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 Yuji » Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:42 pm

I'm seeing Attack on Titan pop up in this thread. What unfortunate timing.

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

Post by It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips » Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:59 pm

Kinokima wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:34 pm Anyways my point is just because a bunch of series are part of one genre doesn’t mean that is the only genre they can be part of or they all have to be exactly the same.

Take the common Hollywood genre like the Westerns you had Western comedies, Western musicals, Western Noirs, Sci-Fi Westerns. When you are part of one genre you aren’t excluded from also being part of another.

So I am not saying comparing Naruto and Dragon Ball is like comparing apples to apples but they are both fruit in the end.
Yeah. I think there's a bit too much nitpicking going on.

To go back to my Three Hearts and Three Lions example, where the book slots in in the world of fantasy might be up for debate but it's still fantasy and clearly shares a lineage with both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Regardless of how different the books may be in tone and what imagery they borrow, they all share the same DNA.
Yuji wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:42 pm I'm seeing Attack on Titan pop up in this thread. What unfortunate timing.
I know he tends to be unpopular in anime communities but youtuber FoldableHuman absolutely called the trajectory of AoT years ago. His "this is Lost for weebs" comparison was the most prescient thing a youtube critic has ever said.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by PurestEvil » Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:32 pm

Yuji wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:42 pm I'm seeing Attack on Titan pop up in this thread. What unfortunate timing.
Did AoT become bad or what?
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Alruneia » Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:49 pm

PurestEvil wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:32 pm
Yuji wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:42 pm I'm seeing Attack on Titan pop up in this thread. What unfortunate timing.
Did AoT become bad or what?
It's ending today, if I recall correctly. (On the 9th, that is.) I haven't kept up since the first season of the anime when it was a huge thing, so don't quote me on this as I'm not the best source, but I believe a lot of people are pretty unhappy with the direction the story took towards the end.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:55 pm

Shonen, Shojo, and Josei series can have different genres that appeal to everyone. Both K-On and M.D Geist are aim towards adults in Japan despite them being two different genres.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Thu Apr 08, 2021 8:23 pm

:shh:
Alruneia wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:49 pm
PurestEvil wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:32 pm
Yuji wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:42 pm I'm seeing Attack on Titan pop up in this thread. What unfortunate timing.
Did AoT become bad or what?
It's ending today, if I recall correctly. (On the 9th, that is.) I haven't kept up since the first season of the anime when it was a huge thing, so don't quote me on this as I'm not the best source, but I believe a lot of people are pretty unhappy with the direction the story took towards the end.

Yeah it over and needless to say most people don’t seem to like the ending. Well endings are tough

I dropped AOT awhile ago. So I feel kind of schadenfreude about the whole thing.

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

Post by Tylerman29 » Thu Apr 08, 2021 11:29 pm

I'm sure it's been stated dozens of times in this thread, but One Piece is absolutely better written than DB. I feel like it takes all the things I like about DB and builds upon them. I guess when it comes to the Anime's pacing(I'm 700 eps in) its probably the absolute slowest long shonen. Every arc has tremendous payoffs though that make the long build up worth it. I see it as the true successor to DB (which ended with GT in 1996 :D ).
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Yuji » Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:10 am

It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:59 pm I know he tends to be unpopular in anime communities but youtuber FoldableHuman absolutely called the trajectory of AoT years ago. His "this is Lost for weebs" comparison was the most prescient thing a youtube critic has ever said.
That's why I normally can't get engaged with the plotting of a serialized work unless it's purposefully being improvised week after week, or has a simple premise. Most manga I've read that try to go for the large scale narrative almost always fumble the ending, even the more critically acclaimed ones like Urasawa's works. I've been following One Piece on and off for almost a decade now and I always try to measure other fans' expectations regarding the ending because at this point it's impossible to live up to.

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

Post by Kinokima » Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:34 am

Yuji wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:10 am
It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:59 pm I know he tends to be unpopular in anime communities but youtuber FoldableHuman absolutely called the trajectory of AoT years ago. His "this is Lost for weebs" comparison was the most prescient thing a youtube critic has ever said.
That's why I normally can't get engaged with the plotting of a serialized work unless it's purposefully being improvised week after week, or has a simple premise. Most manga I've read that try to go for the large scale narrative almost always fumble the ending, even the more critically acclaimed ones like Urasawa's works. I've been following One Piece on and off for almost a decade now and I always try to measure other fans' expectations regarding the ending because at this point it's impossible to live up to.
I also think when you engage with fandom as you watch/read a series as it comes out your expectations end up being much higher. Everyone has theories and thoughts how the series will end and either you will like that conclusion more or you will feel cheated that the conclusion was predicted because that happens when so many people are sharing their thoughts. Or the author goes for an ending that wasn’t predicted but it just feels like a bad twist that wasn’t earned by the story. Even if you do like the ending other people not liking it kind of brings the euphoria down.

