Did Dragon Ball inspire the misconception that shounen is a genre?

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

In anime and manga fandom there is a prevailing narrative (which I was guilty of believing at one point) that shounen is a genre rather than simply a demographic.

Some people will say "battle shounen" is a specific genre because when it's mentioned people think of characters fighting villains and randomly powering up or using a trump card at the last second. Sound familiar?

By the same token I've heard some in literary circles try to coin "young adult" as a genre, possibly because of the success of series like Harry Potter.

I know we can't call "battle shounen" a genre any more than we can call "young adult fantasy" one, in both cases if you remove the demographic you have a certain genre, despite attempts to combine the two into a single unified whole.

If Dragon Ball was not a success however would shounen be seen (rightly) as a demographic because other mangakas wouldn't have tried to recreate its magic? Would another series have caused the same misconception? Interested to hear what people think.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

This is an interesting question. I think when Dragon Ball was running back in the 80s and 90s, the term may not have been used, as it wouldn't make sense to use a term to describe one single series. However, once the likes of Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc... showed up on the scene, inspired by Dragon Ball, fans wanted a term to describe shows/manga of a similar nature. Attack On Titan, Full Metal Alchemist, and Death Note, to name a few, are also targeted towards the same demographic, but would you call them a Shonen series in the same way you'd call Dragon Ball and One Piece ? Probably not. There's also the fact that these popular battle series are mostly published in a magazine called Weekly Shonen Jump, which just makes the name more convenient.

[Kid Buu]

Just going off my personal experiences, not doing any history books.

I only started to hear it during the big 3 era (Bleach, Naruto, One Piece), and only really on the internet. In real life, I'm more to hear the misconception of anime being a genre than shounen.

[JulieYBM]

Dragon Ball was popular in the era before One Piece, NARUTO and BLEACH became juggernaughts in the English-speaking manga and anime fan sphere. If anything popularized the idea of 'shounen' being a so-called 'genre', it wasn't the series that mostly went witout new material coming to North America for the 2010s.

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

There's also the fact that these popular battle series are mostly published in a magazine called Weekly Shonen Jump, which just makes the name more convenient.

I never thought of that, but the fact you might be on to something with the "Shonen" in the name of the magazine adding to the misconception.

Just going off my personal experiences, not doing any history books.

I only started to hear it during the big 3 era (Bleach, Naruto, One Piece), and only really on the internet. In real life, I'm more to hear the misconception of anime being a genre than shounen.

Also an interesting point as I've heard some people argue shounen is a genre because terms are adapted and mean different things to different cultures. For example to a Japanese person "anime" is any animates show or movie, but for us in the western world anime specifically refers to animation from Japan. Not that I agree, but it goes to show that miscategorization is not just a problem for shounen.

[GhostEmperorX]

This is an interesting question. I think when Dragon Ball was running back in the 80s and 90s, the term may not have been used, as it wouldn't make sense to use a term to describe one single series. However, once the likes of Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc... showed up on the scene, inspired by Dragon Ball, fans wanted a term to describe shows/manga of a similar nature.

Would there be any reason for glossing over some of DB's contemporaries in the same demographic (Slam Dunk, Fist of the North Star, etc)?

[MasenkoHA]

I wouldn’t say Dragon Ball inspired the misconception per se. I would guess shonen anime of the “battle shonen” variety being the bulk of anime brought over on kids broadcast television had more to do with it than anything. I’m too lazy to do any research but I’d wager 80-90 percent of the anime that aired on Toonami and Adult Swim fell under shonen in the late 90s to early naughts (pretty much just Sailor Moon, Hamtaro and a few rare seinen titles on AS were the exceptions) so that and since Dragon Ball was the “oldest” title they aired (Japanese broadcast wise) it gave the impression shonen was not only a genre but a genre Dragon Ball invented or at least popularize.


Something else to consider is Shonen Jump got brought over to America (and maybe some other countries?) around the early 2000s. So that probably contributed to the word shonen being branded in middle schoolers minds as a specific subsection of anime and not just a demographic . I can’t think of any other Japanese manga publication being imported over. American publishers that brought over manga were usually their own entity with no Japanese counterpart like Tokyopop

[Kunzait_83]

I don't think I'd blame Dragon Ball itself per se for this whole "Shonen is a genre" phenomenon. That misunderstanding is, unfortunately, just one of several underlying symptoms of a much deeper, bigger issue.

This topic delves into a touchy, prickly subject surrounding the drastic (and I do mean drastic) changes in the North American Anime fandom/market at the tail-most end of the 90s going into the very early 2000s (I'd say the changeover happened around 1998/1999 through 2003 or so, and we've been living in the ramifications and impact of that change throughout all the years ever since), which is one that I've gestured at and spoken around the edges about a whole great deal over the years, but never really delved directly into in greater detail (partly by nature of this being a specifically DB-focused site, and partly by nature of the subject itself inviting a ton of hostility and heat at one point in time).

