Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Escalation by the Rules
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2722 |
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As for some of the other points raised vis a vis Chainsaw Man, I'm curious how the reviewers here would react to Make the Exorcist Fall in Love. I only recall Nick mentioning it the one time. |
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b-dragon
Posts: 631 |
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I always appreciate when a shonen power system bucks its own trends and patterns. Gachiakuta contains my recent favorite example- instead of continuing to have a well done, if standard shonen fight, one character decides to stop the typical escalation and just...pull out a gun and shoot. Its shocking, unexpected, and works really well.
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tintor2
 Posts: 2713 |
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The Culling Games have a big escalation when the final villain is revealed. The final fight takes over 5 volumes. That insane amount of content made the fandom realize Jujutsu was pulling every random power with each character that is somehow able to face the villain but fails. The formula repeats until we have one of the biggest asspulls to end the fight: spoiler[Yuji is part of Sukuna's bloodline and inherited power from his reincarnated uncle or something like that to defeat the guy.]
Compare Sukuna to Meruem, Toguro or Sensui, Togashi never made his final fights really that long and always tried making them unpredictable like Gon never meeting the Ant King or Yusuke being possessed by Raizen to exploit his mazoku power. What happened? Yuta vs Geto from the 0 movie was a far shorter fight that helped to fully develop the former when gaining control over the power that cursed his entire childhood rather than just look cool. |
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explodingpompoms
 Posts: 21 |
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I know this is just how the word "shonen" is used now, but per the very last point regarding genre conventions: as Sylvia sort of gestures to, this discussion isn't really going into shonen as a whole. Shonen is a lot of different things. This is really mostly battle-focused shonen and more specifically Jump battle shonen. Chainsaw Man is definitely a shonen work, it just takes a different shape than some of the others discussed here (perhaps more so recently due to being out of the main magazine now).
I think, for me - a person who is very much not the target demographic of these works admittedly - I tend to get exhausted with battle shonen if they go too long without any downtime, which was ultimately my problem with JJK more than the rules or the complicated powers. Being able to have the characters hang out and detox between big battle arcs is really key, and stuff like JJK just keeps going once it gets going. |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1415 |
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I happened to be watching Saint Seiya for the first time when the Shibuya Incident arc was airing. In Saint Seiya, there is a constant stream of battles propped up by a series of time limit rule gimmicks, backstories appearing of nowhere, and on-the-fly justifications for various killer special attacks.
Laid out like that, it sounds stupid, perhaps even the worst version of the shonen fight manga antics shown here. In motion, it works. It just kinda works. Not for everyone, surely, but if you're open to it it's hard not to let the basic character drama that conjures up sweep you along. When it became apparent to me this was more or less what JJK turned into, it clicked into place, and honestly, I've had a better time watching it ever since. There is fun to be had in witnessing a runaway train. |
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malvarez1
Posts: 3023 |
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I love Saint Seiya, but oh boy, if it were serialized now, Kurumada’s “make up stuff on the fly” writing would not fly as much with people.
Regarding JJK, I think at this point if the story really doesn’t vibe with you, there’s nothing wrong with just watching for the animation. But at some point, you have to pick a reason to watch - it gets frustrating seeing people say that from now on they’ll treat it as a brainless action show only to continue to nitpick the story the next week. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1585 |
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I feel like Gege Akutami tries really hard to be the next Yoshihiro Togashi, but he's just not as good at explaining the rules behind the characters' abilities and techniques in a way that's clear and engaging. He's more like a new Tite Kubo, endlessly trolling readers with "I bet you didn't think I would do this" moments.
