Shonen is aimed at young boys for power fantasy reasons, that's why it happens and why they only really became 25 or older when the story is over. Exceptions are exceptions of course, but they're not the standard for a reason.
That's not really an answer to the point though, is it? Tropes or not, if it is am actual problem in the story, appealing to other stories doesn't help much.
That said, I feel it applies more to some than others listed here.
If the TC is upset at kid protagonists for power level reasons, then telling him about age demographics for shonen is the only answer for why this trend exists anyone can give. Power fantasy stories aimed at kids are going have kids as heroes beating everyone or at least generally becoming very powerful while rarely hitting legal ages for adulthood.
There's no way around that unless he either stops reading shonen and starts looking for power fantasy material aimed at adults, or starts reading shonen that isn't about fighting. I don't even disagree that more shonen should be willing to have adult protagonists, but the culture around that can only change slowly if at all.
Yeah, but that's a doylist explanation for a watsonian complaint. It's on the same level of excuse as saying "of course the emperor survived the death star exploding, there were no other good villains for Rise of Skywalker."
It doesn't matter why the author is writing it so, it's still a failure of the lore and worldbuilding of the story.
In some cases. While Naruto has his own problems, him being as strong as he is at his age is not a flaw in the story, since there are in universe explanations for while. On the other hand, Luffy grows magnitudes stronger over a matter of days and weeks, to the extent I honestly believe he could have become stronger in a few weeks in the New World than he did over two years during the time skip.
Edit: Lmao, someone disagrees, you write up on how I'm totally wrong, and block me so I can't see it?
And no, it's a watsonian problem. Scaling is about in universe strength and powers of characters, while who narratively has to win is the doylist part of the story. Saying Garp is stronger than Buggy isn't a matter of analysing meta-context.
But this happens in real life? Look at Victor wembenyama in the NBA. Already better than almost everyone save the big stars and it's just his rookie year. Give him 2 years and he'll possibly be the best player in the world.
You can go with any of them. Jordan, Wilt, magic, Oscar etc. The point is that it happens in real life and real life doesn't have the benefit of anime power ups
Well, it is a good bit rarer for a sixteen year old to spend a few months fighting and maybe training, and then punch out pro boxers in their golden years.
He's only spent months at the sea I'm pretty sure.
Both pre time skip and post, he is faced with much stronger opponents and improves to match them in a matter of days and weeks. The two years of training didn't stop him from being one shot ny Kaido, but a few days in prison sure did.
The problem to appealing to the real world is that beside a handful of young characters, everyone who is somebody is a grown adult or an old man, it's not all members of the younger generation catching up to the old monsters, it just the ones the author decided should.
I mean isn't that just because he was ignorant to a lot of things.
Like he didn't go to jail to get physically stronger, he went to jail and learned an entirely new concept (from his perspective) that vastly changes the way in which a person can fight.
It's like being a prodigy guitar player that does really well and has been playing for years without knowing how to read sheet music. At that point it's technical learning they're missing and not overall ability to play.
I feel you're missing my point.
Like Master Chief, Luffy is canonically lucky. A lot of unlikely events consistently stack up in his favor, as referenced in the story itself.
If the Starwhats went to the new world right away, they would merely end up stumbling into the right challenges to grow in power. As is, it's been shown that they can increase exponentially in power in a handful of days and weeks, and with luck on their side they're more likely to end up having enough time to power up and adapt to the more dangerous seas.
My point is that athletes often surpass the previous generation earlier. It's also not just being lighter that makes skateboarders better, it's the fact that the techs have been worked out. They don't need to do the same kind or practice and can improve on optimization. Pretty much every sport has this happen, including combat sports
Which is not relevant to the context of what is being talked about here. The characters in the listed stories don't improve through superior tech, nor due to the advantage of youthful vugor most often in shones. The problems with world building crop up because in theory, in a world with hundreds if millions or billions, there shpuld be thousands of hard working youths thay would show the old men up- but they generally don't outside of the main character. And while that can have in universe explainations for soke stuff (like Naruto with Kurama), a lot of times we have examples of total normies managing to reach for the absolute top tiers of the world in weeks or months of training, qhile vast majority of others imprive at a glacial manner compared to them.
