Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips » Fri Apr 09, 2021 2:04 pm

Oh god, it's Kunzait! I loved your wuxia thread! The stuff about wuxia films being in theaters alongside shock horror and late 70s slasher flics made so many things about older hippies make sense.
Kunzait_83 wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:14 am But there is a MASSIVE difference between a genre category, and a milestone work who's cultural and economic impact changed the direction of the broader industry it was made within. Going so far as to create a totally nonsensical, made up genre (Battle Shonen in this case) to lump ALL works into together that have been in any which way impacted or influenced by a landmark title as all being largely one and the same type of story, when each and every single one of them are all CLEARLY within their own separate, independent, and distinct genre categories that they're all clearly and unmistakably embodying - One Piece is definitively a swashbuckling pirate adventure, Naruto is a classic Japanese ninja fantasy, Fairy Tail is a more conventional Western-ish fantasy, My Hero Academia is a straight up superhero story, Hunter X Hunter is a largely conventional action/adventure fantasy with SOME Wuxia elements sprinkled into some of its subplots, Toriko is... a... cooking adventure?... etc. - is a bafflingly over-literal misreading of the ENTIRE Shonen landscape as a whole. In pretty much ANY other context, anyone who'd do something like this with ANY other similarly broad medium of works would be very much rightly and correctly laughed out of the room.
I get where everyone is coming from but battle shonen is a useful category and it's much more descriptive than summer blockbuster (although tbh, I think summer blackbuster has its uses too). Genre isn't just the individual components of a work, it's also the time period in which it was created, the style adopted the artist, and the target audience. These categories only seem vague because people are looking at their basic parts instead of treating them holistically.

Here's a pretty uncontroversial example, Nu Metal. Musically there isn't much System of a Down, Limp Bizkit, and Linkin' Park share. At least no more than they do with any other rock band. System of a Down is much more eclectic than the other two, borrowing the vocals of Middle Eastern singing, the guitar playing of thrash metal, the lyrical nonsense of a stoned art student, and the political messaging of Rage Against the Machine. Nothing like the mostly rap inspired sound of Limp Bizkit or the hiphop and alternative blend of Linkin Park. But they were all producing music in roughly the same time period and were reacting to the same music scene. And in that context their few similarities become much more salient. Not only do we now know why they sound the way they do, we now also have a concrete way of describing a (brief) era in the world of music.

Besides, as everyone here has pointed out, what makes a genre useful is its descriptive power, how well it communicates what a work is as succinctly as possible. Well... battle shonen does a much better job telling you what to expect from a manga like One Piece than swashbuckling adventure. Describing a manga like One Piece as swashbuckling adventure would be hugely misleading to someone who isn't already familiar with the world of shonen and the influence Dragon Ball has had on it. They'll be thinking Treasure Island when really they should be thinking 'Red Ribbon Army Arc but with boats and stuff.'

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Kinokima wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:55 pm As for Isekai it’s a popular genre of finding yourself in different world or being reincarnated in a different world.
Ah, yes. Isekai. Like Dante's Divine Comedy.

More seriously, Heavy Metal magazine used to love that premise. In fact all sorts of Western Fantasy and SciFi used to love it too. I wonder why it died off?
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Fri Apr 09, 2021 2:54 pm

Also saying “Battle Shounen” is a made up genre. I mean I certainly didn’t make it up. It’s a commonly used term to describe a bunch of similar series. People obviously see shared elements in all these series and that is why they group them together.

Again I will bring up the Film Noir comparison. That was a “‘made up term” too at one point. But a bunch of critics saw similarities between a bunch of movies and coined the phrase


It’s not like by calling Dragon Ball & Naruto Battle Shounen I am denying their connections to Wuxia and Ninja fiction.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by LoganForkHands73 » Fri Apr 09, 2021 4:52 pm

Yeah, I mean, all genres are made-up by default and the terms evolve over time, as with all linguistic phenomena. Genre is mainly useful as a shorthand for categorisation of recurring conventions. While the term "Shonen" is always cringeworthy since it's so broad (and more of a branded demographic anyway), "battle manga" always seems more acceptable since it at least brings to mind certain tropes and archetypal narratives. Martial arts, boyish humour, rivalries, serialised, same old character archetypes, etc, in the same way that "slasher horror" conjures up imagery of ultraviolent masked serial killers, dumb teenagers and remote wooden shacks.

"So this One Piece thing, it's a swashbuckling pirate adventure story?"

"Yeah, pretty much, but it's also got gratuitous martial arts fighting and obnoxious melodrama."

"Oh, so it's a battle manga."

"Basically."

The Japanese have legitimised the term anyways, as far as I know, they used it first. Even in that fourth-wall-breaking Dr. Slump crossover episode in Super, Vegeta outright says that Arale operates on gag manga logic instead of battle manga rules. So it is, at the very least, a term that exists beyond our sheltered little Western world.

I can think of a few common genres that are far vaguer and more useless than battle manga. People use "literary fiction" as if it were a genre, but it really means nothing, it's more of a non-genre descriptor. Even though it encompasses an incomprehensibly vast array of styles, when people say it, your mind is drawn to artsy, allegorical, unconventional structure, etc. The styles of James Joyce, David Foster Wallace and so forth.

When people use "shonen", it's more equivocal to when people say "drama" or "comedy". The broadest of broad brushstrokes, barely even genres at all. They literally tell you nothing other than "this one has a bit of conflict", "this one will make you laugh" and for shounen, "this one's for Japanese schoolkids". Which is why I find it's important to narrow down subgenres. One Piece isn't just a battle manga or a swashbuckling pirate adventure, it has elements of both.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kendamu » Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:36 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:14 amHarry Potter is no more a Space Opera than Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings are. Star Wars was a MASSIVE overarching creative influence on the culture of movies and movie-making for decades to come up through to this day: we don't therefore just lump ALL that came after and was impacted or influenced by it under the same broad umbrella genre. That would be every shade of nonsensical and unwieldly imaginable.
Maybe citing specific Western examples might get the point across because "Hey, there are a ton of movies about the characters Sasuke and Jiraiya going all the way back to the 1930s," isn't doing it. I guess "Ninjutsu Sekigahara Sarutobi Sasuke" from 1938 is a "battle shonen," too?

