As much as we all laugh at Ash Ketchum for not learning anything about basic type advantages and

Pokemon battle tactics, his accomplishments are actually nothing to scoff at.

Pikachu the horn!

We're in touch! You! Four! of the Indigo Plateau Conference. He's won himself 48 total gym badges. He was a quarter-finalist in the Joto League,

Hoan League, and UNova League. He was the Cinno League semi-finalists and Callos League finalists.

For a guy whose strategy is literally

Pikachu shock, it's not effective will shock harder.

Ash has bested some of the strongest trainers in the world.

And yet we've still never seen him face his most formidable

opponent. P

Puberty. I'm going to Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory. Ash catch him. You know him, you love him. You ship him with Misty.

This young would-be Pokemon master has battled its way through over half a dozen regional leagues,

20 seasons, and over a thousand episodes of televised content, which is a heck of a career for someone who doesn't look a day over

I'm not sure exactly but he certainly doesn't look like someone who was 10 years old back in 1997

that being said 20 years passing in the real world

doesn't necessarily correlate to 20 years passing on a show so we can't really

be certain of how old Ash is until today it's time to settle this mystery once and for all.

Using the narrator's clues, holidays, seasonal transitions, and even the ripeness of fruit,

we can actually calculate just how old this plucky prepubescent Pokemon professional is.

Right off the bat, it's important to establish one key difference between the anime and the

video games, our trainer's starting age.

On the second page of the instruction manual for Pokemon red and blue,

...