[@Letter Bee]

however, there's the issue of that fluxuating so i guess it's up to personal preference. mine is for pikachu to be female so menh. Outside of that, the only point at which ash cared about earning the respect of his pokemon was in the first season, all later seasons were pretty much "you wanna be strong like us? then do what i say" plus, there are occasions when trainers force pokemon to do what they say even on the rare occasion that they don't like each other. This is, of course, not thinking about the fact that ash may very well already be dead after the first episode's lightning strike, a very popular theory and one i personally support just simply because IT'S BEEN ROUGHLY 12 YEARS AND HE'S STILL 12. Outside of that, you're still left with the issue that pokemon just suddenly lose all forms of agency in the anime, and alot of them are trapped in their pokeballs for untold amounts of time and only able to come out for plot convenience or to do battle with other pokemon, that doesn't help their psyche at all. Now, even if you can discount all of that and more, there's still the fact that gym badges are supposed to be able to help you control more powerful pokemon. I see no reason this would be neccessary if the pokemon were, in fact, acting of their own accord and listening to you out of free will.