People are just going to defend their position no matter how many specific examples I use to differentiate Ninja cinema from Japan and Kung Fu cinema from Hong Kong because everything I'm saying can't really be grasped unless thry intend to go watch "Way of the Dragon" and "Shinobi No Mono" and seeing just how different the genres are from each other and then apply the tropes from those films to Dragon Ball and Naruto.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Sat Apr 10, 2021 5:03 am

Kendamu wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:36 pm
Kunzait_83 wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:14 amHarry Potter is no more a Space Opera than Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings are. Star Wars was a MASSIVE overarching creative influence on the culture of movies and movie-making for decades to come up through to this day: we don't therefore just lump ALL that came after and was impacted or influenced by it under the same broad umbrella genre. That would be every shade of nonsensical and unwieldly imaginable.
Maybe citing specific Western examples might get the point across because "Hey, there are a ton of movies about the characters Sasuke and Jiraiya going all the way back to the 1930s," isn't doing it. I guess "Ninjutsu Sekigahara Sarutobi Sasuke" from 1938 is a "battle shonen," too?

People are just going to defend their position no matter how many specific examples I use to differentiate Ninja cinema from Japan and Kung Fu cinema from Hong Kong because everything I'm saying can't really be grasped unless thry intend to go watch "Way of the Dragon" and "Shinobi No Mono" and seeing just how different the genres are from each other and then apply the tropes from those films to Dragon Ball and Naruto.

Because I am not missing the point you & Kunzait are making. I am not denying that Dragon Ball was influenced by Kung Fu cinema and that Naruto was heavily influenced by Ninja fiction or My Hero Academia by super hero fiction

And yes maybe those 3 genres and pirate stories and stories set in space, etc are all very different from each other

But that doesn’t mean that all these shounen manga set in different places with different power systems and different influences don’t also share traits with each other. And the more you read and watch of these different series the more these tropes become familiar & even comforting to you. Again something does not have to be part of only one genre

And no the Kung Fu Cinema and 1930’s Ninja films are not battle shounen but that doesn’t exclude Dragon Ball and Naruto from being so.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips » Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:02 am

Another shonen that, imo, is better written than Dragon Ball is Ashita no Joe. It follows the boxing career of Joe Yabuki, a delinquet who discovered he had a talent for boxing while in prison. Now, it's... a bit melodramatic but the stakes manage to stay concrete enough that the characters are always relatable. Huge displays of nationalism and long rivalries are both common enough in the world of boxing that none of the relationships feel unbelievable. In fact, the sometimes maudlin dialogue (although, to be fair, that just might be the translation I read) adds to gravity of Joe's life. His brawling boxing style, as exciting as it is, is also terrible for his long term health. Just like the weight cuts he forces himself through to compete at bantamweight. But there's no denying how inspiring it has to be for him to be standing in a stadium, surrounded by thousands of people waving the Japanese flag and chanting his name. So his decision to keep boxing, stupid though it is, never feels contrived for the sake of drama

The art is also fantastic. Really well detailed streets, characters, arenas, and even crowds.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:34 am

It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:02 am Another shonen that, imo, is better written than Dragon Ball is Ashita no Joe. It follows the boxing career of Joe Yabuki, a delinquet who discovered he had a talent for boxing while in prison. Now, it's... a bit melodramatic but the stakes manage to stay concrete enough that the characters are always relatable. Huge displays of nationalism and long rivalries are both common enough in the world of boxing that none of the relationships feel unbelievable. In fact, the sometimes maudlin dialogue (although, to be fair, that just might be the translation I read) adds to gravity of Joe's life. His brawling boxing style, as exciting as it is, is also terrible for his long term health. Just like the weight cuts he forces himself through to compete at bantamweight. But there's no denying how inspiring it has to be for him to be standing in a stadium, surrounded by thousands of people waving the Japanese flag and chanting his name. So his decision to keep boxing, stupid though it is, never feels contrived for the sake of drama

The art is also fantastic. Really well detailed streets, characters, arenas, and even crowds.

I’ve always been interested in watching the anime because it’s directed by Dezaki whose work on Rose of Versailles I love.

One day I’ll get around to it or the manga

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sat Apr 10, 2021 6:41 am

Kinokima wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 5:03 amAnd no the Kung Fu Cinema and 1930’s Ninja films are not battle shounen but that doesn’t exclude Dragon Ball and Naruto from being so.
I'm thinking that maybe this particular nugget might actually lead us into the actual heart of the issue here.

Let me posit a very simple question: what do Shonen titles like Dragon Ball, Naruto, etc. all do that is so dramatically different from their influences that sets them apart from them into the whole separate genre of "Battle Shonen"? Because at the very least when it comes to Dragon Ball (and certainly with Naruto as well), the main difference I take away from them with regards to their non-Shonen influences is that... they're Japanese animated/drawn. That's basically it.

I spent literally three whole pages of an entire thread delving through pretty much damn near the ENTIRE Wuxia genre's modern day history (as well as touching on its very ancient roots to no small degree) and I found barely a SINGLE stitch within Dragon Ball that cannot be seen having been done prior in another Wuxia/Kung Fu fantasy title.

The biggest thing I found that Toriyama did that was truly markedly different was crafting a Jianghu-like setting that blended ancient Chinese elements side-by-side alongside modern/sci fi trappings, whereas most other Wuxia/Xianxia/Martial Arts fantasy tend to pick between one or the other and not actually have them coexist side by side simultaneously. Apart from that though? Toriyama didn't really innovate much in the way of character archetypes, tropes, plot beats, etc. that weren't already done before (often to death) in other Wuxia/Kung Fu fantasy examples from decades, if not centuries, prior.

The single biggest differentiator that Toriyama brings to the table with DB is his particular style of humor and irreverent, Dr. Slumpian whimsy. He basically just takes a whole TON of already long established Wuxia staples (some of them modern and some of them incredibly boilerplate ancient) and blends them with his unique visual, stylistic sensibilities and sense of distinctive humor.

Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in Dragon Ball just about that isn't tied to his art style and humor were ALREADY ESTABLISHED wuxia cliches - up to and including blending the genre with modern sci fi elements. When Dragon Ball is otherwise damn near indistinguishable from a vast chunk of Martial Arts fantasy fiction but for the fact that its drawn/animated by Japanese people... what exactly about it makes it "Battle Shonen" then as opposed to just a fucking standard 80s/90s Martial Arts fantasy serial that was drawn by Japanese people?