There's a LOT of history and details surrounding this (you could easily fill an academic-sized book with it all), but the short, blunt (and I admit, fairly mean and cold) answer is: its largely the fault of a larger swath (though hardly all of course, nothing is ever so blanketed) of Millennial Western fans having - for whatever various reasons, that's a whole OTHER can of worms in itself - a generally myopic view of anime as a medium and possessing a general lack of basic intellectual curiosity for exploring not just anime, but all kinds of media as a whole outside of an incredibly limited and specific set of parameters.

With the internet being what it was throughout the 2000s (increasingly widespread, increasingly accessible, increasingly easy to archive and find basically anything at one's fingertips: though in much more recent years, we're now seeing a noticeable degradation and decline in archival findability of a lot of basic stuff online, but that's still a fairly recent issue) there really isn't any other bigger excuse here for the utter and abject inability and refusal of Millennial Western anime fans writ-large to move on from and move past looking at anime through the, I'll just say it, the "Toonami Mold" of the turn of the century.

There ARE outside factors to consider as well (but again, that would eat up a TON of text and time to delve into them all), but ultimately at the end of the day, this was largely a very needless and largely self-imposed "information barrier" that the Mainstream Millennial Western Anime audience had placed on themselves - in a very broad sense - for more than a decade or two without most of them even really realizing that they were doing it.

Dragon Ball just happened to be the "Rosetta Stone" title that turned this particular generation/demographic subset onto anime, and within a very narrow and highly specific purview. If it wasn't Dragon Ball that did it though, it'd be something else that fits this particular "foreign action cartoon" mold. Anything from a later title like Naruto or One Piece to an earlier or alternate contemporary-to-DB title like Yoroiden Samurai Troopers or Saint Seiya, all could have just as easily taken Dragon Ball's spot under the right conditions.

Dragon Ball just happened to be in the right place at the right time to fill the void of "Gateway Drug" for this very particular and highly specific demographic of fans who would over the course of the 2000s had come to dominate and overwhelm the vast majority of the broader Western Anime fandom in the most visible sense.

And in turn, they basically flooded the anime fandom space for years and years with both a hyper-fixation on a VERY narrow range and specific style of anime/manga titles and with a LOT of misinformation/disinformation about the medium and its history based largely on a combination of their own very limited and insular experience with anime/manga and Western/foreign assumptions rooted in cultural ignorance and half-understood, garbled bits of decontextualized trivia gleaned from both earlier eras of Western fandom and various Japanese sources of varying translation quality.

Simply put, we're talking about a whole entire generation of Western anime fans with a severe aversion to learning history or doing very basic, rudimentary research, and moreover of exploring and understanding media more broadly outside a highly specific realm of children's media, who basically wallowed in their own childhood nostalgia whilst feeding themselves the same misinformed narratives about a foreign medium - that they never really had a terribly good grasp of to begin with - over and over and over and over again, basically forcing a lot of nonsense into becoming fandom-wide "conventional wisdom" on sheer force of overwhelming numbers and repetition, and a near-complete ignoring of actual historical sources of real, hard factual information.

And over time, these false narratives (which again, are initially rooted in ignorance, confirmation bias, and sheer lazy incuriosity) became SO repeated and SO widespread over years upon years upon years, that even broader segments of Western anime fandom (who otherwise WOULD be more intellectually curious or more willing to look at the anime/manga mediums beyond a stiflingly narrow "kiddie pew pew!" purview) simply come to accept these narratives as fact at face value out of sheer inertia, osmosis, and ossification.

"Well when I first Googled 'anime' or 'anime like X-favorite title I saw on TV recently', this is the kind of talk from all the 'hardcore fans' that comes up, so its gotta be accurate right? These people are all die-hards, they must know what they're talking about, right?"

This constant repetition of misinformed assumptions masquerading as "fact" has had the net effect of further drowning out actual historical information and context about a whole universe of a broader tapestry of types and styles of anime and manga that has always existed outside the realm of "Battle Shonen" and whatever perv-oriented crap is popular among the dregs of 4chan at any given moment.

To the point where otherwise very important, landmark, and (in Japan and even in tons of other non-English speaking, non-Western countries) highly visible and mainstream anime and manga titles - that aren't aimed at children (and even a few that are!) and aren't in the "Battle Shonen" or "neckbearded pervert incel" mold - are completely shut out of the wider Western/English-language conversation and become needlessly and artificially obscured.

This self-reinforcing of completely ill-informed, counter-factual, and ahistorical narratives about anime and manga is EXACTLY how you get things like "Shonen is a genre" willing itself into being "mainstream conventional wisdom" despite not being rooted in even so much as one single shred of historical fact about Japanese anime or manga. Its a purely fictitious Western fandom invention.

