Battle Shonen Stuff

[LumRanmaYasha]

I'm just using the popular terms. I mean, the so-called "Dark Age" gave birth to Hunter X Hunter, One Piece, and was carried by Rurouni Kenshin. And that's supposedly its "weaker" era.

Well, the terms more refer to Jump's relative popularity through the years, and less the quality of the series that run or debuted during the timeperiod. The "Dark Age" was thus because Jump had lost nearly half it's readership from the double-whammy of losing Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk, and struggled for a few years to really find another powerhouse that would expand their readership again until One Piece starting picking up steam and became a power-couple with Naruto in the early 00's. 

[Spark Of Spirit]

I'm just using the popular terms. I mean, the so-called "Dark Age" gave birth to Hunter X Hunter, One Piece, and was carried by Rurouni Kenshin. And that's supposedly its "weaker" era.

Well, the terms more refer to Jump's relative popularity through the years, and less the quality of the series that run or debuted during the timeperiod. The "Dark Age" was thus because Jump had lost nearly half it's readership from the double-whammy of losing Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk, and struggled for a few years to really find another powerhouse that would expand their readership again until One Piece starting picking up steam and became a power-couple with Naruto in the early 00's. 

Yes, the "Big 3" that carried Jump through the Silver Age. I've never been as enamored with those series as others, but there's no doubt that they were high sellers that brought the readers in.

Of course, the flip side was that they started a trend of battle manga that all followed the same formula and are all basically forgotten now. Thankfully, now that the era is over with Naruto gone and Bleach wrapping up, there is room for more varied battle manga to breathe. MHA, in particular, is a series that exists as a response to Naruto. If this is an example of post-Big 3 battle manga, then we should all be glad that era is done.

And to take it from LumRanmaYasha, we can compare the battle series specifically since this is the thread for it. I cut out the series that aren't battle and are long since forgotten. Unfortunately, that includes Mx0.


Silver:

One Piece
Naruto
Bleach
D.Gray-man
Hitman Reborn!
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo


Modern:

One Piece
Black Clover
My Hero Academia
Kimetsu no Yaiba: Blade of Demon Destruction
Toriko
World Trigger
Bleach


The battle manga in the latter list are all very different from one another. OP is an epic, Black Clover is very traditional, MHA is heavily character-based, KnY is old school in a very old school way, Toriko is insane, World Trigger is based on military-style tactics, and Bleach is about whatever Kubo ate before plotting the chapter out.

In the former, there's Bo^7 which, let's face it, succeeds because it's a comedy first and One Piece which is its own thing. The other series don't really do much that's original at all. Some were well done at points, especially Naruto and Bleach near the beginning, but as a whole they are all fairly samey. And if I'm being honest, I was never all that engrossed in Bleach or Naruto, even at their peaks. Compared to Dragon Ball, Fist of the North Star, Saint Seiya, Yu Yu Hakusho, or Rurouni Kenshin, they just don't rank.

But yes, I would agree that Jump's weakness ten years ago, was ironically their selling point at the time. The battle manga from back then, the popular stuff, just isn't all that great looking back on it. If it wasn't for their non-battle stuff, I'm not sure if I would have bothered reading them at all.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Bleach is about whatever Kubo ate before plotting the chapter out.

This should legit be the manga's official tagline.

[Dr. Insomniac]

So I watched Bort: Naruto the Movie, and the experience made me wonder just which shonen protagonist became a good, attentive father to their children? Like seeing Naruto join Goku and Jotaro in the absent dads category is making me wonder who's a lead character to buck that trend.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

To be fair (and believe me, I have no sympathy for Naruto as a character), he does actually have a ton of responsibilities to attend to as a leader, so he has more of an excuse to not be around his family that much than other characters of that sort do.

As for Goku, though, I'd say that it's only by the Cell arc that you could call him a bad father, mainly for not understand Gohan's mostly pacifist nature and basically throwing him into a life-or-death situation before he was ready. Before that point he was fine, though. It's the TFS parodies that overexaggerated his poor parenting skills and made him seem much more deadbeat than he was at that point.

As for main characters who make good fathers in shonen....I suppose Kenshin would probably make a good father if the series had actually gone on from where it ended. It's an assumption on my part, but not an unreasonable one based on how we know that the character gave up fighting altogether in order to start a family in the first place.

