1st gen: Recognize all of them and can name the vast majority of them
2nd gen: Recognize most of them and can name some of them
3rd gen: Recognize a handful and can name maybe 1 or 2
4th gen and onwards: Here Be (Pocket) Monsters
Watched the anime, probably dropped out during/after season 2 (The Orange Islands) and the first 3 movies.
Collected the cards cuz I liked the art, but never actually learned to play the damn game.
And this one might be more controversial: Have never actually seriously played/beat any of the mainline games, but have for some of the weird spinoffs like Pokemon Snap/Pokemon Channel/etc.
I was a pokemon tgc gym leader when toys r'us had tgc meetups, I had the original base deck (which was stolen, that hurt!)
Fell out after black & white.
i grew up without a gameboy, so i never played pokemon for more than a few minutes as a time
but i play the absolute fuck out of pokemon go
pretty sure i've gotten my 50 gym coins every day for like 18 months...
Get a GBA emulator for your phone and play the gen 3 games, FireRed and Emerald. I picked up pokemon for the first time this way and instantly dropped Go. It's so much fun, especially if you have speedup.
I know all the Pokermans, but that's only because my brain is good at remembering fun and useless trivia
I can't remember when my mom's birthday is, but I can tell you all about how you can only get a Vespiquen if you catch a female Combee and that requires putting honey on a tree and hoping you beat the 10% spread