Because no one (or rather very, VERY few people, not nearly enough to make a dent in the broader meta-narrative that's being developed fandom-wide) is bothering to look at the broader history and tapestry of Japanese Anime beyond or outside of the incredibly narrow confines of how children's broadcast television in the U.S./English speaking territories has defined it for them during the turn of the millennium: and thus people self-reinforce the idea that something like Shonen is something that's FAR more distinct and paramount than it actually is: to the point of even completely inventing a non-existent subgenre of it ("Battle Shonen") from little more than ignorant assumptions that's rooted in those childhood parameters set by childhood pop-culture.

It just compounds itself in an ossified inertia of ignorant bullshit (that basically started out as a bunch of manchildren laser-focused on chasing the dragon of their own early 2000s nostalgia to the point of rendering anything else non-existent in their eyes) until the average rando - including newer fans trying to jump into things - just looks at what this Western audience has turned the "anime landscape" into, shrugs their shoulders, and thinks "Well, I guess this is what anime ultimately just is. This is all that anyone ever talks about or comments on, so this must be all there is or at least all that matters."

This is also why you see so many fans of this Millennial era also opine "I think I just grew out of anime now that I'm older". No, you grew out of children's cartoons. Which is 100% fucking normal, healthy, and good. Japanese anime however encompasses SO MUCH more than just children's titles (as anyone who's accustomed to the works of Oshii, Rintaro, Kon, Yuasa, Kawajiri, Otomo, etc. can tell you): but you'd scarcely know that from how most of the fanbase of the past two decades+ has structured itself and its focus/scope of titles to spotlight.

It all points to just how fundamentally important not just doing basic due-diligence in researching media is, not just how important it is to grow the fuck up past obsessing over solely one's childhood nostalgia titles, but also moreover to just how important basic curation is. Curation is super crucial as well.

Like just as a thought-experiment: imagine a live action film landscape where there was nothing like a Criterion Collection or Turner Classic Movies in existence. Where no college or film studies courses anywhere ever teaches about Fellini or Hitchcock. All the classics still exist and are still out there and are as easily findable as ever... but nobody anywhere knows anything about them or even cares to look at all.

There exists, in this hypothetical alternate reality here, NO resources or institutions for preserving and promoting works by filmmakers like Kubrick or Scorsese or Bergman, or even just solid mainstream journeyman studio directors like Walter Hill or John Ford. NO audience exists for ANY of this anymore, and the only thing that exists and that anyone discusses anymore anywhere is just Disney movies and other family/kids' movies like them. That, and porn. Porn's the only other thing outside of Disney/kid's fluff that's allowed to be part of the broader conversation to ANY degree.

Hold the jokes please about how "Isn't it already like that now?" I'm talking to a much greater and much more all-encompassing extent than live action film has EVER been subject to, even in today's Disney+ and MCU-addled landscape.

This basically happened in actuality to Japanese animation's Western landscape and fanbase/audience around 25 years ago now. And it wasn't always like that before then, and we've only JUST started in the past maybe ten years or so seen a VERY gradual, downright fucking glacial building back up from and away from that godawful paradigm.

Like take how already-degraded and dumbed-down so much of mainstream live action Hollywood film discourse already is now (in the wake of everything from Harry Potter to the MCU to Disney buying up and owning everything, etc), and worsen it by orders upon orders upon orders of magnitudes: and you're still probably off by a bit from just how utterly and hopelessly infantilized the Western Discourse surrounding anime was, even within a lot of "hardcore online" circles, throughout most of the 2000s and 2010s.

Historicity and curation are monumentally key here. And the Mainstream Western Anime fanbase/audience has needlessly and pointlessly squandered the ENTIRE 2000s and a good bulk of the 2010s obsessing over curating solely the most kiddified, toddler-oriented fluff imaginable (and porn of course, can't forget porn), and historicizing it as if this shit is the sum-total of what an entire fucking artistic medium that's been around for over 70+ goddamned years has ever had to offer.

Is it any wonder then in this context - where anime and manga's entire vast tapestry of its 70+ years history is whittled down to just "Whatever fits the particular style and mold of that which was popular on U.S. kids' TV at the turn of the millennium" - that people would mistake something as broad-sweeping as an age demographic for something as specific as a freaking genre of all things? Or even invent an otherwise non-existent sub-genre out of it?

So yes, while there are of course some other outside factors that are notable to also consider (and I don't leave them out of my general assessment of all this by any means, I'm just trying to keep this post under War and Peace-lengths as best I can here), I'm still overall - and more broadly - largely placing the lion's share of the blame on the Western fanbase itself (and a lot of its Peter Pan-esque "I don't wanna grow up, you can't make me grow up!" tendencies) for this one. Much more than I ever would Dragon Ball itself, which filled a role in all this that could have just as easily occurred with any number of other, similar titles slotted in its place.

