I’ve been reading YugiOh in the original Japanese to keep up my knowledge, but… honestly, I recently read Reborn and was pretty harsh on it, but in many ways, YugiOh is much worse, with bad pacing, less pretty art, and the way the reader keeps being subjected to long explanations of things that are rarely repeated in the storyline. What I especially don’t like is how someone suddenly pulls out a card that we’ve never seen before, and it has this amazing new ability, blah blah. It’s at moments like these that I suddenly wish I was reading a semi-realist manga instead of a fantasy fighting shounen one.
Shounen is a very vague broad category, but of late I’ve become irritated with some of the frequent problems of the genre. I’ll make a random list, in no particular order.
*the mangaka seems to start the series with no idea of what s/he is doing, or no idea of what the plot is going to be. A premise is introduced, but frequently the manga circles around before a big tournament arc finally begins. In essence, this is a problem of pacing and planning.
*the hero is often the least interesting character. Come on. The hero/protagonist doesn’t have to be a pure reader stand-in. Do you really always need to have the most ‘important’ character in a story be the protagonist? Conversely, must the protagonist always be the ‘central’ character of the story?
*poor foreshadowing
*poor development of worldbuilding, making it look like the author is pulling spells/moves/mcGuffins out of his/her ass. This is a big problem. I have no problem with there being a really complex fighting system, but I do have a problem with it appearing arbitrary and only there for the convenience of the author.
*too long: people say that Jojo is long, but what it really is is several manga series, set in the same world, which are about fifteen volumes long, on average. Compare that to series where ten volumes in, the first story arc is barely getting under way.
*having many, many characters instead of deeper characters. Obviously the two are not mutually exclusive, but sometimes series have uselessly large casts.
*creating characters who do not develop or are mostly static, thus making them less interesting
tags>>shounen
3 Responses for "shounen manga ambivalence"
I think one of the major problems with the YGO manga was that the mangaka decided to take it completely in a different direction once they realise how popular the card storyline was and how much they could profit from it. I remember reading an interview years ago when I was in the fandom about how the cards were never supposed to be the focus of the series at all, and I think that’s one of the things that is very clear in the first few volumes especially. It’s a pity, because once the story shifted to being about a card game as opposed to fun little challenges and stories, all sense of characterisation and continuation was really thrown out the window. There was some seriously interesting stuff about Jounouchi’s family life and background that was never explored after the first few volumes, and even the slightly later storyline concerning Ryuuji (now THAT was a dark little arc) didn’t carry on the potential his character brought to the series.
The earlier volumes were certainly very flawed, but I found them fun and engaging in a light way. The later volumes became far too bogged down with static characterisation and overly long matches.
Cairnsy.
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I totally agree with those as problems, and yet…I enjoy stuff like Yu-Gi-Oh and Reborn a lot. I just enjoy it differently from something complex and well-thought-out like, uh, FMA or something.
As for not having an idea where they’re going in the beginning, I think that’s not just a problem of the authors themselves, but also the publishers, who want to take on a story and see how it goes, but may drop it if it doesn’t do well. So the first part of a manga is almost always vague in comparison to later arcs, because it has to be something that can be more self-contained.
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I enjoy Reborn. Yugioh not so much. Although I admit in shame that I used to play the card game.
But the reasons you listed are exactly why I LOVE One Piece. You can tell as you keep reading that Oda has carefully planned out so many things from the very beginning, as many characters and plot points will show up early then come back much later on to startling relevance. He is like the shonen master of foreshadowing.
He’s also an excellent world builder, with every island the crew visits carefully “built” from the ground up. From it’s people to its physical features (like the most recent island, the Yarukiman Mangrove *awesome pun*, with its fancy “resin bubbles”).
He does, admittedly, have a giant cast of characters, as each island has it’s own distinct inhabitants, but his core cast of the pirate crew remains well developed and likable. And, as said, he will often bring back characters you thought were completely done with. The man is very economic with his cast.
I’ll stop rambling now, but that’s why I crow the praises of One Piece. No wonder it’s the “successor” to Dragonball.
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