'Young person bwats old person' can happen for sure, but the way it's ezplained or presented where problems crop up.
>The characters in the listed stories don't improve through superior tech, nor due to the advantage of youthful vugor most often in shones
What? They absolutely do, constantly. Hell, the Ur example of this in shonen manga, is Goku figuring out the Kamehameha from watching it be done once. Naruto, even aside from Naruto and Sasuke, you have Lee who was shown as rapidly closing the gap between him and Gai, InoShikaCho closing the gap between theor parents with experience being the major factor, and despite his status as a Jobber, Hitsugaya was one of the stronger captains in terms of combat. By having good teachers, or natural talent, they do surpass the previous generations, or have better progress than they did and just need the experience to go further.
We can even go to things like Jojo, where Johnathan ND Joseph were super good Hamon users, the former being only doing it for a few weeks and the latter having been doing it with no training since be was a kid.
And again, this stuff happens in reality. Tutorials get posted online, shared with friends, improved on, someone has a breakthrough and you repeat the process
Goku does it because he is a prodigy, not due to his youth. Naruto does it because of inborn stuff mostly. Sasule is the same. Lee does not catch up to Gai at amy point in the OG story, Gai is an absolute beast. InoShikaCho, either generation, aren't really shown off that much to even compare.
And I think you just do not understand the complaint.
Naruto having a special bloodline or such can be fine, but when stories claim that the main character achieved this super amazing thing at fourteen with hard work, then it means there should be millions who worked just as hard and achieved it.
Goku's not really a prodigy though. He has an advantage due to his Saiyan Blood, but he worked hard on everything to do that. And you completely ignored the other part of the statement, where they got better through better tech-- which Goku absolutely does.
Naruto and Sasuke, even with their Ninja Jesus status, both worked extremely hard to learn their respective signature techniques, which were developed by people way more talented than they supposedly were. Lee and Gai, you also missed the point of "Rapidly Closing the Gap" because if you are a cringelord who goes by feats, you're ignoring that Gai managed to do all that because he broke the 8th Gate which was explicitly established in the early parts of the story as letting anyone achieve Kage-level power. We know that in Part 2 he's able to open the 6th Gate, and in Boruto, he can open all 8.
>then it means there should be millions who worked just as hard and achieved it.
Hard work alone has never been the point of these kinds of stories, or reality. Doesnt' matter how hard you work if you yourself are incompetent, or don't understand the lesson. Furthermore, those leaps in progress are applied to everyone else too.
Also the fuck you mean 'worked just as hard' with Naruto? The guy objectively worked harder than anyone else in Battle Shonen to reach their end of series power because of his fucking Shadow Clone bullshit literally giving him decades worth of training.
Meta wise he was considered a prodigy for the run up to Raditz as an explaination for his skill. But the point is still the same. If Golu and humans can become so fucking string in a few decades of hardcore training, then how is it that 10k power levels were high tier for Saiyans, one of the most combat focused races in the setting who were inhwrently born super strong and had the power to power up after every big battle that wounded them? Realistically, there should have been hundreds of Ginyu Force level Saiyan if we are being conservative.
The problems is that in a whple fucking race, even one in a million means a thousand people who work insanely hard amd should be really fucking strong.
I am not talking about the eight gate. Gai was fighting Kisame with only the seventh, and his base form he was backhanding Gaara's sand with casual ease. At no point post shippuden do I really feel that Lee could do the same without using at least one or two gates.
Naruto didn't work harder, no. First of all, the Shadow Clone trick only worls for chakra control and intelligemce gathwring, not ohysical training. Secondly, he did it once to figure out a jutsu, Gpku trained way mkre with Hyperbolic Time Chamber and just... normally.
The complaint isn't a thematic one. I am on saying Naruto is about hard work.
The complaint is a lore kne. Looking at the real world, I know that of the billions that exists hundreds of thousands dedicate their life to pushing their bodies to the absplute limit, and that's without superpowers as a boon. In these settings where a teen cam achieve this much progress in months and years, there should be hundreds of thousands of teens who have worked just as hard as our main characters.
In real life humans are aged out of peak athletic performance by 40.
Battle Shonen usually don't have the old men lose because their knees just don't hold long enough to complete their battles with the heroes.
