ash's strength

[Dragon-89]

first off this is only my opinion. okay, so most people see Unova as a dark time in ash's history. and it all started with his loss to Trip. I agree with the Unova part of that statement. I did not like it either. However I disagree about the Trip part. Ok so here is my theory, when it comes to legendaries there is a rank system, and depending where they are in there will tell you how strong they are and how hard it is to beat or even catch one. at the bottom there is the ones like zapdos, the regis, latios, the unova dogs (sorry I can't seem to remember the names), the lake trio, and Darkrai. than you have the next level above that, which are the big dogs, the main ones in each region. I am talking about Lugia, Ho-Ho, the time space trio, Zekrom and so on. think about it. Ash's pokemon in the second movie might have held off the legendary bird for a short amount of time. But it took the combined power of all three to even put a dent in Lugia and thats while he was protecting ash from all their attacks. in hoenn and then in sinnoh, ash was seen to be able to match with the likes of legendaries. but that was only the lowest tier. when ash and the gang had to face groudon and kyogre they were sitting ducks. they couldn't do anything against them. so the beginning of unova was a reminder of that to everyone. that just because he beat some legendaries does not mean that he is on that level, and if he thought that he could start catching those legendaries he was sorely mistaken. in all of the anime whenever we have seen someone with a legendary it was on of the lower tier.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

[Dragon-89]

and it showed that if ash went up against one of them then there will be consequences like what happened with pikachu. after one exchange, pikachu was left so weak he lost to a level 5 snivy.

 

[Sheep]

Legendaries and mythicals have almost always been shown to be pretty out of reach I think, the few times any important characters capture them (Goh with Suicune) it was because it was weak and pretty much allowed itself to be captured. They are definitely strong but from what I've seen watching the anime, their strength varies since there are multiple of the same species and certain ones seem stronger than others. I never doubted ones like Kyogre and Groudon were very difficult to defeat because of their size and strength, they seem on a whole different level to the legendary birds power-wise.

Would be awesome to see Ash battle Ho-Oh one day though!