I can make literally this EXACT same argument about Naruto, and I don't even in any which way particularly LIKE Naruto! But like with Chinese wuxia/martial arts fantasy, I damn well know my fucking Japanese ninja fantasy schlock quite well, particularly within the realm of anime and manga: Naruto didn't come into existence until what, 1999 or so? I've been ravenously consuming anime and manga for at least a solid-ass decade prior to that, and ninja fantasy anime were an especially big love and focus for me throughout all those years.

I can say with utmost certainty that there is BARELY anything about Naruto, in terms of its basic nuts and bolts anyway, that sets it apart from literally ANY other ninja fantasy anime of the past like, bazillion or so years now. Every piece of lore, every detail, every major (and plenty of minor) story beat, just about ALL OF IT can be readily and easily found in literally ENDLESS GOBS of similar material spanning half a fucking century prior.

Again: the biggest differentiator here that seems to set Naruto apart from COUNTLESS other ninja fantasy titles in the minds of Shonen fans today is simply that it was serialized in Shonen Jump in the 2000s. There's even LESS to remove it from its influences than with Dragon Ball even: Dragon Ball's major influences are at least largely and overwhelmingly Chinese, which at least presents something vaguely akin to a cultural divide. Ninja fantasy though as a genre is straight up NATIVE to Japan, and has been baked into anime and manga as mediums for decades and decades prior to Naruto's existence: hell, they've been a part of SHONEN anime and manga going all the way back to the fucking 1960s! Back in the black and white Astroboy days!

How on god's green earth is Naruto anything other than simply the 2000s incarnation of classic titles like Shonen Ninja Kaze no Fujimaru, Tales of the Ninja, or Karasu Tengu Kabuto, or to some extent even something like Legend of Kamui? What makes Naruto SO different and special from those titles that it is classified as "Battle Shonen" where those examples are not? What makes THOSE examples more "pure" examples of ninja fantasy, but not Naruto? Other than you know, Naruto being popularized in Weekly Shonen Jump during the 2000s, when most of this audience first started paying attention to this stuff? You can't even say the mere fact that its Shonen separates it, as all of the examples I just named (and countless more besides) were largely all Shonen manga and anime as well.

Apart from execution and style, there's No. Discernible. Fucking. Difference. at their core foundations. The argument basically boils down to "Well I heard of and know more about Naruto whereas I don't know any of those other examples, so in my mind Naruto MUST be different and special: otherwise I'd have heard more about those other titles!"

This whole argument is basically hinged on this audience's familiarity (or lack thereof) and not on any actual substance pertaining to the actual content of these stories.

This all applies just as much to Dragon Ball and Chinese Kung Fu fantasy/Wuxia/Xianxia, or whatnot. This audience simply hasn't grown up with nor does it largely know shit from shinola about the Kung Fu Fantasy/Wuxia genre itself nor most other examples of it (certainly none that are most similar and relevant to Dragon Ball): ergo in their minds, Dragon Ball MUST be this other new genre that we all just coined together because Dragon Ball is what we're most familiar with doing this first, and anything and everything else that's similar or even straight up IDENTICAL to it... well, its inconvenient to acknowledge those or to acknowledge that maybe this stuff has been going on for WAY longer than any of us were actually cognizant, so we'll just pretend that they're something else entirely and history actually all really first began largely where we all first came into things.

All this is hinged on is "I don't know what this other thing is, therefore it must not be relevant to the thing that I do know". Which is obviously and demonstrably not in any which way logical, sensible, or coherent. Its arguing from a place of ignorance in defense of that ignorance. Its basically just "I don't want to incorporate knowledge that is new to me which might show that all these things that I thought were true actually never were true to begin with and thus might undo everything that I thought I knew or thought was true/factual about this topic beforehand, meaning I might have to restart my appraisal of this thing from scratch to some extent."

I mean, I don't have to literally run through yet again for the umpteenth all the ENDLESS fucking ways in which Dragon Ball is basically little more than a Toriyama-ified/Dr. Slump-ified 80s/90s Wuxia mashup, do I? Literally ALL the major character archetypes, the plot beats, the character arcs, much of the setting, the fights, even gobs and gobs of INSANELY minor and subtle details... ALL of it is just straight up an 80s/90s post-modern wuxia that just happens to have been drawn by Japanese people (and created/overseen by one particular Japanese guy with a VERY distinct and unmistakable style of whimsical humor).

The ONLY reason that this isn't landing with folks here is because 95% of you just haven't ever bothered to actually hunker down and WATCH/READ any of this stuff for yourselves and see the near 1 to 1 overlap firsthand. So that makes it VASTLY easier to just handwave and dismiss this as irrelevant trivia when its clearly and demonstrably anything but.

And again, I REALLY need to stress how comically ridiculous this whole argument is especially with regards to goddamn Naruto of all things. Again, I'm not even someone who in any way actually likes that fucking series: like at all. But saying that its something other than just a straight up ninja fantasy anime, one of COUNTLESS others exactly fucking like it - down to the Shonen demographic, and many of which are the FARTHEST things from obscure within the realm of the Japanese anime and manga industries - that's just embarrassingly absurd and straight up counterfactual on its face.

Naruto isn't ninja fantasy "inspired" - its ninja fucking fantasy, straight the hell up to its utmost bone marrow. The fact that it takes influence and inspiration on some incredibly surface level details from Dragon Ball (because *gasp* - Dragon Ball was one of the single most popular and influential Shonen manga of all time) doesn't therefore make it "Battle Shonen" or some other entirely separate genre that's only "influenced" by ninja fantasy.

Naruto is ninja fantasy because its literally XEROX IDENTICAL to EVERY other fucking example of ninja fantasy that's existed since LONG the hell before any of us here were born, and certainly that I distinctly remember firsthand having grown up with more than a decade before Naruto was anything more than a flicker of a passing electric current in Kishimoto's cerebral cortex.

Someone here, anyone, please do me a solid: point me to EXACTLY what is SO significantly, foundationally different about Naruto that puts it in a WHOLE other separate genre category than something like Ninja Cadets, or Dagger of Kamui, or Flame of Recca, or Yotoden. And it has to be EXCEEDINGLY substantive and explicit, and if its in ANY which way some nebulous, emotion-soaked "the characters embody this spirit of adventure and friendship" nonsense or some nerd-stench ridden bit of "power scaling" pedantry, then so help me I will find a way to physically throw something at you nostalgia-obsessed goobers from across the internet. :lol: :lol: :lol:

Plenty of incredibly notable and noteworthy examples of ninja fantasy don't even predate Naruto by THAT MUCH (just a couple years in plenty of cases), so its not like ninja fantasy was a once popular but half forgotten genre that bypassed a whole generation or two until Naruto only revived it for the millennium decades later: the genre was still a WIDELY visible and thriving juggernaut of the anime and manga world consistently and steadfastly throughout all the way up to the very moment of Naruto's debut.

