Kinokima wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 12:08 pm
You could also say different series fit into more than one genre. There are broader genres and then you can get more specific with the nitty gritty
The problem I have with that is that nearly ALL the tropes and a fair amount of main character names and backgrounds in Naruto directly reference old ninja fiction.
Like if you've ever seen or read ANY older ninja fiction out of Japan you'd already know about Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru specifically and you'd already know what animals they summon and that ninpo magic like that was super common when depicting ninja on film pre-1960 when the more grounded historically accurate takes became popular.
And even if you only watch the grounded stuff you'd know where Sasuke got his name and you'd see the Itachi plot twist from a million miles away only because it happens ALL THE TIME in ninja fiction. It's an incredibly common trope specific to ninja fiction.
But if Naruto was your intro to these tropes, then what you'll see is, "Naruto is like DB because training, battles, and rivals to friends," while missing literally everything else that keeps it from being in the same genre as Dragon Ball.
Wuxia or not, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films and their tropes are specifically referenced in Dragon Ball and their films had a heavy heavy influence. Heck! Even the old Golden Harvest logo movie intro thing is directly lifted and applied in the anime version of one of the openings to some of the Budokai episodes of DB (same music and all!).
While Lee and Chan's films are a more grounded take on martial arts than a high-fantasy Wuxia film, they still follow the same story beats as a Wuxia film the same way realistic takes on ninja have the same plot twist structure as the more high-fantasy ninja stuff. And Toriyama directly lifted those Kung Fu story beats, which are very distinct from ninja story beats, and applied them to DB.
Of Naruto and DB really have anything in common, it's that their respective authors combined the incredibly kinetic action of the grounded takes with the awe-inspiring mystical aspects of the high-fantasy takes in a very entertaining way while still managing to aim the material directly at children.
"Battle Shonen" is too broad a category for in-depth comparisons. Putting DB, MHA, Naruto, etc. into the same genre is like saying Johnny Quest and Thundercats are in the same genre because there are adventures in both and they're aimed at different generations of the same age group.
Btw the only reason I'm saying this is because if you decide to directly compare them anyway, at least you'll have a better idea of what you're looking at. These aren't all the exact same stories dressed in ninja clothes or Kung Fu clothes or Superhero clothes. They take a lot more from their respective genres than you'd imagine and they deserve to be appreciated for what they are instead of being dissected for what they aren't.