And that has happened already, you know, with a portion of his Elite team taken out of commission meaning he can't use them for this match? That is a legitimate setback. In case that wasn't obvious.
That's a legitimate setback
if it actually sets him back. That's contingent on that actually causing a negative outcome in the fight, while this whole discussion is predicated around people not believing that the fight's actually going to result in a negative outcome. The general belief is that Brock is likely going to win regardless, or if he loses it's going to be because Will was cheating, not because Brock's Pokemon weren't up to the task.
Legitimate setbacks are things that actually impair you going forwards, or cause you significant troubles or hassles. Examples of this might include Pokemon being out of commission that cause Brock to lose matches he might otherwise have won; or it might include having to publicly lose a little face when backing out of or delaying a match; or it might include something that causes long-term negative effects, like traumatic nightmares on someone's part or a significant injury that permanently impacts someone's quality of life.
Losing out on Pokemon for a coming fight that you win anyway isn't particularly a legitimate setback. It barely registers on the scale for anything. It might matter if the protagonist is often portrayed as struggling and there's a sincere sense on the audience's part that this might result in a loss for the protagonist, but uh- I don't think anyone's sincerely expecting that to lead to a loss for Brock here.
But let me tangent from this to lay out something that people have been trying to get at in a lot more words than they're willing to use on the topic.
That is:
Brock's barely faced a challenge through the entire story, and most of the challenges he
has faced have resulted in no significant problems for him. In fact, many of the things he's encountered that should have been challenges in fact ended up benefiting him.
When people say that Brock needs to experience some adversity, what they mean by that is that they're hoping that Brock faces some challenges that he actually gets stymied by, and don't just end up resulting in solving other problems for him or making him seem cooler in the aftermath.
I hesitate to use certain words like "wank" because they have a negative association that I think will lead people to dismiss what I'm saying for attacking the fic without considering the broader things I'm saying, so let's see.
One of the problems that lead a lot of people to dismiss things like isekai anime and 'litRPG' anime (the Dragon Quest-adjacent kind of anime) is that they tend to load up the protagonist with powers to the extent that the story starts to feel like it has no tension. The protagonist might get in over their head, but the viewer never believes that they're actually in
danger; a part of the viewer is aware that the story is never going to have the protagonist actually be at risk.
They're not going to die, or take a serious injury, or lose someone close to them, or fail a goal in such a way that it's permanently failed; they're going to get a new power-up that allows them to take on the threat and win next time, and the only question is whether that's going to happen in the middle of this fight, or if they're going to take a plot-mandated loss and then have a small arc dedicated to how they get a new power that lets them overcome this threat.
Thus, there's no tension to the story. Threats are introduced and built up, problems are stated to be occurring, but there's no audience buy-in. The audience never believes that this threat is actually going to manifest and cause the protagonist material problems that they don't instantly overcome.
That
is a bad thing, regardless of how much one personally might feel satisfied by it, because it means that there's entire swathes of things that can't be done there. For instance; the idea of catharsis is that it's a release of tension that has been building for a length of time. If people don't buy in to the idea that the protagonist is in danger, then when the protagonist overcomes that threat, there's no moment of catharsis for the viewer. There's instead a placid feeling of "The predictable outcome happened".
That's just one example of things that can't be done if there's no audience buy-in on tension and challenge in the story. It's not the only thing that can't happen.
Wrapping this back around, we can see how this applies to Hard Enough. People have lost that buy-in; they don't believe that Brock is actually going to face any significant loss or problems.
This applies to the Will fight, but more broadly, it applies to the entire story. There's no tension regarding Legendaries, because when a Legendary showed up and actively threatened Brock, Brock was able to fight it back. There were injuries on his team, but there's no buy-in to the idea that this is going to cause him significant problems; he's got so many options and he's generally been presented as overcoming every challenger in such a way that people don't believe he's going to lose.
Draw back to Forrest. There was a minor thread of tension with regards to Brock expecting Forrest to take over for the Gym for him, but this didn't result in anything people consider to be significant problems or setbacks. There was no big fight with Forrest as that tension came to a climax; there were no harsh words exchanged as a result of expectations Forrest wasn't interested in matching up to being placed on his shoulders; there's no significant troubles being caused for the Gym as a result of Brock no longer having a direct successor lined up; etc.
Instead, Forrest simply took over Brock's spot on Ash's team, and in so doing solved a
secondary source of tension in the fic, that being whether Brock was going to disappear and join Ash's team to fulfil his canon role. That first tension not only didn't come to roost to cause any significant problems, it also solved another problem that had been presented (yet hadn't caused any issues to date).
In the interest of absolute fairness, it's possible that the Team Rocket plotline or the only-kind-of-resolved plotline with Flint may yet cause further issues in the story. It's
possible, although frankly, I doubt it; the presentation of both has so far not really caused me to believe that they're actually going to cause Brock himself significant personal challenges.
Even if they do, though- Hard Enough is currently over 800,000 words long. That's longer than some entire fantasy series; it's longer than all of
The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and
The Silmarillion put together. In a few chapters, Hard Enough will be as long as the first six books of the Harry Potter series combined. It's longer than Ursula K. Le Guin's
Earthsea series put together. It's nearly as long as any two books in
A Song of Ice and Fire put together- and I only have to qualify that with 'nearly' because books 3 and 5 of that series are inordinately long in comparison. Hard Enough will still be long enough to drop the qualifier in another ten chapters.
One would
generally expect the protagonist of a work to have faced more than a couple of major challenges or setbacks over the course of a work that long.
All this to say:
When people say that they hope that Brock loses here and has to learn some lessons from this fight, they're not necessarily talking about Will himself. They're talking about the story's overall trend towards not having Brock suffer substantial losses or challenges throughout the story.
Will himself is putting up enough of a showing through the chapter that people
want to root for him to win because, for the first time in a very long time, it would actually be believable for Brock to straight-up take a loss here. He might be a personally bad person, he might be using dirty tactics, he might be exploiting loopholes in the rules that will soon be patched- but he's pressing Brock, and Brock is on the back foot, and that means that for the first time in a very long time in the story, Brock feels like he's actually on the back foot.
The story has a bit of tension in it now. People are having that buy-in thanks to Will.
And then people are noticing all of the hints that Will is cheating, and that buy-in is disappearing again; that's instantly making people assume that Brock's not going to lose because Will is going to be accused by cheating, and any loss of reputation or challenge to Brock's skillset will disappear because it's not a 'legitimate' loss. Brock will just carry on with a record only marred by someone bringing in an extra Pokemon to cheat with, and that's a shame, because all of the buy-in one of the most hyped fights in the fic will get will just disappear, and it's going to be much harder to generate that again.