So to pretend like Naruto was in any which way some type of ground zero for its type of ninja-themed fantasy storytelling whereas everything else like it - including reams of incredibly noteworthy and glaringly obvious examples within Shonen anime and manga - is all just arcane apocrypha is just down the line divorced from basic self-evident reality. To a degree and extent that makes the complete ignorance of Wuxia seem like nothing at all in comparison.

Pointing to absolute and utter nonsense like "But there's an escalation of the villains' power!" or "But there's themes of friendship, adventure, and camaraderie!" and all the other dumb, DUMB bullshit that people so often point to fervently when they talk about what the hallmarks of the "Battle Shonen" genre is are absolutely vague, generic, and ubiquitous across virtually EVERYTHING else out there to the point of rendering them utterly meaningless, and are frankly just rooted in "warm fuzzy feelings" from people's collective childhood memories rather than what's actually just straight up demonstrably making up the narrative nuts and bolts of these anime and manga's content, as well as the obvious and clear cut throughline of their (oftentimes INCREDIBLY prominent and not at all obscured) history across the decades.

The problem that I ultimately have here is that most of these points that people keep insistently make when discussing what makes this stuff "Battle Shonen" and not just whatever the hell genre it actually is almost ENTIRELY stem from a place of closely guarded ignorance from what is often INCREDIBLY basic history of both anime/manga as well as incredibly boilerplate Eastern martial arts genres and seem rooted largely in the fact that because so much of this audience hasn't experienced or known about so much (often very prominent) material that both long predates and is obviously directly tied to and exceedingly relevant to these Shonen Jump franchises.

Hell, not that long ago most of you were still steadfastly arguing that Shonen ITSELF (minus the "Battle" qualifier) was a genre and not just an audience demographic. Hell, some folks here and there are STILL trying to make that very case! Tacking on the "Battle" qualifier doesn't suddenly make these various series an altogether new genre anymore than it erases the glaringly obvious and demonstrable history that's being willfully glossed over because... honestly, I'm still beyond baffled as to what exactly the ACTUAL underlying motivation is that's preventing so many people from just accepting basic historical facts about these mediums and genres.

I'm still utterly beyond mystified as to why it is that the idea that there exists a wholly, altogether unique genre classification that sets all these Weekly Shonen Jump mega-franchises apart from basically EVERYTHING else that's out there including stuff that suspiciously looks, sounds, and acts EXACTLY like them in so very, very many cases, is something that is SO stubbornly and almost fanatically clung to like some sort of weird religious totem by this fanbase.

I honestly don't know and am genuinely, sincerely beyond baffled and perplexed as to why exactly it is that in the minds of so many Shonen fans there simply NEEDS to be this entirely unique label for a bunch of Japanese kiddie comics and cartoons that makes them distinct and apart from basically the ENTIRE rest of the world's collective tapestry of genre fiction.

This shit just ISN'T that special or different from tons of other stuff that's already been out there ultimately is what I'm trying to say here. Just because it SEEMED that way to so many of you when you were little and didn't know any differently, doesn't therefore make it actually so. Seriously, this is what almost every attempt that people in threads like this make to justify why it is that Battle Shonen is a thing basically amounts to more or less a variation on something like this:

"No, you don't understand, even though there's this WHOLE ancient-ass genre of magical kung fu fantasy where characters dress, act, and fight EXACTLY like the Dragon Ball cast in stories and narratives with the EXACT same elements, beats, and story/character arcs and archetypes with the EXACT same cultural folkloric roots and the EXACT same supernatural abilities and concepts... Dragon Ball is actually part of a whole DIFFERENT genre that's TOTALLY something else!

In fact, Dragon Ball helped INVENT this new genre! Yeah! Dragon Ball was a trailblazer that invented ALL this stuff see, and all these other examples that clearly show the EXACT same thing predating it by decades or even centuries... well, those don't actually count. Because reasons. Because... because the Japanese don't acknowledge the word Wuxia! Even though the word Wuxia has its etymological roots in a Japanese word... its still something TOTALLY different! Because it was in a MANGA! Yeah..."


:crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy:
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Sat Apr 10, 2021 7:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Sat Apr 10, 2021 7:30 am

Again Kunzait my problem with your argument is you seem to think these series can ONLY be part of one genre. That something like Battle Shounen is just “made up” or that there is no connection & shared tropes between all these different shounen manga

My problem with your argument is you are trying to say people just don’t understand they are wrong because they didn’t grow up with or are not familiar with what these series really are. But no one here is denying the overall influence of Wuxia films on Dragon Ball or that Kishimoto was influenced by Ninja films. But really we are just stuck on those two series but the point is it’s not just these two series.

No one is saying all these shounen titles that people have called “Battle Shounen” have no other influence or are strictly one thing. Well actually that seems to be what you are arguing that since Naruto is Ninja fantasy it can’t also be Battle Shounen.

The manga-ka may not even be thinking “battle shounen” when they are writing their manga but fans see connections and tropes between them not because they aren’t familiar with other genre works but because there ARE connections between these series.


And again I’ll bring up Film Noir because it’s the easiest example for me. No one making those films was thinking “Film Noir” either. They were making pulpy crime films or detective movies & even a Christmas movie. That term was coined after the fact.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sat Apr 10, 2021 9:03 am

Kinokima wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 5:03 amBut that doesn’t mean that all these shounen manga set in different places with different power systems and different influences don’t also share traits with each other.
The main traits they share with one another is that they're written and drawn by Japanese people and aimed at an audience of elementary school boys. The rest is mainly a byproduct of Dragon Ball's popularity, because Dragon Ball was kind of a massively big deal.

The point that's being missed here is that in order to be reasonably qualified as a whole new separate genre, these stories have to collectively do something that makes them markedly different or sets them apart from their forebears and influences.

Horror for example is a pretty broad genre category, so we have various subgenres within it: slasher films for example, while obviously embodying the broader horror umbrella, also have enough unique qualifiers and distinctive tropes of their own to single them out as a subgenre unto themselves. Same goes with science fiction: there's Hard Sci-Fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Primer, there's Soft Sci-Fi like Star Trek and the works of H.G. Wells, there's Space Opera like Star Wars and Buck Rogers, etc. You can distinguish these subcategories apart because they have unique, distinguishing characteristics across a mass enough grouping of them to qualify as their own subgenre.

