pokoko on 02 June 2016
| LuckyTrouble said: The thing with shonen is that it can be defined as a genre. We can say "targeted at young males", but what does that actually mean? It tends to mean a focus on action, the plot usually driven through repeated conflict resolved through battle of some kind, and it tends to have an absence of romance or only uses it as a comedic plot element (One Piece being a great, long running example of all of the above). Granted, not all shonen will necessarily stick to these basic guidelines, but I could rattle off about a dozen more prominent shonen anime that follow them practically to the letter. I mean, you can't say that shonen has a target audience and then say that there are no genre specific trends of appealing to a specific target audience. That literally makes no sense. |
Shounen can't be a genre because it contains many different genres.
To Love-Ru, Bakuman, Sket Dance, Detective Conan, Love Hina, Dagashi Kashi, The World Only God Knows, Nisekoi, Baby Steps, Hayate the Combat Butler, Sankarea, and Yamada-kun & the Seven Witches are all well-known examples of shounen. None of these would fall into the same genre as, for example, Naruto.
In Japan, there is one, true definition for "shounen": it's published in a shounen magazine. Same for the rest of the categories. It's as simple as that. That's why when people say they want more shounen series, other people are like, "but what kind of shounen do you want?" Detective anime? Sports anime? Harem anime? In that context, it doesn't tell us very much.