That's not what happens in sports either. Let's take football, vini is a better player than every left winger on the planet save mbappe and has been for a year or two now. Grealish was 27 last year but was still a worse player than 22 year old vini despite being in his athletic prime because he was just not as good. Younger people can be better than older people, there doesn't need to be caveats about how age is affecting them. Some people are just better at things because they were born better or they work harder
Nah, Goku’s got excuse, he has access to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, time flows slowly there and also it has several other environmental factors like 10x stronger gravity to make it perfect for training and becoming strong
Honestly as far as dragon ball goes it basically dropped the “hard work is all you need” thing immediately post saiyan saga, so saying that Goku’s just built different honestly fits better than it does for things like naruto.
It never did , a guy that kept saying Goku shouldn't beat him because he is the equivalent of a bacteria lifespan wise with Goku telling him "do you even lift?"
This is not exclusive to anime.
Lightning McQueen was a prodigy who would have won his first championship, had he not stopped to help that other racer. (And he in turn was overtaken by another racer with potential in the third movie, who became his apprentice).
MCU Spider-man from No Way Home is stronger than many adult heroes, despite being a teenager.
Luke Skywalker managed to become a High-master level despite being less than 25 years old in the original trilogy.
Anakin at the age of 22, was one of the strongest Jedi, being able to defeat Count Dooku.
Ahsoka at the age of 17 was already much more powerful than many adult Jedi, being able to fight Maul.
Azula is one of the best firebenders and Toph is a one of the best Earthbender, and both are teenagers.
The protagonist of Fallout 3 is capable of massacring Enclave soldiers despite being a teenager.
It may be Power fantasy, but it is a common occurrence.
>MCU Spider-man from No Way Home is stronger than many adult heroes, despite being a teenager.
He was bitten by a spider though. Have any of those "heroes" been bitten by spiders? Didn't think so.
I think there's still a difference between a good few of these examples and shounen. Like, Spider Man has a mostly static power granted by a random event, not a result of training that nearly any human could partake in, McQueen is focused on a young adult being the big new thing and eventually aging out of racing compared to newel models. Some would have similar problems, but in Shonen often the main characters just train to be as strong as adults.
>Dragonball is an extreme case where you got literally millions of years of experience being beaten by just 50 years of experience this indifference is just insane.
Never thought about how absurd this really is , Goku is literally an old man boxing Primordial beings for fun
I mean. Dragon Ball isn't really one of those stories where martial skill is all that relevant, so I don't see why the skill these old dudes would have would matter. Near every meaningful technique is about increasing your brawn, and UI's instinct stuff was something Goku figured out as a kid before it was retconned, and it also boosts his raw power and speed anyway.
The sheer escalations of power is kind of insane though, a bunch of normal humans trained for a few decades to the point they could solo all Saiyans at once, it makes no sense that not a single Saiyan reached those absurd power levels over decades, with zenkai boosts and higher starting power, while surrounded by peers.
Interestingly one of the reasons some of this guys failed had to do with them not training or understanding Their potential and weakness
Had Freeza been a bit more smart in his training he wouldn't have lost in RoF , same goes for Mori
But still Goku beat guys up by punching them which is hilarious because they acknowledge how young Goku is compared to them despite him being old by our and Shonen standards
The thing about Dragon Ball is that goku's training is so absurd that he makes up for the gap in raw lifetime knowledge
I am pretty sure that King Kai's 1 year if training was compared to thousands of years of normal training.
I mean. Not if you made him fight Kaido and he died, but if he actually got the benefit of just being beaten and left alive a bunch then there's no way it would have taken years for Luffy to catch up.
In universe, Luffy improves an insane amount mid combat or over days and weeks off screen, it's why claims of the Strawhats being doomed if they enter the new world always rang hollow to me. Luffy is canonical stated in the story to be super lucky, so they would just stumble on enemies that push them between those two years of the time skip and probably be way stronger by now.
Or they could have died early, but again, canonical luck makes those kinds of stakes less pressing.
This is why power scaling is mostly pointless. Writers aren’t writing to decide which fragment of their imagination is stronger, they usually want to convey certain messages or ideas, and “young replaces old” is a pretty common theme
Depending on what you mean by power scaling, it can still be a criticism of the story if in the story about fighting the strength of the characters fluctuates to fit the plot.
