Shonen senility?

[Durkoala]

I'm sure that many of you at least know about the long-running shonen fighting anime/manga Bleach. After all, It's been running for thirteen years, with plenty of superpowered swordfighty shenanigans.
LatelyFor a while now, it's gonebeen a bit strange. Without spoiling, some of the longstanding traditions have been dropped, new developments are comming out of nowhere, and some really weird things are happening.
Its longstanding rival, Naruto, is in a similar state.

I didn't think anything of it until I realised that Dragonball Z, one of the greatest influences of shonens, had a similar problem: Magical creatures and things spilling into a mostly Sci-fi setting (OK, it there was magic earlier, but most of it was retconned to be aliens), most of the plot being centred on fighting a single villain, the saiyan powers suddenly eclipsing all other powers, including those of said villain and a lot more stuff.

That got me wondering. Is it a coincidence that these really popular long-running shonens all went a bit crazy in their old age? Or is this a thing that happens often? Can you give any examples if you think it does*?

*I can think of one non-anime that's also done this: The Skulduggery Pleasant book series. It started as a magic detective story, much like Dresden files, but has lately been one near apocalyse after the next, new types of magic have been turning up, and the conflicts have got big enough to affect countries politically. That's all I can say without spoiling.

[Yuki Akuma]

...Bleach is now old enough to be at the top end of its target demographic.

That's scary.

As for the actual topic, I think most long-running stories tend to do this. It may be an effort to keep the story from stagnating by retreading old ground, or an effort to make new villains more threatening by making them more powerful - which means that the hero himself has to get more powerful in order to compete.

[Frozen_Feet]

That got me wondering. Is it a coincidence that these really popular long-running shonens all went a bit crazy in their old age? Or is this a thing that happens often?

In order, no and yes.

In case of Dragon Ball, it was a clear case of executive meddling. Akira Toriyama wanted to end the series as early as the fight against Piccolo Jr. Then he wanted to end it at Frieza. Then he wanted to end it at Cell. Then he wanted to shift focus from Goku to Gohan, but even that didn't stick. All because the people at marketing kept telling him "these Sayain characters are, like, really popular, could you draw some more of them?"

In case of Naruto, Kishimoto originally wanted to do a tale about wizards, but was told ninjas were more popular. As the series got big and became popular for being Naruto rather than just having ninjas, Kishimoto got more leeway to introduce elements of his older vision, leading to things getting much wackier.

In case of Bleach and Kubo, many characters only got so much screentime as they did because they became super popular amongst the fans. The "Forest of Menos" world-building arc was entirely dropped from the manga in order to give more time to some of the Espada.

The common vein in all of these is the author being told to do X to pander to the audience, and then they go on this silent rebellion against their masters. The latter half of Dragon Ball is full of self-parody because even Toriyama realized how wacky things had gotten.

[Hytheter]

I didn't think anything of it until I realised that Dragonball Z, one of the greatest influences of shonens, had a similar problem: Magical creatures and things spilling into a mostly Sci-fi setting

What? If anything I'd say it's the other way around, Dragon Ball has always been more magicky than sciencey.

Like, the whole premise centres around the titular Dragon Balls that summon a dragon to grant wishes and the fighting is all magic kung-fu. There's magic beans that heal all bodily harm instantly, a staff that can grow to any size and shrink again, a flying rideable cloud, crystal balls, demons and an afterlife, there are many talking animals, including oolong and Pu'ar who can shapeshift, oozaru is basically a space werewolf on steroids...

Sure, there are some robots and space travel too, but many of the series' foundations are rooted in magic.

Also

(OK, it there was magic earlier, but most of it was retconned to be aliens)

Just because it's aliens, doesn't mean it's not still magic.

[Frozen_Feet]

Just because it's aliens, doesn't mean it's not still magic.

Case in point, many of the aliens are called out as being wizards. Or gods. Or literal devils.

Really, the magic only takes backstage for durations of Namek Saga and the Android Saga. It comes back full force in the Majin Buu saga, with Buu itself being explicitly magical.

[cobaltstarfire]

I always thought it was partially a matter of being an eternal arms race to keep the series going, and the anime having to veer a bit off course to fill time whenever it got ahead of the manga. It's interesting and unsurprising to learn that it's also in part because of executive meddling.


