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.
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..."