It really depends on the series who I focus on. Sometimes I think a main character is great but that doesn’t mean I find them fun to write about. Most often my goal in writing fics isn’t directly about the characters. It’s often worldbuilding in focus that de/reconstructs rules or window dressing aesthetics. Or filling plotholes. I fucking love fixing plotholes. One of my favourite main characters ever is Gesicht from Pluto and I can’t think of anything to do with him he’s just perfect as he is.

So, let’s get back to plotholes~

With the Pokémon franchise, there is a bit of a Schrödinger’s main character situation. Most of them are so flat that writing most them turns them into OC Stand Ins. While your dialogue choices never matter in a Pokémon game, I absolutely latched onto one of the “choices” in Arceus Legends. You can state your character never had anything like Pokémon (whether fictional or living is left vague) in their lives before. I took that and ran with it. There wasn’t a “character” to start with. But there are a lot of concepts around them that I loved so I used those to make a character.

As a_mac says, it’s on the writer to write good characters. The title simply states one’s role in the story. Not how to make the role good in said story lol. Don’t forget this role is transformative. Whoever you decide to write about, regardless of what their role was in the original work, they are now the main character for your story.

(Unless you decide to write a story where there is no main character! Those are fun too~)