been the "coach" to May or Dawn similar to Brock to Ash...but instead they opted to axe her entirely.
In fact Misty could have lasted up until Best Wishes theoretically for the same reasons Brock did. Both May and Dawn would have still likely come to advertise Contests, but the writers decided Misty had no purpose.
And you miss my point, if Misty's departure had caused "backlash" the writers could have never kept her off the show past Hoenn. She would have returned to the cast for Battle Frontier and stayed on for DP at least.
We've already went through this, she got four Chronicle episodes to herself, four return episodes, and appeared in the hour long Mastermind special. That's nearly eleven episodes worth of screentime after leaving the main cast, compared to Dawn's nine (only one of which had her as the main character) and May's four, and that's not including the two cameos during the Hoenn league and having her in a flashback more than ten years after departing from the show, nor alluding to her with the fishing lure during the Diamond and Pearl series.
This I don't agree with. They wasted Chronicle episodes on crappy characters nobody cared for like Richie and Casey. And then these characters faded away into oblivion. Are you telling me those horrid rivals got specials because they were popular? Hell no, its just that the writers were giving screentime to all pre-AG characters at the time.
More popular rivals like Drew, Harley and Paul didn't get anything after they left, do you think they're unpopular? Of course not.
Did you ignore the part where it displayed that the ratings rose from the episodes preceding the Misty-centric ones?
How do you know there weren't other factors by then? This was in late Johto after the majority of the original fandom started drifting from the anime. How did these people know Misty was getting a tournament arc? The Whirl Cup may have high ratings because it was viewed as a major tournament at the time, and it was taking forever to reach the league.
Also in regards to this, I've seen several Japanese character polls where Misty is the least popular female lead over there with Dawn placing #1 and May at #2.I assume its because of the girly otaku appeal. As much as I don't like Piplup, I know its the most popular pokemon over there during the DP era other than Pikachu. The Japanese have different tastes than we do.
And the fad wore off during the tail-end of the second generation, with Crystal selling around the same amount as Emerald, Platinum and B2W2, yet mid to late Johto was still pulling in a far more numerous audience than pretty much any point in any saga afterwards.
Dogasu said it best, more people were watching TV back then. This is in the pre-internet, pre-download, pre Iphone, Ipad days. Back then you HAD to watch an episode on TV or you were out of luck until reruns.
DP is considered one of the best written arcs of the anime, yet its ratings are the second lowest only above BW. Its obvious "good writing" has no effect on ratings. Also I love how you ignore the early AG episodes had higher ratings than late Johto according to that site.
Tracey appeared for some thirty-five odd episodes, hardly giving anybody time to attach to his character, while Misty had a huge presence in the show since the very first episode to the second to last in the original series; 273 episodes, five movies, and the Mewtwo special; all while an incredibly large amount of people were tuning in to see the group's next exploits. The fact that you even think they're at all comparable just shows how bright of a torch you have to burn for her.
But not everyone saw all those episodes. Half the original fandom dropped the show shortly after Charizard left in early Johto. Many people did not even know Misty was gone until we were in mid-Hoenn, simply because they stopped during Johto and never got up till the episode she left. I remember we were in 2004/2005 and people were posting things like "What happened to Misty?" after nearly 100 Hoenn episodes have aired already. A lot of people never even knew she left until well after AG was airing.
Also in terms of the U.S, the 3rd, 4th and 5th movies completely bombed in theaters....so I think that says enough.
As well, you have yet to provide me any proof that even remotely alludes to May or Dawn being more popular than Misty, while I've given you a chart that clearly indicates the ratings dropping far below anything in the original series soon after the novelty of the new cast members wore off. All you've been doing is coasting off of misquoting or just completely fabricating things that Shudo said and expecting people not to actually check
the blog to fact check what you've been claiming. And then to say that the writing cast had some sort of grudge against a fictional character who's personality and attributes they created, so they intentionally sabotaged mid-Johto out of spite? You do realize this is a children's show we're speaking of, right?
I've mentioned above I've seen character polls. Dawn and Piplup were far more popular in Japan than the rest of the world, while in the US it seems a lot of people were rather lukewarm to the character.
Also Misty hasn't been around now in 10 years, entire generations of little kids grew up with AG or DP as their first sagas, so they will have no attachment to Misty even if they go back and watch the older episodes at some point.