If you watched Pokémon as a kid, Brock probably felt like the safest person in the room.
Ash was reckless and impulsive. Misty was permanently furious. Team Rocket were always on the verge of another public breakdown. But Brock? Brock was calm. Reliable. A gentle presence who cooked meals, solved arguments, and generally acted as if it was perfectly normal for three children to be wandering across a continent with no adult supervision.
As a child, I didn’t question this. Brock was just the “grown-up one”.
As an adult, though, I look back at Brock and think: this boy is not the responsible friend. He’s a child parent. And Pokémon quietly gave him one of the saddest backstories in the entire franchise… then awkwardly tried to rewrite it later.
Brock: the Gym Leader Who Was Also Raising a Family
In the early anime, Brock isn’t just Pewter City’s Gym Leader. He’s also the eldest of a large group of siblings, and he isn’t simply “helpful” at home.
He’s running it.
He cooks. He cleans. He manages the household. He makes sure the younger children are fed and clothed and cared for. He acts as their parent in every meaningful way. The show doesn’t frame it as abuse or neglect. It doesn’t score the scenes with sad music. It doesn’t pause to remind you that Brock is only a teenager.
It presents it as an admirable character trait. Which is precisely what makes it so unsettling.
Because if you strip away the cheery music and the fast pacing, the situation is bleak. Brock has been forced into adulthood far too early. He isn’t “mature for his age.” He has been placed in a position where he cannot afford to be anything else.
This isn’t just a sad detail. It’s the foundation of his entire personality.
Flint: the Deadbeat Dad Who Wasn’t Even Gone
Most fictional absent fathers have the decency to at least be far away. They vanish into another region, they go missing, they’re presumed dead, they become a mystery for later seasons.
Brock’s father Flint isn’t like that.
The early anime essentially implies that Flint walked out to chase his own dreams, leaving Brock behind to raise the children. The jaw-dropping part is that Flint doesn’t disappear in an unreachable way. He isn’t trapped somewhere. He isn’t taken from them. He is simply absent because he chooses to be.
Brock becomes the parental figure because the actual parent refuses to be one. And somehow Brock doesn’t hate him. That’s the part that hurts the most.
There is something quietly devastating in the way Brock accepts his role. He doesn’t rage. He doesn’t resent. He doesn’t even seem to believe he deserves better. He has folded the burden into his identity so thoroughly that he behaves as if it is simply his job to hold everything together.
That kind of acceptance is not “sweet”.
It is survival.
The Hidden Sadness in Brock’s Personality
When people describe Brock, they usually list his obvious traits. He’s kind. He’s loyal. He’s dependable. He looks after everyone. He cooks. He gives advice. He supports Ash. He provides stability.
But those traits aren’t random. They are shaped by his backstory.
Brock’s emotional maturity isn’t just a positive personality feature. It’s a coping mechanism. If you spend your early years raising children, you learn to read people. You learn to mediate. You learn to keep your own emotions quiet because other people are depending on you not to fall apart.
In that context, Brock’s calmness stops being comforting and starts being tragic. He had to become reliable because his parents weren’t.
And that childhood doesn’t just disappear once he joins Ash. He may be physically travelling, but emotionally he is still in the role of caretaker. Still monitoring needs. Still organising. Still steadying other people’s chaos.
Then Pokémon Did Something Even Worse: Introducing Lola
Just when you think Brock has already lost enough, the anime later reveals something that makes the entire situation more disturbing.
Brock’s mother Lola exists.
She didn’t die. She didn’t vanish due to tragedy. She wasn’t taken away. She simply wasn’t there. At some point, Lola left the family too.
This turns Brock’s backstory from “father abandoned them” into “both parents abandoned them”, and the show delivers this information almost casually. Lola’s later return is written in a softened way, with a tone that tries to make it feel like a mildly dramatic family situation rather than a serious breakdown of responsibility.
But no amount of upbeat storytelling changes the underlying fact. Brock was left to parent multiple children. Alone. For years. And then, when the writers realise how dark that actually is, they attempt to patch the problem.
The Retcon: Brock’s Family Gets ‘Fixed’
At some point, the anime decides it can’t carry on pretending this is normal. So it introduces a storyline where Lola returns and takes over the household. Flint is also folded back into the family situation, not as a villain but as a misguided man who made mistakes.
The story is adjusted from a stark reality into a more comfortable one.
Instead of “Brock sacrificed his childhood because his parents failed him,” the narrative becomes “Brock stepped up for a while, but everything is fine now.”
It allows Brock to leave and travel without the moral complication of abandoning his siblings. It gives the viewer permission to enjoy Brock’s adventures without thinking too hard about the children back home.
And on one level, it’s nice. It’s nice that Brock’s siblings are no longer functionally orphaned. It’s nice that Brock is allowed to chase his dreams. But on another level, it’s deeply strange. Because this doesn’t undo what happened. It doesn’t erase the years of responsibility.
It doesn’t give Brock his childhood back. It just quietly closes the book and hopes you don’t reread the earlier chapters.
Why It Hits Different as an Adult
When we rewatch childhood shows, we often discover hidden jokes or sly adult references. Pokémon offers something different. It gives us a character whose trauma is hiding in plain sight.
Brock’s story is one of the clearest examples of how children’s media can normalise burdens that should never be placed on a child. Brock is celebrated for being selfless, responsible, and emotionally stable. But those traits were forged in abandonment. He didn’t become mature because he was special. He became mature because he wasn’t allowed not to be.
This is what makes Brock such a fascinating character when you revisit the series. As a child, you see him as a comforting older brother figure. As an adult, you see a teenager holding up an entire family tree.
Brock Deserved Better
Brock might be one of the best human beings in the Pokémon anime. He’s loyal. He’s gentle. He shows up. He carries other people’s emotional weight without complaint.
But he deserved to be a kid.
He deserved parents who raised their children.
He deserved to have dreams without guilt, and travel without responsibility snapping at his heels.
And the saddest part is that Pokémon never treats this as a tragedy. It treats it as background.
Which means Brock’s story becomes something even more quietly heartbreaking: a child who was forced to grow up, and everyone around him acted like it was normal.