It all comes down ultimately to a lack of and disinterest in historical awareness, a disinterest in basic research, a lack of curation, and a lack of intellectual curiosity or rigor for thinking about and looking at these things outside of how one might have seen them when they were in Grade School.

And at a certain point, especially given the "just following where the eyeballs and the cash are" nature of the licensing companies, the buck stops eventually at the "hardcore" Western audience for refusing to ever take it upon themselves to broaden the scope of English anime discourse very far past "stuff that most closely resembles what I loved on Cartoon Network and Fox Kids and whatnot when I was 8 years old in the year 2000".

And that's because so many of them, frankly, never first bothered to broaden their own love and appreciation for anime beyond "stuff that most closely resembles Toonami or the Disney Jetix lineup circa 2004".

tl;dr - History, preservation, curation, and maturation/intellectual growth are monumentally critical - broadly speaking in general, even well outside of just anime - when it comes to creating a healthy landscape for good art to flourish. And Western Anime Fandom spent the vast majority of the entire 21st century thus far caring for basically NONE of these things whatsoever, or misapplying them solely and primarily to just children's fluff and little else. Aside from once again, y'know... porn.

Which when combined with a total lack of historical awareness for the medium writ-large, results in completely made-up-from-wholecloth narratives not only coming into existence, but also self-reinforcing themselves into total crystallization as "conventional wisdom" within the fan culture.

[GhostEmperorX]

tl;dr - History, preservation, curation, and maturation/intellectual growth are monumentally critical - broadly speaking in general, even well outside of just anime - when it comes to creating a healthy landscape for good art to flourish. And Western Anime Fandom spent the vast majority of the entire 21st century thus far caring for basically NONE of these things whatsoever, or misapplying them solely and primarily to just children's fluff and little else. Aside from once again, y'know... porn.

Which when combined with a total lack of historical awareness for the medium writ-large, results in completely made-up-from-wholecloth narratives not only coming into existence, but also self-reinforcing themselves into total crystallization as "conventional wisdom" within the fan culture.

I think I've realized the overall point being advanced whenever this sort of discussion pops up, which can probably be best summarized as this:

"It's time to graduate."

Particularly from the demographic in question, or any other tunnel vision media interests (I thought about a few of the common pitfalls within shounen not present in more mature media).

For my own part (being an editor on more than one different database), I think that a lot of online information resources dealing with anime/manga have done a terrible job with curation or verification of one key aspect or another, as well as localization companies to varying degrees misrepresenting the IP's they've gotten licenses to. I also hadn't seen any detailed categorizations for most of these series in the way that I might for a Western movie or something like that.

And as for the medium of anime, there seems to have been a change in it after 2000, beyond just the cel -> digital paint transition. It's like it made it easier for certain other types of series (that may fall within a category or two you described) to proliferate.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

Would there be any reason for glossing over some of DB's contemporaries in the same demographic (Slam Dunk, Fist of the North Star, etc)?

Dragon Ball back in the day, especially when Z took off, was kind of in a league of its own. There was basically Dragon Ball, then everything else below it. It wasn't until Naruto, Bleach, & One Piece showed up that it had real competition in terms of popularity.

[JulieYBM]

Y'all gotta get on that Gregg Araki and David Lynch shit, for real, for real. The Interview With the Vampire TV series is rewlly fucking good, so watch it! >_<

(I barely watch television and film anymore, I'm making my own shit and reading what my friends write lol)

My anime backlog is so fucking huge lol

[BernardoCairo]

Dragon Ball back in the day, especially when Z took off, was kind of in a league of its own. There was basically Dragon Ball, then everything else below it. It wasn't until Naruto, Bleach, & One Piece showed up that it had real competition in terms of popularity.

True. But I think the "big three" from that era would probably be Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk and Yu Yu Hakusho.

[Kunzait_83]

Dragon Ball back in the day, especially when Z took off, was kind of in a league of its own. There was basically Dragon Ball, then everything else below it. It wasn't until Naruto, Bleach, & One Piece showed up that it had real competition in terms of popularity.

*sigh*

Once more, I'm begging people to be even a smidge more history-minded than this. Read something, anything, that's actually contemporaneous from and of the era in which you're speaking on. Have even the most rudimentary of basic rigor. For the love of god research this shit before you actually sound off about it.

Dragon Ball was incredibly, wildly popular, yes: iconic and generationally defining, absolutely. No one has ever or could ever argue otherwise.

I'm going to say this with as much emphasis as this site's format will allow me here:

This does not mean however that Dragon Ball was somehow the only big iconic series of its time. Other stuff just as equally iconic, influential, beloved, and important as it also existed during this same timeframe.

And its not all that difficult to look this up and see for yourselves. Its blindingly in your face how robust the anime/manga landscape of Dragon Ball's day actually was, even just in terms of super huge, iconic, phenomenon-level series of its type.

