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tsuchinokoroyale · 4 months

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I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on JJK. Admittedly, I’m not well versed in shonen, so I never even considered that it was trying to subvert the genre.

P.S. Thank you for the consistently thoughtful takes and hot ass 😘

Ooooo boy I hope you’re ready for a whole ass essay 😎😎😎

Shonen as a genre has changed over time as any art form does, but it is still mired in tropes that can be traced back to the classics. The shonen genre is thus named bc its target demographic is boys to young men, for our discussion we’ll say teenage boys. While it obviously has big appeal for other demographics, it is mainly designed to both appeal AND communicate life lessons to that crowd of impressionable kids.

Because of this dual function you get this really odd genre full of super powerful special boys who love their friends but have no qualms about slaughtering their enemies. They typically espouse lessons about the merits of hard work, sticking to your beliefs ((so long as your beliefs are beneficial to society at large)), of goodness and friendship triumphing over evil. Look no further than DBZ and Naruto which can broadly be divided into Battle Arcs and Training Arcs, upping the ante for our special boy main protagonists until we literally have them fighting gods as the logical extreme of continuous escalation.

The Standard™ Shonen formula has a boy main protagonist who’s got some sort of motivation that is so ideologically pure that he’s basically impossible to defeat. Goku loves to fight, Naruto wants to be hokage, Tanjiro wants to cure his sister and slayer all the demons, etc. He forms/joins a band of merry outcasts with their own tragic backstories and sets out to defeat whatever villain appears for that arc. If they win, arc is over move onto training arc, if they lose, they train, fight and win, then train some more. The fun of the genre comes from the colorful side characters, and the little twists that come with each battle system, which brings us to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

At the time JJBA was being published, the big influence on manga was big beefy male led 80s action movies and Fist of the North Star, a manga about a beefy martial artist named Kenshiro going around beating baddies in a post apocalyptic world. Battle systems in Shonen were usually incredibly soft, most tied to physical combat enhanced by some poorly defined life force energy that could be called upon to even out fights and give big climactic finishes, like Ki from dragon ball and their iconic kamehamehas. Even JJBA starts off this way, with our beefy boys learning Hamon/Ripple and duking it out with vampires, til my man Hirohiko Araki was like “mmmm this is kind of limiting. Time to Change Everything~” and he came up with the concept of Stands, incredibly limited psychic/magic abilities that manifest as furries or sexy robots or a Lego version of the White House (?). You can see this idea really grow and expand within the part it’s introduced, going from “fire furry” and “robot knight with sword” to “guy whose stand turns into a ball that immediately erases anything it runs into but he can’t really see what he’s attacking since he has to be inside his stand in order for it to work also his name is Vanilla Ice and he’s a vampire in a thong.”

You can FEEL the impact this had even to this day. Stands became Jutsus in Naruto, quirks in MHA, Nen in HxH, Cursed Techniques in JJK. And part of what made it fun was that it added strategy to the mix! Str8 physical fights are hard to strategize bc it’s basically just a numbers game, right? Like bc his power level is over 9000, it’s going to be a tough time until some plot contrivance and/or training occurs to drive *my* power level over 9000. But now there is an additional layer of *how* these powers interact.

My ability is to blow bubbles and his ability is to turn a single person who comes into contact with bodily fluids into a mindless zombie? Create bubble shields so they can’t splash blood on you. My ability is to fold anything into origami and if you touch the origami you begin to see one object as something else and his ability is an automatic tracking stand that hunts me down by creating face shredding tornados when I breathe? Make a city bus look like my dad ((part 8 is fucking nuts)).

As you can tell, JJBA really burst open the dam on creativity, but as per the examples I’ve given they can often feel very… silly and contrived. The Serious Anime Fan™ will complain and say those fights are full of asspulls, which they are, but that’s very much part of the fun of the series. BUT because diversity is the spice of life, you also get artists who are less interested in adhering to the Rule of Cool and more interested in making things explicitly “logical” which is how we get Hunter x Hunter.