And going by Dragon Ball Super, Gohan is a pretty great dad to HIS kid. I know that he's not a main character anymore, but he could be considered as having been one for at least a portion of Dragonball.

That said, I think that while in our culture it's much more baffling to see this sort of behavior, even in fiction, it seems to be a trope in a lot of shonen manga for the children to learn to stand on their own feet and not rely on being babied by their parents in order to grow and mature into adults themselves. I believe that's more of a thematic choice than negligent writing in most cases, especially because in cases like Naruto and Dragonball, the lack of proper parenting is clearly pointed out rather than being ignored (Boruto has a lot of animosity towards his father, and Piccolo lashes out at Goku for basically forcing Gohan into a situation which he clearly wasn't mentally ready for). That's the same sort of logic that series like One Piece and Hunter X Hunter follow. Hell, in Yu Yu Hakusho, it's very telling that Togashi only gives Yusuke one parent to look after him, and that's his mother, who as it turns out doesn't look after him very well at all, forcing him to basically raise himself. And it's even more telling that instead of the wise old master archetype serving as a father-figure for the lead, Togashi once again subverts the trope by having Genkai be Yusuke's master and serving a "tough-love" motherly sort of role. And once again in more recent manga like My Hero Academia, only Midoriya's mother is present in his life. And while we're at it, we never see Mashiro's father in Bakuman. In Food Wars!, Soma's father basically leaves him to fend for himself once he's old enough to attend an elite culinary High School. And in JoJo's Bizarre adventure, we have three JoJo's in a row between parts two to four who only have mother-figures to look up to (you could argue that Joseph does eventually become Josuke's father-figure, but he's barely in enough scenes in DiU to really count that). So to add to my point about the lack of parentage being a thematic device in most shonen manga and anime, I specifically believe that male protagonists growing up without a father is a conscious decision made by the writers in conveying their character arcs.

That's just my two-cents though. In all likeliness I'm probably wrong and just talking out of my ass.

[Spark Of Spirit]

A lot of it has to do with drama. Tension between family members (especially father and son) is the easiest to play off for dramatic effect. It's a lot harder to have conflict between family members while having them make up and grow. That's why in most shonen, fathers and sons either have great relationships, or bad ones. It's hard to evolve that sort of thing in a story that usually involves blowing stuff up or defeating bad guys.

I actually think Vegeta at the beginning of the Cell saga to the end is a much better father than Goku is by far. You can see his relationship with Future Trunks grow as the story goes on, and by the end he becomes a pretty good dad. That's a good example of rolling in a father and son relationship into the plot. Everyone in Dragon Ball is a better parent than Goku. There isn't even a question there.

Kenshin probably would have been a great father. His relationship with Yahiko was a bit of a preview to what he would be like. Just ignore that stupid non-canonical OVA. Just about everyone was out of character in it.

The characters in Digimon and My Hero Academia have good parents, though I would like to see Midoriya's father at least once. We don't know anything at all about him except his quirk.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Here's a potential subject for discussion. ANN, perpetual anime tabloid, made aList of best battle tournaments.

Now, there's a glaring omission here, but I'm sure you know what it is. That said, I've become far less enthused with the shonen staple over the years. So much so that I can't remember the most recent series featuring a battle tournament that I've liked. MHA's I liked mainly for the character development, but I found the first half of it pretty boring.

Honestly, for all that people like to harp on Black Clover, they haven't actually had a tournament arc yet. I find that pretty impressive, considering how much of a staple it is.

[LumRanmaYasha]

The Grand Magic Games from Fairy Tail is on the list over the Dark Tournament and they put in the Indigo League over the Kalos League (which despite the fuss over Ash losing is still unquestionably the best tournament in the series by far). The rest are good choices, though. ANN's "The List" column is dependent on the opinions of a sole writer and what they have seen and like, so knowing the opinions of the writer in question, I can disagree but understand her reasoning for why she ordered things the way she did (though seriously, I can't understand why anyone likes the fucking Grand Magic Games. Fairy Tail wins because Sting chickens out because they are "too determined" and doesn't even fight them despite them being worn-out as shit. Fucking bite me, Mashima.)