Just off the top of my head here, and even keeping things largely within the realm of just Shonen itself and purely the most astronomically popular, highly influential and iconic stuff of the time:

In the 1980s, from 1984 and onward in particular (i.e. starting from DB's run), you had:

- Fist of the North Star
- Saint Seiya
- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
- Barefoot Gen
- Urusei Yatsura
- Guyver
- City Hunter
- Captain Tsubasa
- Kimagure Orange Road
- Zeta Gundam
- Kinnikuman

And in the early to mid 1990s (i.e. still during DB's run and before One Piece or Naruto in the late 90s) you had:

- Ranma 1/2
- Yu Yu Hakusho
- Slam Dunk
- Rurouni Kenshin
- Slayers
- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (again, continuing on)
- Tenchi Muyo
- Record of Lodoss War
- Evangelion
- Trigun
- Escaflowne

Without even needing to stop and look it up, I just off the top of my head pulled nearly two dozen examples out of a hat of Shonen series contemporary to Dragon Ball's run that either matched or came pretty damned close to matching it in terms of sheer visibility, popularity, and notoriety during that same time period.

i.e. If you were following or just getting into following manga and anime at ANY point during the same time that Dragon Ball was running in the 80s and early half of the 90s, you were every bit as likely to be heavily, heavily exposed to and be pulled into following any one of these other series just as equally as you would DB.

Both the fanbase itself at large, and the general marketing of the time would've been shoving some combination of any or all of these titles at you right out the starting gate, at least within Shonen-centric spaces (which of course, back in those days, Shonen was far from the only or primary game in town among Western fans of the time, but that's a whole separate can of worms).

Hell, there were still Shonen titles that had just ended either right before DB started or right as it was starting (like Macross, Cobra, Golion, and even Toriyama's own Dr. Slump) that were STILL highly relevant, visible, and still making significant waves of popularity and fandom-wide discourse across the globe (even yes, in the U.S. at the time) that easily rivaled DB for much of its run.

And if I expanded this out from just Shonen to also include Shojo, Seinen, and Josei, this list would easily be more than twice or thrice as big, if not bigger. Easily.

Or as a counter-point, lets say you want to limit this even more: lets just solely take into account the series that were around during Dragon Ball's uppermost peak Z era stuff (Freeza, Cell, and Boo arc stuff): ignoring the utterly seismic cultural impact and visibility of titles like Ranma 1/2, Slam Dunk, Kenshin, YYH, Evangelion, or Slayers (to say nothing of freaking Jojo, Lodoss, or Tenchi) from that same time period to say "Dragon Ball stood alone at the top of Shonen Mount Olympus" is just completely ahistorical and retconning insanely basic "90s anime and manga 101" stuff that is - and I cannot stress this enough - incredibly easy to look up yourselves in a fucking ten minute Google search regarding early to mid 90s anime and manga fandom.

Throw in Shojo, and then you've also got Sailor Moon, Rayearth, and Fushigi Yugi in the mix. Throw in Seinen, you now also have Ghost in the Shell, Berserk, Patlabor, Gunsmith Cats, Dirty Pair, Bubblegum Crisis, Crying Freeman, and so on.

Regardless: the idea that 90s Shonen landscape - even limiting it to JUST Shonen - was just solely defined by DBZ up until Naruto and One Piece came into the mix late in the decade... I'm sorry, but this is just blindly retconning the actual real-life history of the 90s anime/manga landscape with a post-2000s Cartoon Network boom perspective without doing even a hint of actual even basic-most delving into of what the actual landscape and fandom/culture was actually like at the time. i.e. "History only began when I first started paying attention to it, and any context prior to that either doesn't exist or doesn't matter."

This isn't just not knowing any better, this is also not caring to know any better and just going off of raw, blind assumptions and "vibes" based on one's purely 2000s-infused perspective and experience. And/or just blindly parroting the words of other fans who are already doing exactly that themselves.

And understand, I'm not trying to be a hardass on poor Vegeta the 4th here or anything: this isn't really about him, this is about how these completely full of shit fandom meta-narratives have managed to stick so stubbornly for so many decades (Literally decades! Plural!) despite not having so much as even a lick of truth to them, and not matching up even slightly with what the actual reality was like back in the day.

There's an incredibly easy, simple remedy to this however, and its been sitting right here in front of you this entire time for all these many years now on the very same computer or phone screen you're now using to read this right now: its called The Internet. Fucking Google or Wiki this shit for god's sake! Nothing's been stopping any of you this entire time!

I'm sincerely, from the bottom of my heart not trying to be a mean asshole here (and I have to keep repeating this, because so many of you guys have repeatedly kept reading into the text of my posts on these topics here as aggressively angry, nasty, snobby, and agro, even though I can assure you I'm often just laughing to myself - in between facepalms - as I type this stuff).