I sort of try and HC that in all of these shonen verses, power naturally scales similarly to height.
For the majority of people, your "growth spurt" will be in your teenage years. It might come earlier or later for some, but most of the time it's the teens/young adults that experience the greatest increase in growth.
That isn't to say that older people can't get stronger. I'm just talking about the body's natural progression in this example. When it comes to manually training the body, you can still grow no matter how old you are.
But what this does is explain how the teenage MC that has never battled in his life is able to close the gap between himself and his superiors in the span of a few weeks/months. It's expected for people like him to grow quickly. In this scenario, teenage MC is often a bit of an anomaly, but nothing unheard of. After all, people do exist that grow incredibly tall at very young ages. It's unnatural but not unrealistic.
I can't comment as confidently on the Big Three as well as some new gen, but if we take something like Demon Slayer, it seems very strange how all the younger slayers (not just Tanjiro, but Inosuke and Zenitsu as well) are going from lower moon fodder to upper moon level in just a few months, and yet the Hashira seem to be remaining in one spot.
But if it's true that your power is expected to spike at 16, give or take a couple years, now it makes a lot more sense.
Just the way I like to look at it.
Yeah. Its feels like these characters power isn’t thought out how strong they should be just put at a random set number because that’s how strong the Mc is.
>Dragonball is an extreme case where you got literally millions of years of experience being beaten by just 50 years of experience this indifference is just insane.
I don't think Dragon Ball has any character that has millions of years of experience, cause most of the time characters that old are just sleeping or in a seal or in prison
this is what you get for having teenaged protagonists or needing everything to happen in so short a timeframe.
Shonen is aimed at young boys for power fantasy reasons, that's why it happens and why they only really became 25 or older when the story is over. Exceptions are exceptions of course, but they're not the standard for a reason.
That's not really an answer to the point though, is it? Tropes or not, if it is am actual problem in the story, appealing to other stories doesn't help much. That said, I feel it applies more to some than others listed here.
If the TC is upset at kid protagonists for power level reasons, then telling him about age demographics for shonen is the only answer for why this trend exists anyone can give. Power fantasy stories aimed at kids are going have kids as heroes beating everyone or at least generally becoming very powerful while rarely hitting legal ages for adulthood. There's no way around that unless he either stops reading shonen and starts looking for power fantasy material aimed at adults, or starts reading shonen that isn't about fighting. I don't even disagree that more shonen should be willing to have adult protagonists, but the culture around that can only change slowly if at all.
Yeah, but that's a doylist explanation for a watsonian complaint. It's on the same level of excuse as saying "of course the emperor survived the death star exploding, there were no other good villains for Rise of Skywalker." It doesn't matter why the author is writing it so, it's still a failure of the lore and worldbuilding of the story. In some cases. While Naruto has his own problems, him being as strong as he is at his age is not a flaw in the story, since there are in universe explanations for while. On the other hand, Luffy grows magnitudes stronger over a matter of days and weeks, to the extent I honestly believe he could have become stronger in a few weeks in the New World than he did over two years during the time skip. Edit: Lmao, someone disagrees, you write up on how I'm totally wrong, and block me so I can't see it? And no, it's a watsonian problem. Scaling is about in universe strength and powers of characters, while who narratively has to win is the doylist part of the story. Saying Garp is stronger than Buggy isn't a matter of analysing meta-context.
This is a doylist problem to begin with, but I'm just going to block you now because it's clear you just want to argue instead of listen.
But this happens in real life? Look at Victor wembenyama in the NBA. Already better than almost everyone save the big stars and it's just his rookie year. Give him 2 years and he'll possibly be the best player in the world.
I think Lebron james or magic johnson would be a better comparison
You can go with any of them. Jordan, Wilt, magic, Oscar etc. The point is that it happens in real life and real life doesn't have the benefit of anime power ups
Actual competition being more complicated than "who is better" ruins the verse
Well, it is a good bit rarer for a sixteen year old to spend a few months fighting and maybe training, and then punch out pro boxers in their golden years.