While it’s not as acclaimed as Attack on Titan was on the web the same thing happens with Dragon Ball super.

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

Post by UltraInstinctRorikon » Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:42 am

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

Post by Yuji » Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:24 am

Kinokima wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:34 am
Yuji wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 7:10 am
It_Is_Ayna_You_Flips wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:59 pm I know he tends to be unpopular in anime communities but youtuber FoldableHuman absolutely called the trajectory of AoT years ago. His "this is Lost for weebs" comparison was the most prescient thing a youtube critic has ever said.
That's why I normally can't get engaged with the plotting of a serialized work unless it's purposefully being improvised week after week, or has a simple premise. Most manga I've read that try to go for the large scale narrative almost always fumble the ending, even the more critically acclaimed ones like Urasawa's works. I've been following One Piece on and off for almost a decade now and I always try to measure other fans' expectations regarding the ending because at this point it's impossible to live up to.
I also think when you engage with fandom as you watch/read a series as it comes out your expectations end up being much higher. Everyone has theories and thoughts how the series will end and either you will like that conclusion more or you will feel cheated that the conclusion was predicted because that happens when so many people are sharing their thoughts. Or the author goes for an ending that wasn’t predicted but it just feels like a bad twist that wasn’t earned by the story. Even if you do like the ending other people not liking it kind of brings the euphoria down.

While it’s not as acclaimed as Attack on Titan was on the web the same thing happens with Dragon Ball super.
While I agree that generally fans make up expectations that the story itself doesn't try to adhere to, I think we have to be careful not too generalize every criticism as such. Even while being charitable, there are times where stories simply do not provide a satisfactory ending. Being able to distance yourself from the work and understand the author's presumed intent is good, though, and something everyone should do. Often times fans get too angry at commercialized fiction.

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

Post by Kunzait_83 » Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:14 am

Zephyr wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 10:56 amI think peoples' tendency to group Dragon Ball and its direct imitators into the same "Battle Shonen" genre is off the mark not for the grouping, but for the label they put on it. Not to deny the influence of ninja, pirate, superhero, etc media on these respective "successors", but there seems to be some sort of "kung fu-lite" bend to them. Tournaments, training arcs, throwing hands to speak to each other, etc. by way of their doing what DB was doing.
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 umbrella 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 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.

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.

Kendamu wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:10 pm"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.
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.
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Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by UltraInstinctRorikon » Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:40 am

Kunzait_83 wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:14 am
Zephyr wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 10:56 amI think peoples' tendency to group Dragon Ball and its direct imitators into the same "Battle Shonen" genre is off the mark not for the grouping, but for the label they put on it. Not to deny the influence of ninja, pirate, superhero, etc media on these respective "successors", but there seems to be some sort of "kung fu-lite" bend to them. Tournaments, training arcs, throwing hands to speak to each other, etc. by way of their doing what DB was doing.
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.

Kendamu wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:10 pm"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.
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.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by MasenkoHA » 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
Zephyr wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 10:56 amI think peoples' tendency to group Dragon Ball and its direct imitators into the same "Battle Shonen" genre is off the mark not for the grouping, but for the label they put on it. Not to deny the influence of ninja, pirate, superhero, etc media on these respective "successors", but there seems to be some sort of "kung fu-lite" bend to them. Tournaments, training arcs, throwing hands to speak to each other, etc. by way of their doing what DB was doing.
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.

Kendamu wrote: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:10 pm"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.
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?

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

Post by Kunzait_83 » Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:12 pm

UltraInstinctRorikon wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:40 amLast 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.
There's militaries in DB, but none of them are "U.S." And in either case, what the hell does that even have to do with anything?

Cyborgs, robots, and spaceships also in no way have anything to do with anything that I'm talking about. And movement so fast its basically teleportation and energy attacks and whatnot... yeah, those are as stock Wuxia tropes as it gets (robots, cyborgs and spaceships for that matter are also not exactly strangers to the genre in any way).

