In my never-ending quest to make the "Pokémon" anime more character-intensive, I hit on the idea of Ash and May becoming an item. True, the series has never given Ash a serious romantic interest before, but that's part of the show's problem - the characters are never allowed to do anything that doesn't somehow involve promoting the video games. I've recently been brainstorming ways in which the entire Hoenn saga could have been overhauled, and the biggest change I came up with was this - Ash, the experienced master, and May, the curious novice, brought together in love through their adventures in gym badge collecting, contest coordination, and thwarting the dual threat of Team Aqua and Team Magma. As it just so happens, I drew this in time for Valentine's Day and thought it'd be a nice romantic piece to add to my gallery.

As these things are wont to do, it spawned a whole big fanfiction project in which I went through all 191 Advanced Generation episodes and tinkered with their plots to make them more focused on character development. As it stands, Ash and May's first kiss would happen sometime around the beginning of Season 8, during my imagined revision of the embarassingly lame Groudon and Kyogre saga (I expanded it to include Mt. Pyre, added Wallace and Steven to the mix instead of Lance, made the whole thing a lot more epic, and worked Rayquaza into the climax). You can probably expect more concept art from my revised Hoenn ideas in the not-too-distant future.

And to those who argue that May is too young for Ash, who's probably somewhere in his early teens, I defy you to show me one ten-year-old on earth with a figure like hers. She's gotta be 13, at least.