While JJBA dabbles in using stands for characterization, HxH goes HARD into it. Nen abilities are ((usually)) manifestation of their user’s idea of power, creating a direct link between who that person is and what they can do as a result. This is balanced by people having innate Nen types which means the kinds of abilities they can use are limited, though there are rules restrictions and exceptions to this as well. We know all of this bc mangaka Togashi literally gives a college level lecture on Nen in the story, describing how it manifests, how it works, what it can and can’t do, and how individual rules can supersede the basic set of rules and the rules for doing that. I call this style Erudite Shonen, bc bitches be TALKING. In erudite Shonen, powers usually fall on the complex side, even Bungee Gum, which has the properties of both rubber and gum, can be used in insane ways like ricocheting bullets, gluing minors together, and/or cheesing a game of dodgeball and it’s all both shown AND told.

Now where does JJK fall into all this? Listifying the common Shonen tropes we have A Special Boy main protagonist with a pure motive, a crew, goodness triumphing over evil, prioritizing bonds and community over selfish gain, and the winning power of hard work.

Early JJK fits the mold pretty well. Yuji Itadori starts off the series special, with superhuman fitness before he ingests sukuna’s finger at which point he becomes a Naruto analog, where he is strong because he has a powerful spirit trapped inside him. He has the rather off kilter but still acceptable goal of “dying a proper death”. His squad of mentor Gojo, Fushiguro, and Kugisaki is established by episode 3. The villains are cursed spirits who want to eradicate humanity, the good guys are the jujutsu sorcerers who say “no u” to that. Yuji wants to gain power to protect others instead of just becoming powerful himself. And there’s a training arc! Sure, it happens after Yuji gets his heart ripped out, but he’s not even dead that long. Even the powers in early JJK present themselves as pretty simple, Fushiguro does shadow summoning, Kugisaki does hammer and nail resonance, panda, Inumaki does cursed speech.

It wears its darkness on its sleeve however, presenting Junpei as a potential future team member only to shockingly kill him. The whole star plasma vessel incident casts an unflattering light on Jujutsu society. But none of that COMPARES to the shitshow that happens in Shibuya, where JJK finally shows its real hand.

Over the course of the Shibuya arc, we watch our protagonist mount an offense against the villains that have been building themselves up over the course of the show, sacrificing so so much just to ultimately… lose. The Shibuya arc subverts not just idiosyncratic plot beats but story telling traditions as well. “The strongest” loses, multiple fan favorite characters are either taken out of commission or outright killed, the story progression slams the fast forward button as Yuji goes from having ingested 4 out of 20 fingers to 15/20 resulting in mass civilian casualties because his version of the 9 tailed fox is an actual monster, and ((meta-narratively)) worst of all, Yuji doesn’t even get to defeat his arch-rival, Mahito. Instead Mahito is unceremoniously absorbed by other big bad Geto/Kenjaku. It’s supremely unsatisfying and the weight of the tragedy is so immense you wonder how our heroes are gonna come back from this.

And thus begins the “deconstruction” phase of JJK. Cuz they just… don’t. As dark as Shibuya got, a standard Shonen would then go on to give the heroes a big fat W, some sort of come back after all that. But not JJK! Bc JJK is subversive 😏 this means the fact that the story is super unsatisfying is like, the point mannnn. This isn’t the worst thing that can happen. Chainsawman is also a story of major L’s and minor W’s and it’s my #1 favorite modern manga series. The difference is in intent, however. Chainsawman works as well as it does bc at its core, it loves Denji. He REALLY goes through the ringer, but it’s all in service of understanding what life is like for someone trapped on the hedonic treadmill and how one can ((attempt anyways)) to break out of it.

And then there’s JJK. It truly feels like the manga is designed to tear Yuji’s self sacrificial mindset to shreds for the sake of making him suffer and for the reader to feel bad for ever feeling like good has to triumph over evil. The real problem is, it feels as if the series is bending over backwards to make this shit happen.

Part of the change over is what was a previously simple-ish battle system goes full Erudite Shonen. There were hints that cursed energy could get more complicated, what with domain completion competition and guaranteed hits and simple domains and that one guys FPS ability I can’t explain. But we go FULL HxH level afterwards. All of a sudden oxygen delivery to the brain becomes important to cursed technique, there’s domain range and boundary fidelity and incomplete domain properties, disruption of somatic components becomes a factor, and… it honestly feels like utter nonsense at times.