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1772 |
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The thing with Saint Seiya is that the anime had to add a lot of filler which contradicted with some things from the manga, like how the anime created original characters, like the Steel Saints and Hyoga's master, the Crystal Knight, which made Hyoga's confrontation against Aquarius Camus (who was Hyoga's master in the manga) very confusing. But speaking about Saint Seiya, while it's been some years since I last watched the original series, I don't remember it having a lot of complicated rules in regards to their power level, just that the Saints were divided from Bronze (low), Silver (medium) and Gold (high) in terms of power, though the battles, especailly in the Sanctuary Saga, revolved around endurance, sacrifice and a lot of willpower, I know Saint Seiya is not well known in the U.S., but alongside Kinikkuman, Fist of the North Star and Dragon Ball, it set the basis for shonen battle stories. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7214 |
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Considering the way the fight with spoiler[Gojo & Sukuna ended no one should be surprised or upset hell the final fight in of itself had bullshit pulled from outta nowhere.] |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 3003 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I wasn't going to say anything, but since someone else decided to bring it up in passing I will say that, while I'm not surprised by what was covered here, this look at the "building blocks" of "shonen battle" was rather surface level. Yes, Dragon Ball no doubt is what so much of today's works cite as their direct influence, but it by no means was the origin of almost anything, and while Akira Toriyama was indeed a once-in-a-generation talent it's not as though he came up with things from out of the blue, and it is disappointing to still see people treat the man like like that. People will point out that Toriyama notably had stopped reading manga by & large before getting into the business, which meant that he had other sources of inspiration to pull from, but he also fully admitted that he started reading manga again once he started making his own & would constantly ask his editor what the most popular titles were in Shonen Jump. Therefore, Toriyama's manga inspirations were his own contemporaries & a big one was no doubt Masami Kurumada, going all the way back to Kurumada's first hit manga, Ring ni Kakero... which even Shueisha literally advertises as the "Hot-Blooded Fighting Manga Bible". RnK was the series that inspired Yudetamago to change Kinnikuman from an Ultraman parody gag manga into a slapstick wrestling series, while both RnK & Kinnikuman were considered the titles to surpass when it came to the creation of Fist of the North Star. Toriyama himself even wrote the afterword to Volume 23 of RnK back in the early 80s, while he was making Dr. Slump (which Kurumada himself included a shout-out to by having Arale, or at least her hat, appear in attendance for the final fight), & extolled how awesome he thought Kurumada was (even trying to use the fact that he personally knew Kurumada to make himself look cool), how exciting his manga was to read, & how (at the time) he felt he couldn't possibly ever make a character as amazing as Jun Kenzaki, the main rival/best friend of RnK's main character Ryuji Takane. If you know that, & are familiar with RnK, then you can absolutely see where Toriyama took inspiration from when it came to the creation of Vegeta, as it was Toriyama finally creating the character that only a few years prior he thought he wasn't even capable of making. Even Saint Seiya was likely an influence on Toriyama while making Dragon Ball, especially in the latter "DBZ" half of the manga, which happened to be made after Seiya had ended. But you can then go even further back & see what inspired Masami Kurumada when it came to RnK, and you'll find call backs & inspiration from the likes of Ashita no Joe, Star of the Giants, & Team Astro, including the transition of the "makyu", i.e. special pitches thrown in various baseball manga of the era, into "superblows", which are essentially the origin of named superpowered attacks that characters throw out like crazy today, complete with people screaming out the attack name while performing them. Meanwhile, his follow-up Fuma no Kojirou pays direct homage to the likes of Legend of Kamui & Babel II, and even includes an early example of letting an action series deal with some more existential thematic elements, like the concept of destiny & if one can truly define their own future by literally fighting again what the gods have pre-ordained for you, long before Saint Seiya. Dragon Ball isn't the origin of this stuff, but rather is the coalescence of everything that had come before it that happened to be the vector that the majority of people got to experience the genre through for the first time, & Toriyama did such a damn good job with it because he knew exactly where to look for inspiration for the action side of things & take what worked best while ignoring what maybe didn't work as well. If Ring ni Kakero is the "bible" or "Rosetta stone" of shonen action/battle storytelling, then Dragon Ball is best described as the "King James Version", i.e. the reinterpretation/translation that's been spread out to the most people, but not the original author of said "bible" itself. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1792 |