Even Kenshin is doing it a little bit, and it's not super long running and I'm only about halfway through. (It's becoming more weird as they have to introduce more and more powerful/scary badguys). Of course it's super down to earth compared to DBZ/Bleach/Naruto, or most modern shonen anime by its nature, but it's still going a little pear shaped. I guess it helps that it wasn't super duper mega popular so it was able to come to and end eventually.

I think Shonen is a little bit odd even before things like age and meddling executives settle on it, it's just the longer it runs the more accentuated it has to get.

[Man on Fire]

I meanwhile noticed this happens a lot less often in shonen series ran in other magazines than Shonen Jump, with clear end - neither Mirai Nikki or FMA had this problem, I didn't heard of Deadman Wonderland having it either. And of course Attack on Titan ended in other magazine because author didn't wanted to change the story to pander to X audience as Jump editors told him to.

[Prime32]

I meanwhile noticed this happens a lot less often in shonen series ran in other magazines than Shonen Jump, with clear end - neither Mirai Nikki or FMA had this problem, I didn't heard of Deadman Wonderland having it either. And of course Attack on Titan ended in other magazine because author didn't wanted to change the story to pander to X audience as Jump editors told him to.

Heck, Bakuman has a whole arc about how Shonen Jump always tries to milk stories for as along as possible, and how the authors try to fight against it so they can end their manga before they run out of ideas. And it ran in Shonen Jump!

[Traab]

Lets take Bleach as an example. You can only have the characters get flat out faster stronger and more destructive for so long, until you reach world shattering power, and that ends the whole story. So you have to add in different powers, different bad guys with different skill sets that require something other than even more speed and slashing ability to beat. Eventually, if you cant just end the damn story, things get whacky. There is a reason the term jumping the shark is called that, and not, "Thing Get Whacky" Its because a show about leather wearing greasers suddenly had the fonz jumping over an actual freaking shark in an episode. They were obviously running out of reasonable topics due to its run time (and the fact that the fonz wasnt even supposed to be a reoccurring character in the first place, but never mind that) so they had to find crazier and crazier things for the cast to do until boom, shark jumping.

That being said, that isnt always the case. As has been covered already, often times you get writer conflict with the publishers and they have to keep stretching things out because the story is still so damn popular they dont want to let the cash cow go till its been milked dry.

[Aotrs Commander]

Somewhat an inevitable result of any creative endeavour forced to go beyond a certain limit.

Sometimes, you can get something to last longer by changing the writers (or the make-up of the show up, tonally or by character cast) - comics do this... With a wide degree of varying success and failure. Or a change of media or something.

Power-scaling in shonen seems to be hit worse, because it is an ever-increasing spiral... And usually not one carefully planned to an end point power-level and progression from the start (or forced past that end-point).

I suspect at some point, for these authors, after a long period of time (Naruto is coming up to fifteen - it's nearly as old as the titualr characters...!) it becomes a bit of a paycheck job.

[Terraoblivion]

Really, it's the same reason why so many soap operas end up with so many long lost siblings, bizarre deceptions retconned in and the occasional proclamation that an entire season was just a dream. Coming up with new stuff every week year after year without major breaks is hard and sometimes the ideas you come up with aren't the best, but you don't have time for anything else. Shonen Jump is especially bad about causing this due to how it's big and popular enough that they can drop even popular series if the creator doesn't bow down and obey them, leading to both executive meddling and a lack of breaks to come up with new ideas. The magazine is kinda infamous for being controlling and demanding, even compared to other weekly magazines.

[Durkoala]

The annoying thing about a lot of fighting shows is that at the beginning, they often have a few strange powers that are phased out in favour of whatever the heroes use. When that power is getting a bit stale, the usual response is to introduce somebody stronger to fight, instead of doing something with the things they've already shown. I think dragonball had a minor character who could have killed nearly every villain and maybe some of the heroes, but was forgotten about so he didn't do anything.

At least Bleach managed to keep a good variety of powers, no matter what else it dropped the ball on.