Its just genuinely, comically ridiculous to me how much this whole entire swath of fandom has needlessly, senselessly mythologized the pre-Cartoon Network era of U.S./Western anime and manga fandom as "The Before Time in the Long Long Ago" when this stuff was not back then at the time, nor is it now, in any way "hiding" from any of you guys.

You're all just apparently REALLY terrible at using the internet! And apparently back in the 90s (for those of you old enough to remember any of those years at least) either had some of the most unbearable, over-policing helicopter parents imaginable as kids, or lived in the the middle of absolute bumfuck nowhere. Or both.

I've said this a billion times before, and I'll say it again: if most of you guys took a Time Machine back to circa 1993 or whenever, pretty much none of you would even vaguely recognize what the anime and manga landscape was ACTUALLY like at the time, because none of it matches even slightly with all these absurdly stupid little made-up stories and narratives you've all been telling yourselves and convincing yourselves is somehow "real history" about that time period for so many fucking years (decades!) now. You guys would be SO disoriented and lost, it'd be genuinely fascinating to actually witness if such a thing were possible.

Hell, just in terms of the fact alone that Shonen wasn't the primary focal fixture of the broader Western fanbase at the time and that wider swaths of the then-Western audience put much heavier prominence on anime and manga made for an exclusively adult audience (and with often some much more varied art styles that many people here wouldn't even initially recognize at first glance as being anime or manga-like art styles): that all by itself, would be utterly brain-imploding to a ton of people in communities like this one.

I'm saying this all with sincere laughter and warmth (tinged with some facepalming frustration to be sure), not sneering condescension. Its incredibly silly that I have to spell that out here, but apparently I have to in order to prevent people from getting overly defensive and hostile over this shit.

I cannot possibly stress this enough on these kinds of topics guys: Stop just blindly repeating ahistorical nonsense that you've only heard regurgitated from other people: other people whom I assure you, also do/did not know what the fuck they're talking about on this subject, and they most likely heard it from someone else who likewise didn't know what the fuck they were talking about, etc. and so on and so forth.

This right here is how this exact kind of bullshit ahistoricity has ossified itself into blindly-accepted "fact" in the minds of this fanbase over the past 20/25 fucking years. This fanbase has literally through sheer mindless repetition of unresearched nonsense (based on assumptions held originally by fucking middle school children of the early 2000s) has convinced/brainwashed itself into believing utter bullshit that is totally counter-factual to the actual - easily findable and citable - history of this entire Japanese anime/manga medium.

Its basically just one gigantic game of telephone amongst an entire generation of a fanbase that has gone on for well over 20/25 years now, and not at any point in all that time has anyone stopped to think "Hey wait a second, maybe I should actually do some real research and reading and fact check some of this shit before I accept it as gospel truth."

Anime and manga fandom - not just internationally, but even in the United States - did not start in the late 90s/early 2000s. You have to actually know something about actual history of how this fandom actually developed over the course of several decades prior to that point to have any kind of actual contextual framework about these topics if you're going to choose to speak about them with any certainty or authority.

Obviously the vast majority of you guys weren't actually there present for it like I was, but that's what this little invention called "the internet" has been here for this whole entire fucking time: Google, Wikipedia, and even stuff like ANN are your friends here, and they've been here right along for you since the 2000s. This doesn't HAVE to be some big mystery that only old fucks like me have to unravel for you all. The 1980s and 90s weren't still ultimately THAT long ago in the grand scheme of things here.

I'm asking people to for the love of god, put aside all this nonsense bullshit post-2000s fanboy revisionism about this stuff (ALL of which is completely made the fuck up from little more than "history didn't start until I first started paying attention" level of assumptions), and actually instead read something, anything substantive and fact-based about what the landscape was actually like back in the 80s and 90s.

Christ, am I seriously going to have to eventually make yet another pages and pages long, hyper methodically detailed, and image-filled "explainer" thread on this subject like I did with Wuxia back in the day where I have to hand-hold people through another easily Google-able, not at all obscure topic that everyone here thinks is obscure regardless? Its been ten years since I did the last one, and I'm only ten years older, crustier, less patient, and that much more lacking in free time to do it.

I think when Dragon Ball was running back in the 80s and 90s, the term may not have been used, as it wouldn't make sense to use a term to describe one single series.

Shonen was absolutely used as a term back in the 80s and early 90s: but when it was used back then, it was used appropriately to described a target demographic, and NOT as a "genre" label.

The use of the term in the context of it being a "genre" with "tropes" (that are all mysteriously shared solely and exclusively by Dragon Ball and its various wannabe knock-offs, and not by all the countless and endless other examples of Shonen that don't fall into that highly specific and insular little basket) didn't start to become a thing until around the early to mid-2000s, and primarily only in English speaking spaces filled with much younger fans who got into anime primarily on things like Cartoon Network and Toonami and associated anime broadly and primarily with Dragon Ball and its myriad of ripoffs, because that was primarily all that they watched and all that they had any interest in.

You sensing a throughline here yet?