Neither Dragon Ball nor Naruto have this separation from their influences is what I'm saying. Dragon Ball doesn't do THAT much differently from any other wild and wacky post-modern 1980s or 90s Martial Arts fantasy/Wuxia work that makes it an altogether different category from them. Same goes with Naruto and the countless other ninja fantasy anime and manga that came before it.

Kinokima wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 7:30 amAgain Kunzait my problem with your argument is you seem to think these series can ONLY be part of one genre.
...
No one is saying all these shounen titles that people have called “Battle Shounen” have no other influence or are strictly one thing. Well actually that seems to be what you are arguing that since Naruto is Ninja fantasy it can’t also be Battle Shounen.
No, I'm NOT making the absurd argument that a story or work cannot occupy two different genres at once: that's demonstrable and obvious that they can. My point isn't that these Shonen titles don't or cannot occupy multiple genres: my point is that Battle Shonen does not present anything that's specifically unique enough to set it apart as its own genre in the first place. You cannot occupy a genre that doesn't actually really technically even exist. The problem is that most of the things that fans often cite as Battle Shonen's "tropes" are often in fact actually the tropes of OTHER genres that they aren't familiar with (like Wuxia, or bafflingly enough apparently even most any ninja fantasy that isn't Naruto).

So if most of Battle Shonen's most distinguishing tropes aren't actually Battle Shonen tropes, but rather are the very same tropes shared by other, much more older and VASTLY more established Eatern martial arts fantasy genres... what does that leave Battle Shonen with that sets it apart as its own distinctively unique thing? Why do we even bother to have it around as a term, if its most defining characteristics have already been taken up well long before it by other, wholly more appropriate terms? What purpose does it serve other than to be A) redundant and B) a reminder of an unbelievable degree of mass ignorance within this fanbase to basic Eastern fantasy genres that have already been around and established since forever and ever ago?

Boil it down, and all that you're left with ultimately that sets Battle Shonen apart from other identical martial arts/action/fantasy genres of storytelling is basically just the fact that these titles are written and drawn by Japanese cartoonists and aimed at an audience of Japanese grade schoolers. Those things do not make up a genre: they are simply the work's culture of origin and target audience demo. Death Note for example is a supernatural detective story (hey look at that: a mix of multiple genres!): the fact that it was written and drawn by a Japanese guy for an audience of Japanese schoolkids is utterly meaningless with regards to its genre and core, foundational storytelling sensibilities.

This is clearly the case with Dragon Ball. Obviously Dragon Ball is FAR from a "traditional" martial arts fantasy/Wuxia story in the classical sense. But part of the whole point of my having gone into so much of the modern history of Wuxia throughout the Wuxia thread was to show you guys how so much of Dragon Ball's genre-blending, post-modern sensibilities toward Wuxia's classic tropes DIDN'T EVEN ORIGINATE WITH DRAGON BALL TO BEGIN WITH. Dragon Ball is FAR from the first martial arts fantasy story to blend elements of Sci Fi or wacky, slapstick comedy with traditional Wuxia tropes.

The biggest differential with Dragon Ball is the STYLE AND EXECUTION of it: Toriyama's unique voice and sense of style and humor being lent to a type of irreverently insane and hyper-manic form of martial arts fantasy that had already started to be well in vogue throughout the genre since the latter portion of the 1970s or so and all throughout the 1980s and 90s: well apart from and outside of just Dragon Ball.

And the thing is: the fact that so many Wuxia stories before and during Dragon Ball's time was going through a phase of blending tons of modern and futuristic elements did not stop people from still recognizing and citing them as martial arts fantasy/Wuxia titles first and foremost above all else. A work can occupy multiple genres at once, yes, but you also have to factor in which genre elements are the more predominant over the story.

Evil Dead 2 for example blends macabre, grisly horror with goofy, zany vaudevillian-style slapstick comedy: people DON'T however group it side by side along with the Three Stooges shorts though. Despite all its goofy silliness, Evil Dead is still generally recognized and treated as horror first and foremost, because despite all the other silly comedy elements, horror is still its most defining motif.

The same goes for something like Dragon Ball within the realm of martial arts fantasy. Or hell, stuff like A Step Into the Past (which I detailed in the Wuxia thread as being a Wuxia story that has time travel sci fi elements), or A Chinese Ghost Story (also detailed in the thread), which blends Wuxia with everything from supernatural horror to slapstick comedy to epic romance... but its still ultimately seen and marketed and referred to as most prominently a Wuxia/martial arts fantasy film series by pretty much everyone. The same goes for The Butterfly Murders, which blends Wuxia with the fucking slasher genre of all things. There's a difference between occupying multiple genres evenly/equally and occupying one overarching genre with elements and flavors of others sprinkled in alongside the main one.

Dragon Ball isn't "Sci Fi Wuxia" anymore than something like Saviour of the Soul or Iceman Cometh are: they're all largely martial arts fantasy stories that happen to have sci fi elements bolstering them almost more as flavoring/window dressing than as crucial, defining components of their core identity and narrative. Dragon Ball would still be unmistakably Dragon Ball without any of the sci fi trappings (and in fact it has been at varying points, so the proof's in the pudding right there): it would NOT however continue to be recognizably Dragon Ball without any of the martial arts fantasy elements that most define the entire spinal column of the story, characters, and franchise's whole core identity. THAT'S the key difference here.

Contrast that with something like say... the Alien franchise. Alien occupies both Sci Fi and Horror more or less evenly and in equal measures, and would cease to be recognizable for what it is without either element present. The same cannot be said for A Nightmare on Elm Street, which has generally been a horror/slasher franchise throughout, but has on and off dipped into silly comedy as well. You can easily have that film series be what it is with or without the comedy: but not the horror/slasher component.

What it ultimately boils down to when it comes to a story that has multiple genres baked into it is simply "which of these genre elements are expendable and which are not?" when it comes to its overall identity and core focus as a story.

All of this of course obviously also goes for Naruto as well: and Naruto doesn't even really mix that many genres! Its largely in many ways just a straight up bog-standard, boilerplate ninja fantasy throughout (if a fairly cringy, laboriously tween-angsty, and dorkily executed one, but that's just my humble opinion talking there), of a kind that's been done to death and omnipresent across other countless examples of Shonen manga and anime both decades long before it as well as even just a a few short years prior and directly alongside it! Because ninja fantasy never even fucking WENT ANYWHERE in the mainstream anime and manga landscape all throughout the many years leading up to Naruto's debut!