UltraInstinctRorikon wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:40 amDragon Ball is far from authentic in any sense nor does it need to be and neither does One Piece. That's the whole point.
This literally makes zero sense and has no bearing on anything I wrote in any regard. This isn't in any way to do with "authenticity", in whatever capacity you're meaning here: I'm talking about how different fantasy elements jibe with one another (or don't) between two obvious fantasy serials. No one here is mistaking any of this for an Elem Klimov movie. In the nicest, most respectful way I can possibly say this: please actually read and digest what's actually been written before responding.
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Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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

Post by jjgp1112 » Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:19 pm

I wouldn't really call One Piece a swashbuckling pirate adventure - probably in the most literal sense, but it doesn't adhere to a lot of pirate story elements in anything but window dressing - the protagonists don't even areally act like pirates, and the series itself actually makes a joke of this at different points. (IE, the one time they actually plunder an island and escape like thieves in the night taunting everyone, the locals were actually LETTING them take everything and waving goodbye!)

I'd say One Piece is a melting pot of a ton of different genres and influences faaaar beyond just Dragon Ball, all tied together under the pirate motif.
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Re: Are there other shonen you acknowledge as better written than Dragon Ball?

Post by Kinokima » Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:24 pm

Battle Shounen is absolutely a genre just like Supernatural, Horror and Isekai and sports are all very broad genres.

Just because something is broad than say breaking it down to Ninja or martial arts or pirates does not mean it is not a legitimate genre that is a nonsense argument.

And just because you don’t see similarities between these types of series beyond influenced by Dragon Ball doesn’t mean there are no similarities between the different series. Again it seems like if something is not exactly the same then if cannot be compared or part of the same genre.

No one is saying if you like one of these series then you will like all of them. Obviously more specific differences may make you prefer one over the other.

But saying no analysis and comparison can take place between One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball because they are 100% different is ridiculous too.

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

Post by MasenkoHA » Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:34 pm

Kinokima wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:24 pm Battle Shounen is absolutely a genre just like Supernatural, Horror and Isekai and sports are all very broad genres.
I don’t not what Isekai is but Supernatural, horror, and Sports all exist outside of manga/anime. Battle Shonen is just a term used by shonen anime fans who at least have the awareness that shonen is not a genre.

If you can’t list anything outside of the manga/anime medium it’s not really a genre.

Battle Shonen is as much of a genre as saying Action cartoons aimed at 6-11 year old boys is a genre.
Last edited by MasenkoHA on Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:36 pm, 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 » Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:36 pm

jjgp1112 wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:19 pm I wouldn't really call One Piece a swashbuckling pirate adventure - probably in the most literal sense, but it doesn't adhere to a lot of pirate story elements in anything but window dressing - the protagonists don't even areally act like pirates, and the series itself actually makes a joke of this at different points. (IE, the one time they actually plunder an island and escape like thieves in the night taunting everyone, the locals were actually LETTING them take everything and waving goodbye!)

I'd say One Piece is a melting pot of a ton of different genres and influences faaaar beyond just Dragon Ball, all tied together under the pirate motif.
I did mention in another thread that One Piece feels more like an adventure series than original Dragon Ball ever did with the island hopping aspect of the series. The setting is just as important as the battles and power system in One Piece

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

Post by Kinokima » Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:55 pm

MasenkoHA wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:34 pm
Kinokima wrote: Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:24 pm Battle Shounen is absolutely a genre just like Supernatural, Horror and Isekai and sports are all very broad genres.
I don’t not what Isekai is but Supernatural, horror, and Sports all exist outside of manga/anime. Battle Shonen is just a term used by shonen anime fans who at least have the awareness that shonen is not a genre.

If you can’t list anything outside of the manga/anime medium it’s not really a genre.

Battle Shonen is as much of a genre as saying Action cartoons aimed at 6-11 year old boys is a genre.

That’s not how genres work

And again I keep mentioning certain tropes that are common to these series including a specific power system, tournaments, the rival character, transformations, training arcs etc. It has nothing to do with just having “action” Obviously they don’t have to all of these elements to be Battle Shounen but these type of series all share common elements.

A genre is just something that shares similarities in form style or subject matter. And a genre can certainly exist in just one form or place. Take something like Film Noir. That coin was phrased when a bunch of French critics watched a bunch of American crime films after the war and felt they shared common themes and motifs. So yes saying these Japanese comics form a specific genre is perfectly legitimate


Again Magical Girls, Mecha and Giant Robots are also genres that exist mainly in Japanese media. Does that mean it’s not a legitimate genre ?

As for Isekai it’s a popular genre of finding yourself in different world or being reincarnated in a different world.
Last edited by Kinokima on Fri Apr 09, 2021 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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