However, once the likes of Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc... showed up on the scene, inspired by Dragon Ball, fans wanted a term to describe shows/manga of a similar nature.

Simply calling them "Dragon Ball clones" or "Dragon Ball ripoffs" would have worked just fine and been far, far more accurate.

Attack On Titan, Full Metal Alchemist, and Death Note, to name a few, are also targeted towards the same demographic, but would you call them a Shonen series in the same way you'd call Dragon Ball and One Piece? Probably not.

Right, which again is where the silly "Battle Shonen" moniker stems from. It started out in the early/mid aughts with just calling ALL of Shonen as a "genre", but it eventually further warped its way into "Battle Shonen". Which, as a term or concept, is just as much a pure invention of the Millennial Western audience as defining Shonen as genre itself was/is.

There's also the fact that these popular battle series are mostly published in a magazine called Weekly Shonen Jump, which just makes the name more convenient.

Thing is, Weekly Shonen Jump isn't the only Shonen publication to have the word right in its title.

Just from a cursory Wikipedia search, you have:

Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine
Gekkan Shōnen Jets
Monthly Shōnen Ace
Monthly Shōnen Champion
Monthly Shōnen Magazine
Monthly Shōnen Rival
Monthly Shōnen Sirius
Shōnen Club
Shōnen Big Comic
Shōnen Sunday S
Monthly Shōnen Sunday
Weekly Shōnen Sunday
Weekly Shōnen Champion
Weekly Shōnen Magazine

All of these are distinctly different Manga Publications from Weekly Shonen Jump with their own various serialized titles, some of which easily rival anything found in WSJ in terms of iconic popularity (Weekly Shonen Sunday alone was home to Urusei Yatsura, Detective Conan, Ranma 1/2, and Ghost Sweeper Mikami, to name just a few), and all of which (like in WSJ) span a VAST assortment of wildly varied and different genres.

The thing that links them all together is the target demographic, which is what the "Shonen" so prominent in the title is advertising to readers.

Other manga publications aimed at other demos like Shojo aren't much different either.

Again, its just pure foreign ignorance mixed with myopic over-focus on what was being heavily advertised to U.S. children on things like Toonami and Fox Kids back in the day, plus just blindly ignorant assumptions from that highly specific standpoint that lead to the Western audience of the 2000s thinking (quite mistakenly) that this word was describing a genre rather than a target audience.

Would there be any reason for glossing over some of DB's contemporaries in the same demographic (Slam Dunk, Fist of the North Star, etc)?

No. Absolutely not. There's simply no reason whatsoever for glossing over those titles, as all of the ones you listed (and several others that I listed earlier) were all highly relevant and equally as iconic and impactful during their time - to one degree or another - as Dragon Ball was.

That is, unless - as so many in this fandom space have been doing for the past 20+ years now - you're just making blind assumptions about the past based on your present-day perspective, and treating that assumption as if its fact: effectively "retconning" history with your own recency bias.

i.e. "I don't know much, or anything, about some of those titles, they mean nothing to me; ergo they must also not have ever been particularly important to anyone else in general at any point.

After all, Cartoon Network would've played them back in the day or the other kids on the playground swapping Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh cards would've mentioned them at some point, and thus I would've heard of them back then if any of them actually mattered, right?

And no I won't do ten seconds worth of Googling or Wiki-ing to actually find out and see for myself if there's something notable about these titles before I blindly dismiss them out of hand as irrelevant or unimportant while still styling myself to others as an 'expert, hardcore nerd' on all things anime and manga.

Object permanence? Theory of mind? What's that?"

[JulieYBM]

For the record, what seemed to be most popular—or at least, was enough for my friends and I to be getting into anime in the late 1990s and early 2000s—was whatever was violent/bloodier and sexually-charged, and that was definitely not the shounen stuff lol. There was a whole-ass market of anime available on VHS in that late 1990s and early 2000s era before NARUTO and such began making waves. Even the kid shows you would see on US TV blocks like FOX Kids and shit didn't really have a presence on home video. We were watching the sort of shit that would have definitely pissed off conservative parents lol.

I've blocked most of my childhood out, but goddamn, do I remember all the animated tits and blood I saw lol

[Kunzait_83]

There was a whole-ass market of anime available on VHS in that late 1990s and early 2000s era before NARUTO and such began making waves. Even the kid shows you would see on US TV blocks like FOX Kids and shit didn't really have a presence on home video.

Kiiiiiind of the point I'd been driving at for years and years now in these sorts of discussions. Except that that market first began all the way back in the mid-1980s, and was omnipresent from then all the way through the whole entirety of the 90s.

That gigantic-ass cottage-industry of a market is the whole entire reason why titles like Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Ghost in the Shell, Guyver, Crying Freeman, Golgo 13, Ninja Scroll, Fist of the North Star, the Street Fighter II anime, and so on all had pre-existing notoriety and reputations within the U.S. since many, many long years (more than a decade and a half) before anime first ever reared its head on the late 90s/early 2000s kids' programming blocks on places like CN and the like.