But because this giant generational swath of millennial Shonen fans didn't start to pay attention to stuff until the turn of the millennium, we all have to collectively pretend that decades and decades and decades worth of ninja fantasy anime and manga (much of it Shonen even!) are this whole other separate thing over on one hand, and Naruto is something that's at least partly unique and altogether different over on the other hand... even though its not in any way at all different in the slightest in terms of any of its, y'know, actual content throughout. I can't be alone in finding that to be utterly beyond senselessly stupid and moronic, right? :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy:

There's literally NOTHING at all that's in any which way different about Naruto from something like Flame of Recca or Shonen Ninja Kaze or what have you, save for the fact that its the ninja fantasy anime that most millennial fans just so happened to glom onto during a peak period of Shonen Jump's popularity and visibility. That's literally IT. It seems so often like the core-most important tenant of Battle Shonen in the eyes of fans is "It has to remind me of Dragon Ball - no matter how vaguely or nebulously so - and I had to have seen and first heard of it at some point during or by the early 2000s". That seems to be a VERY suspiciously conspicuous throughline that really seems to be the core thing linking a lot of this nonsense together ultimately.

This is why I'm saying that Battle Shonen is a made up non-genre: because nothing about it stands apart as distinguishing it from just various forms of straight up Eastern martial arts fantasy storytelling genres of a kind that have been around already and readily well established for decades/centuries prior.

The whole origin of the term Battle Shonen seems to stem largely from the fact that a millennial audience of fans of Shonen Jump titles who have collectively seemed to have little to no experience with much of anything else of this kind outside of modern day Shonen works all collectively decided that they would coin a new term for it together rather than just take a fucking step back for a moment and notice that all this crap was already well long ago established in TONS of other similar/identical works outside of their immediate periphery, while also remembering to bear in mind that no, history and artistic evolution doesn't all just conveniently begin at the very moment and place where you just so happened to step in as a kid.

Kinokima wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 5:03 amAnd the more you read and watch of these different series the more these tropes become familiar & even comforting to you.
And people wonder why I keep noting how so much of the core of this argument often seems more rooted and wrapped up in emotional baggage rather than in anything the least bit substantive, factual, or rooted in actual demonstrable history.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by JulieYBM » Sat Apr 10, 2021 10:38 am

I think plenty of comics aimed at kids are better than Dragon Ball. I also don't think I really care because that just seems superfluous to my ability to read and enjoy the comics I like!

My girlfriend was suggesting I pick up some shoujo the other day so I picked up Kiss Him, Not Me and it really reminded me of how limited battle comics (and popular JUMP comics) aimed at boys are in their variety. Of course, I'm still out here reading Boku no Hero Academia and Black Clover in addition to Dragon Ball Super it just really sends home to me how boring those titles are in a lot of ways.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Lord Beerus » Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:16 am

Absolutely.

There are many of Japanese comics aimed at the same demographic as Dragon Ball that I find as superior to it, not just in writing, but in visual presentation as well.

Just to name some off of the top of my head:

Galaxy Express 999
Barefoot Gen
Devilman
Area 88
Black Jack
Appleseed
The Flowers of Evil
A Silent Voice
The Drifting Classroom
Kerberos Panzer Cop
Tomorrow's Joe
Mermaid Saga
Ancient Magus' Bride
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin
Rokudenashi Blues
Hajime No Ippo
Mobile Police Patlabor
Bio Booster Armor Guyver

Hell, if I was to get even more specific and focus on manga at the shonen demographic that centered around martial arts and are from the Wuxia genre as well, Dragon Ball would still be a behind the likes Fist Of The North Star and YuYu Hakusho.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:19 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 9:03 am
Kinokima wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 5:03 amBut that doesn’t mean that all these shounen manga set in different places with different power systems and different influences don’t also share traits with each other.
The main traits they share with one another is that they're written and drawn by Japanese people and aimed at an audience of elementary school boys. The rest is mainly a byproduct of Dragon Ball's popularity, because Dragon Ball was kind of a massively big deal.

The point that's being missed here is that in order to be reasonably qualified as a whole new separate genre, these stories have to collectively do something that makes them markedly different or sets them apart from their forebears and influences.
Except being Japanese and aimed at elementary school students (and for the record Shounen Jump’s primary audience is older than that but that’s neither here nor there) DOES NOT make something Battle Shounen. If that was the case anything that was Shounen including romance, horror and sports series would be Battle Shounen, which is clear not the case. I am not even saying anything with action scenes is necessarily Battle Shounen

And yes Dragon Ball obviously had an influence on these type of comics. So did Fist of the North Star for that matter. But there are plenty of people who can recognize something as “Battle Shounen” without having ever seen Dragon Ball. Because the tropes and overall set up of these series are so familiar to people. Hunter X Hunter is even called a deconstruction of the genre. While I am not saying that is the case (I haven’t read enough of Hunter X Hunter to agree or disagree ) you cannot be a deconstruction of something if it doesn’t exist.


And there is literally NO rule that says a genre has to offer something completely different from what came before . Again a genre is just a group of things with shared style, themes, or subject matter. People group these series into Battle Shounen because they do share common tropes and motifs whether you want to agree or not.

And again the term Battle Shounen is not brand new. It’s been around for awhile to describe these type of similar series.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by jamiljamtheman » Sat Apr 10, 2021 2:20 pm

I like the writing in Naruto more than Dragon Ball, because Natuto has a heavy emphasis on character focus and emotional drama, on top of its action.

I don’t like one series better/worse than the other though, the writing styles and tones are so different that they satisfy different moods.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by SupremeKai25 » Sat Apr 10, 2021 3:32 pm

jamiljamtheman wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 2:20 pm I like the writing in Naruto more than Dragon Ball, because Natuto has a heavy emphasis on character focus and emotional drama, on top of its action.

I don’t like one series better/worse than the other though, the writing styles and tones are so different that they satisfy different moods.
Had emphasis on character focus, until they replaced Madara with the generic no-name, no-personality alien monsters.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by UltraInstinctRorikon » Sun Apr 11, 2021 12:48 am

MasenkoHA wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:52 am
UltraInstinctRorikon wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:40 am
Kunzait_83 wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:14 am

I've said this numerous times before, but to the extent that other later Shonen series (like Naruto, One Piece, etc) share scraps of elements with Dragon Ball, its 1000% due to Dragon Ball having an incredibly ubiquitous influence over manga authors for years after, and not in any way because those later manga are in any which way part of the same genre as DB.