Tournament arcs as a concept are easy to screw up and make dull when you make them a string of fights with no point to them. I like the ones that either move fast and focus on a select few essential fights or those that have a lot of story and character development for a lot of characters underlying them. I really do like the Fall Classic in FW! and Sports Festival in MHA in that regard because in addition to some good match-ups there was a lot of character development either payed off on long developing character arcs and established new directions for others. You can complain that some characters in MHA didn't get a big fight to their own, but I much preferred Horikoshi selecting a few key characters and focus his time on them specifically, showing only the key fights and moments that affect their stories and development. That was a weakness of the first round of FW!'s Fall Classic, which spent chapters showing off every Polaris chef even though most of them wouldn't make it to the second round and have little influence and relevance in the story.

As for Black Clover, it might have a tournament arc in the future, who knows. I'm not inherently against them conceptually. I just don't want them to waste my time with fights that add nothing to character development and move the story forward and keep the story stuck in the same place for a long period of time.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I stopped taking ANN seriously years ago.

At any rate it's just someone else's list, so I don't have anything inherently against it.

I will say that aside from the obvious choices, I tend to like most Sports manga tournament arcs. The All-Japan Juniors from Baby Steps and the Summer Inter-High from Yowamushi Pedal particularly stand out to me as good tournaments, rather than just a series of matches of varying quality. All of the matches are good, but you also get the sense of elevating stakes and great character development between the matches that really helps make the tournament feel more like an inter-connected story arc.

[Spark Of Spirit]

If I ever get the chance to get back to Flame of Recca, it'll easily show why some people think of it as "dime-store YYH" instead of a series with a great sense of fun and high-spirited energy the manga has. The anime was too overly serious and gives it a tone that makes it appear like it's trying to be YYH, when it has far more influences than just that series. The tournament arc is probably the biggest change, since they make the final fight in the anime the last fight of the series and completely ruin it in the process. I still stand by my opinion that the anime of FoR has done it more harm over here than good.

But that'll be for another time.

Sports anime and manga rarely flub with tournaments, unless the series is already bad. Heck, most sport series usually end with a tournament. I'm not quite sure why they just appear to be so much better at them than battle series are. Is it because battle tournaments are always the same, and rarely offer variety? All the best ones usually do. I guess it's hard to get invested in a one on one fight unless there's a purpose for the characters and the story. Putting that together in a tournament setting is pretty difficult, I'd think.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Since most competitive sports themselves revolve around tournaments, most sports manga inherently have to be based around a tournament for most of their duration, and they'd have to be pretty incompetent to mess up that fundamental structure. Likewise, that's why most sports manga do tournaments better than battle series. Competitive sports are already tournaments, and any mangaka who's done enough research and watched enough games should know how such tournaments are structured and can draw from real life examples as to how certain games and situations might play out.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

This: http://youtu.be/DUQfInd0gLA

I've had my issues and disagreements with some of Digibro's opinions in some videos, but on this subject matter I agree with just about every word that he said. This is a great watch.

[Dr. Insomniac]

It reminds me of this what-if scenario I considered where Jojo's was the show Toei made in the late 80s/90s that would be marketed worldwide and would help FUNi flourish, while DBZ was the franchise little-known outside Japan that would suddenly get an anime in 2012. Would the fan perception be shifted as well, with Jojo seen as a tired shonen while Dragon Ball Z's lauded as refreshing from the usual fare?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I've considered the same thing many times. It's so easy to stick a stereotypical label on a known entity that we've been exposed to for decades, but would people really have the same perception if they weren't exposed to it until recently, and through a much more styalistically resonant anime adaptation?

[Spark Of Spirit]

On pacing, I found this list of series and how long they took to adapt the first 10 volumes of the manga:



Other series:

Fairy Tail: 35
FMA Brotherhood: 19
Reborn!: 37
Yu-Gi-Oh: 16 (43 with Season 0)
Detective Conan: 70
Gintama: 97
Tokyo Ghoul: 16

MHA will be at 38 episodes by the end of season 2. My guess is that it will tie with YYH by the time we get there.

It says a lot about pacing because I don't consider YYH or Dragon Ball (original) too slow, but I do think FOTNS and Naruto definitely were. Bleach's speed is funny considering how badly paced it became not long later.