Complexity isn’t bad, like I mentioned I LOVE HxH and could probably explain the chrollo-hisoka fight if you gave me a few hours to study, but I could not tell you all the new rules for cursed energy that seem just kind of invented on the spot in random chapters during this back half of JJK. Bc they involve concepts never really mentioned before, it feels like an asspull, like this was something made up to force the situation at hand. Thing is, more of those situations only benefit the villains. You get shit like a character winning a battle at the end of one chapter and then starting the next one to find they were killed off screen moments later, actually. It’s just like yeah it’s subversive, but the reason stories aren’t told like this is bc this shit sucks lmao. I think out of all the plans the heroes make like only a handful of them are actually successful, and even then they get so unwound by the next step in the plan that they may as well have not happened. It doesn’t help that the abilities are so complicated now you’ll get a chapter dedicated to explaining what one guy can do just to have him wiped off the face of the earth the next one.

So the crew is gone, our special boy is actually the most disempowered guy ever except for the fact that he can’t be killed for some reason, the good guys are NOT doing a great job standing up to evil since like 86% of their plans fail or have bad results, a gag character wins one of the most important fights in the story and it’s unironically the best thing JJK has done in a while, and it’s all just a very confusing slog to read. This is the danger of writing subversion for the sake of subversion with intent for contempt, kids 😮‍💨

Granted we aren’t at the end of the story yet so maybe I’ll be wrong and there’ll be like a reset button that fixes everything (( which would also suck )), but yeah. JJK wants what HxH did in the chimera ant arc but forgot that that story was possible bc it was fundamentally about humanity and love, not just the parts about how people suck and goodness can fail.

If you made it this far congratulations you’re entitled to one big kissy on ur forehead from me and barnaby 😚😚😚

#no one is allowed to tell me how many words this is I don’t want to know #0 note post here we fucking gooooooo #this one goes out to the girlies who don’t understand why I’m single I’ve got yer explanation right hereeeee 😅

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decembermoonskz · 1 year

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not me crying over the wind temple and tulin and revali all in one go love this for me 🫠

(more crying under the cut / includes botw/totk/aoc spoilers)

I just watched the clip of revali and tulin in aoc and idk man I just love it so much and I cried because like…. wow I had to take a moment and think about the fact that tulin is not only the new wind sage but he’s REVALI’S SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR

don’t get me wrong I do love teba as well and he was p much the champion in botw. but tulin literally told revali in aoc that he wanted to be just like him and one day master the great eagle bow and idk maybe bc I JUST watched teba pass the great eagle bow down to tulin but that really took me out and my eyes started to water jahsjsjssjsjdhdh

and revali like literally not being his usual asshole self and melting at how soft and cute and sweet tulin is and he was like “yk one day you could end up just like me, who knows” AND THE EXCITED LITTLE SOUNDS TULIN MADE TO TEBA ABOUT HIS HERO ENCOURAGING HIM 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

AND TULIN EVEN TRIED TO IMITATE REVALI AND HIS COOL DEMEANOR I AM IN SHAMBLES 🫠🫠 and it made revali LAUGH

revali, the very prideful, very arrogant, very cocky revali LAUGHED AND SMILED 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹😭😭😭😭😭 THOSE ARE MY BABIESSSSSSS (revali having a soft spot for tulin is my new favorite thing)

like idk I’m glad the new sage was tulin and not teba. like sidon being the new water sage makes sense, I’m glad they didn’t introduce another zora or anything but besides sidon revali was my favorite and I didn’t learn about tulin till totk BUT tulin has this youthful innocence and endearing confidence that just makes me feel like I’ve known him forever (when I tell you his little intro cutscene in totk made me tear up… it’s so pure and so wholesome 🥹)

tulin just has this little shounen protagonist energy and I love it so (it fits with his va being the voice of killua who —while I’ve never watched hxh— I know is a shounen protagonist) and he just has such a big heart and just thinking about how he now holds revali’s bow just got to me man

like……….

revali would be so proud of tulin if he could see him now, and that made me tear up. I love these two so much, other than sidon these two are my absolute favorites and thinking about the connection they got to have for those few moments in aoc got to me

also this all came up bc I was listening to colgera’s theme and how dragon roost, molgera, rito village AND the vibe of revali’s theme were all mixed in there. truly legendary it’ll be an iconic theme in the future I know it

man wind temple got hands…. video games man 🫠🥹

#zelda.txt

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