One Piece for example is in EVERY sense pretty much strictly a pirate adventure serial: yet it has vestiges of Dragon Ball's Kung Fu Fantasy/Wuxia elements haphazardly shoehorned in. Not in any which way because they make any kind of cohesive sense with One Piece's world or more broad storytelling style and themes, but purely because Toriyama did them in DB (where they made VASTLY more sense) and Oda grew up loving Dragon Ball.

There's literally NO good reason what-so-fucking-ever for Luffy to be getting into vaguely Wuxia-esque martial arts-like throwdowns with his villains as opposed to your more conventional swashbuckling, Erol Flynn-esque sword fight or whatnot: it only happens that way because Oda liked Dragon Ball growing up. Whereas in Dragon Ball these kinds of fights make INFINITELY more sense because they're happening within a solidly defined Kung Fu Fantasy/Wuxia framework. This style of fighting is just glaringly, distractingly out of place in One Piece in a way that it NEVER is or could be in something like Dragon Ball. As opposed to within a story/setting/world like One Piece's, where its effectively a total non-sequitur that ONLY makes any kind of creative sense when you factor in real life facets about the author (big Dragon Ball fan, loves Toriyama, etc).

And its not just One Piece that's guilty of this: Toriko, My Hero Academia, Fairy Tail, and to a certain extent Naruto and Hunter X Hunter (though those two are much more nuanced and have WAY more legitimate reasons for going that route with some of their fights), along with countless other examples, are just as guilty of doing this. It has pretty much next to nothing at all to do with all of these otherwise COMPLETELY disparate Shonen mega-franchises sharing anything at all resembling the same genre as one another, and EVERYTHING in the world to do with the fact that DB was an incredibly successful and influential manga/anime that made a huge impact on the industry.

To bring in a Western example for comparison: its kind of like the impact that the original 1977 Star Wars had on the film industry. Ever since Star Wars was first released, the whole Hollywood studio summer tentpole formula was coined, and much of the narrative formula for these movies share a NUMBER of common traits with Star Wars. They largely adhere to the Joseph Campbell "heroes' journey/monomyth" archetypes and format, they often feature a number of similar broad narrative beats (such as the wise mentor heroically sacrificing themselves in front of the hero, or the hero losing their family to prompt them onto their reluctant journey, a rogue-ish scoundrel like supporting character who seems shady and untrustworthy at first, but ultimately comes through in the end, etc).

But do ALL of those films which followed and modeled themselves under the same narrative formula of Star Wars (or whichever various selected elements of said formula) also share the same GENRE as Star Wars? Star Wars' genre can generally be safely classified as Space Opera or Sci Fi Fantasy: but what about all the summer blockbuster films that followed in its wake? Do we consider Harry Potter for example to be in the same genre as Star Wars? What about Ghostbusters? The Lord of the Rings (the movies at least, set aside the fact that there is a much older source material)? The Matrix? Back to the Future? Indiana Jones? Hell, The Lion King or any given Pixar film for that matter?

All of these films all share some common narrative formula elements taken either in part or in full from Star Wars (which in turn took plenty from not just Joseph Campbell, but also old 1930s through 50s film serials, Westerns, and WWII films, among a TON of other Eastern influence: Japanese Chanbara and Chinese Wuxia among them incidentally), and all would likely not have been made or possible without Star Wars setting the baseline: does that mean that we group ALL of them within the same genre as Star Wars?

No, of course we don't. That'd be beyond ridiculous and asinine. Harry Potter is no more a Space Opera than Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings are. Star Wars was a MASSIVE overarching creative influence on the culture of movies and movie-making for decades to come up through to this day: we don't therefore just lump ALL that came after and was impacted or influenced by it under the same broad umbrella genre. That would be every shade of nonsensical and unwieldly imaginable.

In most ways, this isn't THAT dissimilar from the impact that Dragon Ball had on Shonen manga and anime in the decades that followed its end. Naruto, Toriko, My Hero Academia, Hunter X Hunter, One Piece, Bleach, Fairy Tail, etc. NONE of them are within the same genre as DB is. A few are in genres that are similar/connected to it (like Naruto, as ninja fantasy has some semi-distant cultural roots - by way of Japanese and Chinese folkloric history - connected to that of Wuxia). Many/most others however have almost ZERO genre connection to it whatsoever. That DOESN'T therefore diminish or invalidate the OBVIOUS broader industry-wide IMPACT that Dragon Ball had had on the Shonen marketplace: that much is absolutely undeniable.

But creating a totally nonsensical, made up genre (Battle Shonen) to lump ALL of them into together as largely one and the same type of story, when each and every single one of them are all CLEARLY within their own separate, independent, and distinct genre categories that they're all clearly and unmistakably embodying - One Piece is definitively a swashbuckling pirate adventure, Naruto is a classic Japanese ninja fantasy, Fairy Tail is a more conventional Western-ish fantasy, My Hero Academia is a straight up superhero story, Hunter X Hunter is a largely conventional action/adventure fantasy with SOME Wuxia elements sprinkled into some of its subplots, Toriko is... a... cooking adventure?... etc. - is a bafflingly over-literal misreading of the ENTIRE Shonen landscape as a whole. In pretty much ANY other context, anyone who'd do something like this with ANY other similarly broad medium of works would be very much rightly and correctly laughed out of the room.

And I cannot help but continue to point out that such a wildly off-base misreading of the Shonen market would not have been possible were it not for both a MASSIVE degree of cultural ignorance among Western fans with regards to even basic-most facts about Eastern martial arts fantasy genres (since so much of this nonsense traces its way back to Dragon Ball and the impact its had on Shonen as a broader market) as well as how so very, very many would-be anime/manga/Shonen "historians" among Western anime/manga fans online throughout the years have been so insanely, stupefyingly off the mark, absurdly narrow in their scope of focus, and (yes I'll go so far as to say) straight up incompetent and unrigorous in their basic-most research into this stuff.