Even titles that would later re-appear on Cartoon Network and find an audience amongst this Millennial/Shonen-obsessed generation - which include stuff like Lupin III, Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Tenchi Muyo, Rurouni Kenshin, to name just a few - all had some years prior (in Lupin's case, well over a decade+ prior) originally made their U.S. licensing debut in precisely this "straight to VHS and not aimed at kids" market. They ALL had pre-existing, built-in fanbases even here in the U.S. looooong before they first appeared on kids' television.

This community in particular has had a long-standing and consistent issue with completely erasing/ignoring that entire gigantic piece of Western anime history, and reframing/retconning the 90s as if the sole, only aspect of it that existed or mattered to the history and context of anime and manga in the U.S. was the Fox Kids/Toonami type of material.

And its especially annoying not just because it ignores where DB itself likely would've ended up had FUNimation not gotten ahold of it, but moreover it also ignores/erases where so much of the pre-FUNimation fansubbing community themselves - that gave the whole Toonami generation its baseline of understanding that Japanese Dragon Ball was different from what they saw on TV in the first place, and where/how you got sites like DBZ Uncensored and the like - actually came from, and the wider context surrounding where that whole original pre-dub Dragon Ball audience in the West/North America first came to be.

Reframing Western/North American anime fandom as "All that ever existed or mattered is the Toonami and Fox Kids lineups and their forebearers in the form of Robotech, Voltron, Speed Racer, and the like, and nothing else of any other kind ever existed prior to that point, and all other context about anime in wider U.S. popculture just kind of magically popped into being out of nothingness and wholecloth." is EXACTLY how you get into so many tedious circle-jerking sessions around here where everyone here consistently over-inflates the importance and significance of not just Dragon Ball itself, but also of companies like FUNimation, 4Kids, etc. as that which is most singularly defining and worthy of historical analysis and retrospect of the entire history of Japanese anime and manga in North American/Western culture.

Its ahistorical, counter-factual, and replaces the reality of the actual history (one that's endlessly fascinating and nuanced in and of itself) of Japanese animation and manga on Western shores with this tedious and bizarre bit of retroactive fan fiction that, rather conveniently, finds Millennial fans from the post-Toonami era centering themselves and their incredibly insular and specific gateway titles as the center of all Western anime history around which everything else that has ever came before or come after all revolves around.

I myself predate the Cartoon Network generation by more than a good dozen or so years at least: and yet even I had never at any point - not even at my absolute youngest and dumbest - ever centered myself and my whole post-Akira generation as being singularly definitive of and central to where all history of anime and manga in the West first starts from.

I had enough basic sense of awareness to know even back then as a little kid that I was walking into something that had a whole TON of pre-existing history even just within the U.S. long before I first found it, and that I was little more than just another Johnny-come-lately dumb little dork of a noob, the proverbial "child wandering into the middle of a movie" per Walter from The Big Lebowsky.

This whole "We must be the first people to ever discover anime, nobody else must've ever known about it, because none of us ever heard of this stuff before now! This must be where it all started, nothing else of any importance could've possibly come before we all first saw Goku on our TV screens in 98/99!" mentality has always consistently for decades now seemed to really be a thing that is most central to a large swath of the late 90s/early 2000s generation of fans specifically.

And its always been utterly mystifying to me, especially given how much ample evidence there has always readily been available all this time throughout to clearly demonstrate otherwise.

[JulieYBM]

I'm aware of the decades of Japanese animation fandom in the US before me, I was simply speaking to the era in which I joined to underscore the fact that it was in fact not simply Dragon Ball and ye olden Pocket Monsters that were popular.

[Kunzait_83]

I'm aware of the decades of Japanese animation fandom in the US before me, I was simply speaking to the era in which I joined to underscore the fact that it was in fact not simply Dragon Ball and ye olden Pocket Monsters that were popular.

Right, I wasn't claiming that you were saying otherwise. Just elaborating further in general on the point itself.

[WittyUsername]

So, Toonami inspired the misconception?

[GhostEmperorX]

Dragon Ball back in the day, especially when Z took off, was kind of in a league of its own. There was basically Dragon Ball, then everything else below it. It wasn't until Naruto, Bleach, & One Piece showed up that it had real competition in terms of popularity.

I was being cautious and patient with that question, but as someone has answered this already, all I have to add is that this is the kind of thing that needs... you know... citations.

[jjgp1112]

Eh, it was moreso the Shonen Jump monthly mag popping up in the states back in 03 and grouping DB, Naruto, OP, etc all together under one umbrella. And honestly, I don't get why people split hairs about it. Words are malleable and there's just enough shared connective tissue among them in terms of tone, target and tropes that I'm fine tying them under an umbrella