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Yeah, it's interesting how Saint Seiya is one of the early adopters of power leveling as we know it today, yet it mostly contradicts the modern assumptions of the trope. In DBZ, for example, having a power level equal to or higher than your opponent's is essential to victory throughout the Saiyan and Namek Sagas. Saint Seiya is interesting because it uses power leveling to establish the characters as weaker than their enemies: the heroes are the Bronze Saints, the lowest tier, but the story arcs typically pit them against squads of Gold Saints. So instead of DBZ's "look how powerful our hero is" approach, Saint Seiya goes with "oh no, our hero is the underdog and he'll have to rely on cunning and determination to beat this much stronger enemy!" It's interesting how that approach seems to be used pretty rarely these days. In most shonen, if your enemy is much stronger than you, it's an automatic loss (and triggers a training arc.) Maybe Seiya is actually a good model for shonen going forward, with less reliance on characters becoming stronger and more emphasis on weaker characters fighting smarter. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 927 |
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JJBA has another brilliant tool for serialized escalation: Stardust Crusaders, which introduced Stands, used the team's distance from Egypt as the marker as opposed to any kind of weird power level structure. The danger was getting closer to DIO, because nobody (at the time of the manga's original release) knew what DIO's Stand was capable of. And if you're going up against Stands that can turn you into a zygote, curse you to death or absorb you into a blob of flesh, who knows what the vampire commanding these freaks might do. He could breathe fire for all we knew!
I've always considered power levels to be an exercise in futility. Even though Dragon Ball popularized Power Levels, they're meant to be utterly arbitrary as a concept--not to mention completely pointless. While the early fights against Saiyans showed the gap between even Nappa's and Raditz's strength against Goku and company, this became less meaningful once Goku learned techniques like the Kaio Ken that could multiply his power. Not to mention, Freeza and his forces using scouters that hinged on detecting Power Levels wound up being used against them once Krillin and Gohan learned they could evade detection entirely by supressing their power levels. And even then, this wasn't even the first time power levels were proven to be complete bunk--the original came from Astro Boy! Atom/Astro originally was billed as having an output of 100,000 horsepower. When the World's Strongest Robot arc happened, Pluto was billed at having an output of 1,000,000 horsepower, which contributed to him thrashing all of the other strongest robots. Astro asked Dr. Elefun/Watson for a power-up--and was denied one. Eventually, Pluto gets thrashed by a gargantuan robot with an output of 2,000,000 horsepower--but Astro handles that second robot just fine because the robot is so big, Astro can just slip between its armor plating and destroy it from the inside out. All that, at just five percent of that second robot's strength. |
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 3120 |
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I am with you on this one. Two of my favorite series have their adventure/action arc,.then stop to decompress and show what happens with the character lives before the ext arc happens,.showing the consequences of the arc that just ended. Its fun how both do these in almost extremes, like the first one has the arcs happen around one month after the previous one, so the consequences are very noticeable. The other instead has breaks that last from a few months to a year or more, so we get people growing up, getting married, finishing school, etc.. |
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tintor2
Posts: 2713 |
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The Episode G trilogy gave Seiya and other fighters more convoluted powers to fights like Dunamis, combined cloths and more senses |
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 868 |
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One of my favorite moments in Dragon Ball Super is when Android 17 attacks the magical girl parodies mid-transformation. It's mildly annoying because everybody chides him for it and they use it as a meta-joke about how no one attacks shonen characters mid powerup, but nevertheless it is a curveball that is entertaining.
Speaking of "no one knew what he was capable of", the first time I saw Stardust Crusaders, I was kinda depressed just how little Dio used his vampire powers. Like, I saw an explanation somewhere that said it was because he was using Jonathan's body and the Hamon there prevented him from doing it, but like... he has laser eyes, and he didn't replace his freakin' head! Whatever, just a minor gripe I have with one part of the series. |
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