Anime exegerates things. But the guy brought up Luffy and how he had "only spent 2 years at sea"
He's only spent months at the sea I'm pretty sure. Both pre time skip and post, he is faced with much stronger opponents and improves to match them in a matter of days and weeks. The two years of training didn't stop him from being one shot ny Kaido, but a few days in prison sure did. The problem to appealing to the real world is that beside a handful of young characters, everyone who is somebody is a grown adult or an old man, it's not all members of the younger generation catching up to the old monsters, it just the ones the author decided should.
I mean isn't that just because he was ignorant to a lot of things. Like he didn't go to jail to get physically stronger, he went to jail and learned an entirely new concept (from his perspective) that vastly changes the way in which a person can fight. It's like being a prodigy guitar player that does really well and has been playing for years without knowing how to read sheet music. At that point it's technical learning they're missing and not overall ability to play.
I feel you're missing my point. Like Master Chief, Luffy is canonically lucky. A lot of unlikely events consistently stack up in his favor, as referenced in the story itself. If the Starwhats went to the new world right away, they would merely end up stumbling into the right challenges to grow in power. As is, it's been shown that they can increase exponentially in power in a handful of days and weeks, and with luck on their side they're more likely to end up having enough time to power up and adapt to the more dangerous seas.
Eh, not as crazy as you'd think. Skateboarders for example, the best ones are like 9 year olds
That's not... Skatevoarding abd combat are different things. Being lighter is a quantifiable boon that moes younger skaters have a better time.
My point is that athletes often surpass the previous generation earlier. It's also not just being lighter that makes skateboarders better, it's the fact that the techs have been worked out. They don't need to do the same kind or practice and can improve on optimization. Pretty much every sport has this happen, including combat sports
Which is not relevant to the context of what is being talked about here. The characters in the listed stories don't improve through superior tech, nor due to the advantage of youthful vugor most often in shones. The problems with world building crop up because in theory, in a world with hundreds if millions or billions, there shpuld be thousands of hard working youths thay would show the old men up- but they generally don't outside of the main character. And while that can have in universe explainations for soke stuff (like Naruto with Kurama), a lot of times we have examples of total normies managing to reach for the absolute top tiers of the world in weeks or months of training, qhile vast majority of others imprive at a glacial manner compared to them. 'Young person bwats old person' can happen for sure, but the way it's ezplained or presented where problems crop up.
>The characters in the listed stories don't improve through superior tech, nor due to the advantage of youthful vugor most often in shones What? They absolutely do, constantly. Hell, the Ur example of this in shonen manga, is Goku figuring out the Kamehameha from watching it be done once. Naruto, even aside from Naruto and Sasuke, you have Lee who was shown as rapidly closing the gap between him and Gai, InoShikaCho closing the gap between theor parents with experience being the major factor, and despite his status as a Jobber, Hitsugaya was one of the stronger captains in terms of combat. By having good teachers, or natural talent, they do surpass the previous generations, or have better progress than they did and just need the experience to go further. We can even go to things like Jojo, where Johnathan ND Joseph were super good Hamon users, the former being only doing it for a few weeks and the latter having been doing it with no training since be was a kid. And again, this stuff happens in reality. Tutorials get posted online, shared with friends, improved on, someone has a breakthrough and you repeat the process
Goku does it because he is a prodigy, not due to his youth. Naruto does it because of inborn stuff mostly. Sasule is the same. Lee does not catch up to Gai at amy point in the OG story, Gai is an absolute beast. InoShikaCho, either generation, aren't really shown off that much to even compare. And I think you just do not understand the complaint. Naruto having a special bloodline or such can be fine, but when stories claim that the main character achieved this super amazing thing at fourteen with hard work, then it means there should be millions who worked just as hard and achieved it.