Wuxia may not be super well known in some parts of the mainstream Western world, but when you're glued to a global, worldwide database of near-infinite information like the internet for years/decades at a time... it isn't *nearly* that obscure or difficult to come across then. At a certain point, at a certain threshold, a significant chunk of the Western anime fanbase post-Toonami boom have basically just not even been trying so much at all to broaden their scope of focus past a very specific niche of Cartoon Network-friendly material in order to be THIS blind and THIS cut off for THIS long to so much of this stuff.




While this is all totally 100% correct, I'll go father and say that its not even just that Battle Shonen is "too broad a category", its not even a real fucking category AT ALL to begin with. Its a completely, 100% made-the-fuck-up nonsense genre that doesn't actually exist or mean anything. All it means basically is "a popular Japanese children's comic/cartoon franchise that takes some influence from Dragon Ball". That's... that's not a fucking genre. Its nothing. Its meaningless. It shouldn't be a thing and the fanbase would probably do well to just scrub it from their collective vocabularies.

I know that that's probably never going to happen, but its still an incredibly stupid and meaningless term that doesn't actually describe much of anything notable or substantive about a given anime/manga series, and whose origins in the fandom lexicon stem largely from complete cultural ignorance and sheltering.
Last I checked Dragon Ball has US military, cyborgs, robots, space ships, and long term battles end up being movement so fast it looks like teleportation and turning energy into ghosts that pick their nose and explode.

Dragon Ball is far from authentic in any sense nor does it need to be and neither does One Piece. That's the whole point.

I....I am genuinely at a complete loss at how you got any of that from Kunzait’s post? Where did he ever say in his post Dragon Ball was authentic or realistic?
I am at a complete loss regarding most of your posts to be quite honest.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by DragonBallFoodie » Sun Apr 11, 2021 6:58 am

In terms of action, there are a lot of fantasy shonen that do better than DB. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Bleach, Blood Blockade Battlefront, Jujutsu Taisen, Fist of the Northern Star, St Seiya, and the Fate saga are just a few examples. But it's worth noting that Toriyama kept his shonen simple, going with higher and higher power levels as opposed to different techniques that would utilize strategic thinking.

In terms of humor, which is Toriyama's forte, I can think of only three that can match/surpass DB:
- KINNIKUMAN. A wrestling parody show about an idiot alien prince who must compete in a wrestling tournament to prove his royal worth.

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- Hideaki Sorachi's GINTAMA. A great action comedy mix that is set in an alternate 1850s/2000s mix of Japan, where a ronin living a quiet post-war life must eventually confront his past, but at the same time enjoys having a day-to-day life with laughs and fun. The show also had its fair share of parodies, and as the artist was a big fan of DB there are more than enough DB parodies.

Image

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- BOBOBO-BO BO-BOBO. Think Hokuto No Ken, but with hair-fighting techniques, zany characters and gags/jokes galore. The lead hero fights with his nose hair, and is named Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Mewzard » Fri Apr 16, 2021 9:43 pm

Speaking of Kinnikuman, there's a series that really kept evolving as it went on.

Had we just left off with Kinnikuman's 36 volumes vs Dragon Ball's 42 volumes, I'd probably end up favoring Dragon Ball, despite feeling Kinnikuman was getting better over time to its end, while Dragon Ball's end was a bit of a drop compared to its peak.

But when they returned to the original cast in the 2011(after the OG series ended in 1987, and their sequel series *which we got as Ultimate Muscle* ran from from 1998-2011)...we got something that stepped up its game to a level I didn't imagine possible.

The Perfect Origin Arc ran from volumes 38-60, and honestly, I can't imagine calling anything else a more perfect shonen arc, if you'll forgive the term choice.

The arc itself drew from large sections of the original series. It brought back many characters who before barely had any limelight and let them have chances to shine. It wasn't just a protagonist showcase, but everyone got to their fights. Death went from being consequence free to having some real weight behind it, and the lore of the world was expanded in greater detail.

One of the biggest changes...the main character, Suguru Kinniku, Kinnikuman himself...only had two fights in 22 volumes. There was legitimate drama and matches where I couldn't be sure who would win.

A series that could often be goofy left you feeling emotions and tensions when the guy who was a living Cassette Tape Player who used people's powers/fighting styles on tape (Stecasse King) or the guy who turned into various reptiles or into a giant shoe to kick his enemies (Sneagator) would win their fight or not, and would they live?

Every fight felt impactful, and the fact that not every returning character was some big arc character, but even the sillier characters could possibly win and earn their respect felt great.

The character growth for these smaller characters was part of the big appeal of the arc for me. So many series would just let such bit players disappear, but the entire comic from 2011 to now has been bringing back these small players into the limelight.

Death having an impact now was a major turning point given in the past, you could literally earn your life back as a Chojin with a little bit of time and effort spent. The fact that since the revival, we've only had one return from death (and given how it happened, and the emotions behind it, I'm all for) is a big deal.

Not related to the writing, but the series looks the best it's ever had during the revival. Even ignoring scan quality issues, it's clear how Yudetamago have grown as mangakas artistically as well as in writing.

I suppose you could say technically it doesn't count, since it now runs in a Seinen magazine, but honestly, it still feels like the series of old, just a better version of it writing/art wise. It's got the heart the series built up to after it stopped going 100% gag Ultraman parody and went cheesy but fun wrestling for massive stakes.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by ZeroNeonix » Sun Apr 18, 2021 1:20 am

IMO, My Hero Academia is so much better than Dragon Ball. First time I watched it, at the suggestion of my brother, I didn't really get into it, but it gets better as it goes. I'm sure lots of Shonen are better than Dragon Ball, although I don't watch many anymore these days. Even as a fan, I recognize Dragon Ball's weaknesses, and I love it despite those weaknesses. It innovated the genre, but many have built on its foundations and used better and more consistent storytelling. Heck, some take the weaknesses associated with the genre and turn those into strengths, like One Punch Man or Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which are basically parodies of the genre.

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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Zinnia » Sun Apr 18, 2021 4:08 am

ZeroNeonix wrote: Sun Apr 18, 2021 1:20 am IMO, My Hero Academia is so much better than Dragon Ball.
I disagree, as it suffers from the same problems as DB if not more. The side characters are underutilized and at best they can help supporting Deku. When was the last time Iida or Tokoyami got any fights on their own? Even Bakugo, the Vegeta of this series doesn't really do much nor go through any development. Second problem is Shigaraki constantly escaping, it makes the pro heroes look incompetent by being unable to catch one guy. The series has one set villain and the rest are his minions for use, but it's boring to have a single main villain for 300 or so chapters, because the plot has to bend to his will.

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