[Prime32]

The annoying thing about a lot of fighting shows is that at the beginning, they often have a few strange powers that are phased out in favour of whatever the heroes use. When that power is getting a bit stale, the usual response is to introduce somebody stronger to fight, instead of doing something with the things they've already shown. I think dragonball had a minor character who could have killed nearly every villain and maybe some of the heroes, but was forgotten about so he didn't do anything.

At least Bleach managed to keep a good variety of powers, no matter what else it dropped the ball on.

Sounds like you should be reading JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The powers just get stranger and stranger over time, with physical strength becoming more or less irrelevant compared to how creatively you use them.

[Durkoala]

I've started watching the anime. I'm having trouble with it, as it's so Japanese but keeps throwing in your face that it's set in 18th century England. Still, at least they didn't make Dio be Jack the Ripper.

[Yuki Akuma]

Another manga/anime for 'weird out-there powers' is Hunter X Hunter. It's not quite as focused on that as JoJo is, but it's at least not Dragonball's case of 'everyone uses the same powers but with a different colour'.

HxH does have a habit of dropping characters for entire story arcs, though. Including protagonists.

[Morph Bark]

Lets take Bleach as an example. You can only have the characters get flat out faster stronger and more destructive for so long, until you reach world shattering power, and that ends the whole story. So you have to add in different powers, different bad guys with different skill sets that require something other than even more speed and slashing ability to beat. Eventually, if you cant just end the damn story, things get whacky.

That's why I liked that Bleach effectively did a hard reset on their most powerful characters after one of the other most powerful characters lost his arm (which later turned out to be little hindrance, but still). The only big problem with that was that at the end of the next arc, the main character had nearly all of his powers back and then some and was on the way to getting more.

Of course, there is also the possibility of doing things the entire opposite way around, as in Pokémon, where there seem to be power resets every time Ash goes to a new region, without there being any proper explanation as to why Pikachu suddenly can't beat practically everyone into the ground.

[Flickerdart]

Of course, there is also the possibility of doing things the entire opposite way around, as in Pokémon, where there seem to be power resets every time Ash goes to a new region, without there being any proper explanation as to why Pikachu suddenly can't beat practically everyone into the ground.

Do you remember back in Gen II, when after you beat the Elite Four you could go back to Kanto and fight the trainers and gym leaders there? Brock didn't use his level 11 Onyx, and even the roaming trainers had powerful Pokemon. A trainer with an unevolved, weak pokemon who gives away all his other ones all the time would have trouble.

[Durkoala]

That's why I liked that Bleach effectively did a hard reset on their most powerful characters after one of the other most powerful characters lost his arm (which later turned out to be little hindrance, but still). The only big problem with that was that at the end of the next arc, the main character had nearly all of his powers back and then some and was on the way to getting more.

Of course, there is also the possibility of doing things the entire opposite way around, as in Pokémon, where there seem to be power resets every time Ash goes to a new region, without there being any proper explanation as to why Pikachu suddenly can't beat practically everyone into the ground.

Spoiler: Bleach

Show

I was a bit disappointed when Ichigo got repowered. The Fullbring arc had hit its stride, we had had some great villains and the supporting cast were relevant again for the first time in years, there was a different feeling to all the Reaper's wars we'd had so far... where was this going to go? Oh, the shinigami are back, Ichigo's capable of demolishing cities again and we're back where we've been for ten years?

On the other hand, the repowering itself was a great scene. Very emotional, and a great reward for everything Ichigo was put through.

Given that the series is based on the idea of being passed through different realms as part of reincarnation, there is a perfect way to reset the power level whenever: just add a few more steps to the circle of rebirth and kill off everyone every so often. New powers, ways to give neglected characters more power (they died first, so they have more experience with their new form), new settings, bingo.

[TheThan]

Nope its all simple power creep.

Throughout DBZ for example, Goku and the others constantly grow more powerful, sometimes it’s a huge leap (becoming a super sayan), other times it’s sort of gradual. The result of this power creep is that the makers keep having to throw more and more powerful enemies at the protagonist(s) just to provide an appropriate threat to the characters. This means they have to constantly come up with new reasons why these new villains haven’t been seen before.