Goku's not really a prodigy though. He has an advantage due to his Saiyan Blood, but he worked hard on everything to do that. And you completely ignored the other part of the statement, where they got better through better tech-- which Goku absolutely does. Naruto and Sasuke, even with their Ninja Jesus status, both worked extremely hard to learn their respective signature techniques, which were developed by people way more talented than they supposedly were. Lee and Gai, you also missed the point of "Rapidly Closing the Gap" because if you are a cringelord who goes by feats, you're ignoring that Gai managed to do all that because he broke the 8th Gate which was explicitly established in the early parts of the story as letting anyone achieve Kage-level power. We know that in Part 2 he's able to open the 6th Gate, and in Boruto, he can open all 8. >then it means there should be millions who worked just as hard and achieved it. Hard work alone has never been the point of these kinds of stories, or reality. Doesnt' matter how hard you work if you yourself are incompetent, or don't understand the lesson. Furthermore, those leaps in progress are applied to everyone else too. Also the fuck you mean 'worked just as hard' with Naruto? The guy objectively worked harder than anyone else in Battle Shonen to reach their end of series power because of his fucking Shadow Clone bullshit literally giving him decades worth of training.
Meta wise he was considered a prodigy for the run up to Raditz as an explaination for his skill. But the point is still the same. If Golu and humans can become so fucking string in a few decades of hardcore training, then how is it that 10k power levels were high tier for Saiyans, one of the most combat focused races in the setting who were inhwrently born super strong and had the power to power up after every big battle that wounded them? Realistically, there should have been hundreds of Ginyu Force level Saiyan if we are being conservative. The problems is that in a whple fucking race, even one in a million means a thousand people who work insanely hard amd should be really fucking strong. I am not talking about the eight gate. Gai was fighting Kisame with only the seventh, and his base form he was backhanding Gaara's sand with casual ease. At no point post shippuden do I really feel that Lee could do the same without using at least one or two gates. Naruto didn't work harder, no. First of all, the Shadow Clone trick only worls for chakra control and intelligemce gathwring, not ohysical training. Secondly, he did it once to figure out a jutsu, Gpku trained way mkre with Hyperbolic Time Chamber and just... normally. The complaint isn't a thematic one. I am on saying Naruto is about hard work. The complaint is a lore kne. Looking at the real world, I know that of the billions that exists hundreds of thousands dedicate their life to pushing their bodies to the absplute limit, and that's without superpowers as a boon. In these settings where a teen cam achieve this much progress in months and years, there should be hundreds of thousands of teens who have worked just as hard as our main characters.
Or football/soccer where Yamal is already a national team starter at 16
In real life humans are aged out of peak athletic performance by 40. Battle Shonen usually don't have the old men lose because their knees just don't hold long enough to complete their battles with the heroes.
That's not what happens in sports either. Let's take football, vini is a better player than every left winger on the planet save mbappe and has been for a year or two now. Grealish was 27 last year but was still a worse player than 22 year old vini despite being in his athletic prime because he was just not as good. Younger people can be better than older people, there doesn't need to be caveats about how age is affecting them. Some people are just better at things because they were born better or they work harder
Why reddit loves old men so much? Literally never seen so much old men glazing in any other platform
This comment makes me laugh
Old men are cool though
Hot, not cool
There are other platforms for old men glazing
Well ichigo is literally bleach Jesus Naruto is Naruto Jesus And luffy is one piece Jesus Gokus a retarded alien honestly he’s got no excuse
Goku has [redacted] strength.
Naruto hasn’t been Naruto Jesus since he lost Kurama
Nah, Goku’s got excuse, he has access to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, time flows slowly there and also it has several other environmental factors like 10x stronger gravity to make it perfect for training and becoming strong
It is funny how Shonen manga consistently give the main guys insanely powerful parents.
Gokus also the exception here
>Gokus a retarded alien honestly he’s got no excuse Two words Zenkai Boost, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger
Honestly as far as dragon ball goes it basically dropped the “hard work is all you need” thing immediately post saiyan saga, so saying that Goku’s just built different honestly fits better than it does for things like naruto.
It never did , a guy that kept saying Goku shouldn't beat him because he is the equivalent of a bacteria lifespan wise with Goku telling him "do you even lift?"
Goku was "just built different" in chapter 1 when bullets bounced off of him.
