The "Me Thing" vs. the "We Thing"

Pokémon Trainers are like people. Or rather, they are in fact people in every sense of the word, just somewhat removed in a different world. So that means they exhibit the same characteristics as people in our real world. This includes the natural tendency to group together or to remain solitary. These are the things that we - including I myself - do on a regular basis, and it's not too far of a stretch to think that Pokémon Trainers do the same.

The most exemplary situation where Trainers band together is obviously Ash and company from the anime, which has been the case in the previous regions' sagas. But that doesn't mean there couldn't be other Trainers that group together; the ones in the side story for "Raikou: Legend of Thunder", which also became the first batch of episodes for Pokémon Chronicles. And of course, all the villainous groups can be considered a big faction of Trainers. The advantages of this grouping together are numerous as they are obvious, many of them strung together to a word called "assistance": Trainers together can help each other out in Pokémon and non-Pokémon aspects. On the other hand, it's perfectly fine for Trainers to be solitary, since that's how it is in the games as well as in many depictions of the Pokémon world outside the main realm of the anime.

I think of myself as being individualistic most of the time, so I would fit with the individualist paradigm of many Pokémon Trainers. I'm fine with scouting, catching, breeding, and raising Pokémon by my own efforts and the aid of the people that help Trainers in general. Yet by this token and in general, no one can live in total isolation, so that is why I interact and band together with friends in the real world; I would be glad to do the same thing in the Pokémon world with other Trainers and only be willing to help them as I do to others in the real world. While I can't hope that the experience would be the same as I've seen it in the anime, I would be up for seeing other unique experiences with a group of Trainers, though hopefully to do good deeds rather than bad ones as with the villainous groups.

It's a fact of life that people do things on their own as well as with a group, and for both our world and the Pokémon world, this applies equally well. It's what we do, whether to achieve our personal or collective goals, which any person has, real or imagined, including me. This is just one of the many things that make our world and the Pokémon world closer to each other despite being fundamentally removed by existence.