For example Freiza was supposed to be the most powerful being in the galaxy, threatened only by a Super Saiyan. He took out the Saiyan home world so that nobody could have even the potential to threaten him. After Goku defeated freiza, the creators needed a new more powerful villain for Goku to battle, so they came up with the Androids and Cell in order to continue the series and make money on it.
As others have pointed out, these things happen due to executive meddling and sometimes just because the writers think its cool or some such.

throughout most other shoenen series, you will see the same situation. The heroes win, only to discover that there's an even bigger threat rearing it's ugly head.

[Math_Mage]

Order of the Stick would be a pretty long manga by now. At some point the mangaka of a series that anticipates long runtime has to sit down and work out a story whose scope matches the length. Otherwise, it ends up riddled with inconsistencies, loaded down with characters, plagued by disjointed narratives, and/or simply repetitive.

[Terraoblivion]

No, it wouldn't. It would be eight to ten volumes long and once with comparatively simple art. In comparison Bleach is 63, Naruto is 70, One Piece is 74 and Dragonball is kind of a runt at 42. Bleach has only had two years more to produce more than six times the material of Order of the Stick at a more detailed, which is more time consuming after the initial design work is done, level. The workload is immense and there is much less time to pause to plan things out. And having it all planned before you start would be insane. You'd spend hundreds of hours creating material that will almost certainly never see the light of day and likely also get stuck telling a story that needs more time than you have to win an audience, quite possibly making the success of your series less likely. And after you've gotten serialized you generally won't have the time to do it because there is next week's chapter to consider.

[Math_Mage]

No, it wouldn't. It would be eight to ten volumes long and once with comparatively simple art. In comparison Bleach is 63, Naruto is 70, One Piece is 74 and Dragonball is kind of a runt at 42. Bleach has only had two years more to produce more than six times the material of Order of the Stick at a more detailed, which is more time consuming after the initial design work is done, level. The workload is immense and there is much less time to pause to plan things out. And having it all planned before you start would be insane. You'd spend hundreds of hours creating material that will almost certainly never see the light of day and likely also get stuck telling a story that needs more time than you have to win an audience, quite possibly making the success of your series less likely. And after you've gotten serialized you generally won't have the time to do it because there is next week's chapter to consider.

*shrug* Leaving aside that we're talking about different things when it comes to seeing OotS as a manga, and that you're reading rather more into the phrase "work out a story" than I intended, what you describe is why long-running series get stuck with the problems I listed.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I've started watching the anime. I'm having trouble with it, as it's so Japanese but keeps throwing in your face that it's set in 18th century England. Still, at least they didn't make Dio be Jack the Ripper.

Heh. You really just have to embrace the weird when watching JoJo. But a lot of it is about continuing to increase the application of the powers they reveal. (That said, I've only watched the first two arcs.)

[Durkoala]

Heh. You really just have to embrace the weird when watching JoJo. But a lot of it is about continuing to increase the application of the powers they reveal. (That said, I've only watched the first two arcs.)

I can deal with wierd (three words : Kraken, China Mieville), it's cultural inaccuracy I have trouble with.

[Rodin]

I just don't get why we always have to reach "destroy the world/galaxy/universe" levels. Like with Naruto, the whole premise is sneaky and clever use of techniques. That's a premise that doesn't need to be expanded upon - you can just introduce new techniques and then use them in different sneaky and clever ways.

Instead, they're throwing around giant energy bombs that can wipe out a city. There's only so many ways you can be sneaky with that.

[Starwulf]

Of course, there is also the possibility of doing things the entire opposite way around, as in Pokémon, where there seem to be power resets every time Ash goes to a new region, without there being any proper explanation as to why Pikachu suddenly can't beat practically everyone into the ground.

I love pokemon, all new series are immediately set to auto-record, but yeah, this drives me nuts so much. I mean, at this point Pikachu should be level 100 with maxed out IV's and..EVs?I can't remember the correct terms for it. He should be able to one-shot everything except other level 100s that his attacks would be ineffective against, ie: Region Champions, and even then there is no guarantee that they will have a level 100 pokemon that just happens to be Pikachus antithesis.

