Anime Discussion Thread - Page 6213

But they're not outliers, there's a ton of them, it's not just one or two or a dozen, it's a fairly significant chunk. At least i can't personally agree with calling them outliers when they're not rare and they don't differ from a norm, even if they aren't the majority. I don't have any actual statistics but i genuinely doubt that they make up some miniscule amount like sub 5% of the series in the demographics that'd make it appropriate to call those outliers.

I would much rather say that certain tropes are more common in stories written for certain demographics, with the key word being more common, not a constant. A series in the comedy genre must have comedy elements, a series in the adventure genre must have adventure elements. However a series written for the shounen demographic? Well, there's no rules, there's no restrictions or must-haves, there's just things that are more common and typically used because they have been found to have a general appeal to the demographic at hand, such as a focus on action, but not having a focus on action or even being completely different isn't odd.
And to some degree that's the usefulness that comes with it, it's just a category, it's different from genres so i see no reason to dilute the meaning of the term by turning it into some half-baked term that just refers to action+adventure series combined, we already have genres to describe that. However by having the demographical categories we get a look into what those demographics like and enjoy, and that's far more meaningful and useful to me. We can see that the shounen demographic tends to really enjoy action shows, but we can also see that there's also a market there for series that are far more grounded and focus on character interaction and inter-personal drama, or even just pure comedy focused series.

Also i did not say that usefulness isn't important for what it's worth, i said that i don't see the need for it to have a use beyond being a category for stories written for a certain audience. That is useful, as written above.

I feel that if the term shounen is truly lost and just becomes a generic word for action/adventure focused series then that is an overall loss for the discussion of the medium. I feel that that'd dilute the ability to talk about the series that are encompassed by this incredibly large demographic. Especially because we already have a term for that, to use your word, "pseudo-genre": 'Battle shounen'. People use this term to specifically talk about those series all the time without diluting or imo ruining the terms other uses because they have another descriptor to make it clear which sub-section of the stories they're talking about. In the same vein one could talk about 'SoL shounen' or 'Romcom shounen' although those terms are rarely if ever use, it's a possibility. But the second shounen as a whole is just used to refer to battle shounens? Well then that option is lost. Then it loses so much of its usefulness as a term if you ask me.

the rainbow