I actually loved the last season of the show, Ash brung back his Charizard and he stuck with him till the end and man was he freaking super-powered. I loved it! Why does Charizard get to be all-powerful and not poor Pikachu though? :-(. It is especially bizarre when you stop and think about exactly why Ash is traveling around all the regions: To become a Pokemon MASTER!!!! That means he is aiming to be the best, absolute strongest trainer in existence. Shouldn't he be showing at least some power growth over the years? There is just no way that every new region he goes to everyone there is so much stronger then the last region that no matter how powerful his pokemons got, they are like level 1's in comparison. That is just absurd, as it would mean that a single evil-minded person from the last and final region would have pokemon so powerful they could conquer every other region by themselves, and yet...that hasn't happened.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

I can deal with wierd (three words : Kraken, China Mieville), it's cultural inaccuracy I have trouble with.

Oh, heh, well...

...JoJo's really doesn't care heavily about cultural accuracy. But that's kinda the least unusual thing.

I just don't get why we always have to reach "destroy the world/galaxy/universe" levels. Like with Naruto, the whole premise is sneaky and clever use of techniques. That's a premise that doesn't need to be expanded upon - you can just introduce new techniques and then use them in different sneaky and clever ways.

Instead, they're throwing around giant energy bombs that can wipe out a city. There's only so many ways you can be sneaky with that.

Yeah, power creep. It's the easy way to continuously raise the stakes of a story. It's definitely evident when you have a blockbuster movie and its sequels. Every successive movie has to be BIGGER.

[Math_Mage]

I just don't get why we always have to reach "destroy the world/galaxy/universe" levels. Like with Naruto, the whole premise is sneaky and clever use of techniques. That's a premise that doesn't need to be expanded upon - you can just introduce new techniques and then use them in different sneaky and clever ways.

Instead, they're throwing around giant energy bombs that can wipe out a city. There's only so many ways you can be sneaky with that.

Someone mentioned above that Kishimoto didn't really want to be writing a ninja story. Besides, from the look of it, being sneaky and clever was mostly a barrier for Naruto to smash through with the power of "Believe it!"

[Knaight]

That the shows mentioned are shonen isn't even all that relevant - there are underlying issues that affect them present in basically any long running serial work, and it plagues basically all of them. Most have already been mentioned, but two in particular could use further highlighting.

The first is pretty simple - there's a particular story being told, and regardless of what story it is it generally doesn't need to be ridiculously long. Pretty much any narrative told across about 500 episodes (about 10,000 minutes) is bloated and needs to be trimmed. The same thing is true of 80 volume collections, whether they are anime, or comics, or even standard books. Said volumes are generally pretty short, but you're still probably getting 10,000 pages across them, and that much just isn't necessary. So we see quality decline across a long running TV show, or over movies with a dozen sequels, or over those 15 book fantasy series where every book is 800 pages plus, or just about anything else.

Then there's the aforementioned "power creep", which is pretty much just something that comes with the bloat. There's an attempt to keep the attention of an audience across something which is very, very long, and a way to do that that crops up all the time is to make things bigger. In an action series, the characters get stronger and stronger. In a drama, the cast gets bloated and the relationships between them more convoluted. In a police procedural, the scale of the crimes get bigger and bigger until what started as series of homicide investigations is suddenly some sort of international conspiracy. It's easier to expand than it is to contract, and over the interminable period of a bloated work, things get out of control.

You may notice that this issue doesn't really crop up all that much in Shonen works of 10-15 episodes. Even over 20-30 episodes, it's not really much of a problem most of the time. By the 40-60 episode range it usually starts to show, but it's often still fairly minor. Past that point though, the bloat tends to start taking over.

In more ensemble shows which are more slowly paced than is typical of Shonen (e.g. Star Trek, to break out of anime entirely) there's more room to work with. The episodes are generally longer, but the amount there before problems crop up is often still pretty similar. Then there are books, which often have yet less of a problem. Trilogies and quartets of reasonably long books often work fairly well. Wheel of Time and similar works still desperately need editors to cut them down, but within 2000 pages or so things often aren't too bad. I'd still say that a lot of works of that range could be edited, but the bloat is managed, and the creeping expansion often has yet to get completely out of hand.

[Eldan]

Someone mentioned above that Kishimoto didn't really want to be writing a ninja story. Besides, from the look of it, being sneaky and clever was mostly a barrier for Naruto to smash through with the power of "Believe it!"

I don't know... I've only seen the first... two or three seasons? I don't know. The end of the tournament arc. Seemed Naruto had plenty of clever ideas, especially in the very first arc.