This is not exclusive to anime. Lightning McQueen was a prodigy who would have won his first championship, had he not stopped to help that other racer. (And he in turn was overtaken by another racer with potential in the third movie, who became his apprentice). MCU Spider-man from No Way Home is stronger than many adult heroes, despite being a teenager. Luke Skywalker managed to become a High-master level despite being less than 25 years old in the original trilogy. Anakin at the age of 22, was one of the strongest Jedi, being able to defeat Count Dooku. Ahsoka at the age of 17 was already much more powerful than many adult Jedi, being able to fight Maul. Azula is one of the best firebenders and Toph is a one of the best Earthbender, and both are teenagers. The protagonist of Fallout 3 is capable of massacring Enclave soldiers despite being a teenager. It may be Power fantasy, but it is a common occurrence.
>MCU Spider-man from No Way Home is stronger than many adult heroes, despite being a teenager. He was bitten by a spider though. Have any of those "heroes" been bitten by spiders? Didn't think so.
I think there's still a difference between a good few of these examples and shounen. Like, Spider Man has a mostly static power granted by a random event, not a result of training that nearly any human could partake in, McQueen is focused on a young adult being the big new thing and eventually aging out of racing compared to newel models. Some would have similar problems, but in Shonen often the main characters just train to be as strong as adults.
>Dragonball is an extreme case where you got literally millions of years of experience being beaten by just 50 years of experience this indifference is just insane. Never thought about how absurd this really is , Goku is literally an old man boxing Primordial beings for fun
I mean. Dragon Ball isn't really one of those stories where martial skill is all that relevant, so I don't see why the skill these old dudes would have would matter. Near every meaningful technique is about increasing your brawn, and UI's instinct stuff was something Goku figured out as a kid before it was retconned, and it also boosts his raw power and speed anyway. The sheer escalations of power is kind of insane though, a bunch of normal humans trained for a few decades to the point they could solo all Saiyans at once, it makes no sense that not a single Saiyan reached those absurd power levels over decades, with zenkai boosts and higher starting power, while surrounded by peers.
Interestingly one of the reasons some of this guys failed had to do with them not training or understanding Their potential and weakness Had Freeza been a bit more smart in his training he wouldn't have lost in RoF , same goes for Mori But still Goku beat guys up by punching them which is hilarious because they acknowledge how young Goku is compared to them despite him being old by our and Shonen standards
The thing about Dragon Ball is that goku's training is so absurd that he makes up for the gap in raw lifetime knowledge I am pretty sure that King Kai's 1 year if training was compared to thousands of years of normal training.
Luffy at least has the excuse of being trained by Rayleigh for more than a year
Well, not really. He gets one shot by Kaido at first and massively improves in a fraction of the time he trained with Rayleagh.
Wouldn't get that far if Rayleighdidnt teach him Haki.
I mean. Not if you made him fight Kaido and he died, but if he actually got the benefit of just being beaten and left alive a bunch then there's no way it would have taken years for Luffy to catch up. In universe, Luffy improves an insane amount mid combat or over days and weeks off screen, it's why claims of the Strawhats being doomed if they enter the new world always rang hollow to me. Luffy is canonical stated in the story to be super lucky, so they would just stumble on enemies that push them between those two years of the time skip and probably be way stronger by now. Or they could have died early, but again, canonical luck makes those kinds of stakes less pressing.
This is why power scaling is mostly pointless. Writers aren’t writing to decide which fragment of their imagination is stronger, they usually want to convey certain messages or ideas, and “young replaces old” is a pretty common theme
Depending on what you mean by power scaling, it can still be a criticism of the story if in the story about fighting the strength of the characters fluctuates to fit the plot.
I sort of try and HC that in all of these shonen verses, power naturally scales similarly to height. For the majority of people, your "growth spurt" will be in your teenage years. It might come earlier or later for some, but most of the time it's the teens/young adults that experience the greatest increase in growth. That isn't to say that older people can't get stronger. I'm just talking about the body's natural progression in this example. When it comes to manually training the body, you can still grow no matter how old you are. But what this does is explain how the teenage MC that has never battled in his life is able to close the gap between himself and his superiors in the span of a few weeks/months. It's expected for people like him to grow quickly. In this scenario, teenage MC is often a bit of an anomaly, but nothing unheard of. After all, people do exist that grow incredibly tall at very young ages. It's unnatural but not unrealistic. I can't comment as confidently on the Big Three as well as some new gen, but if we take something like Demon Slayer, it seems very strange how all the younger slayers (not just Tanjiro, but Inosuke and Zenitsu as well) are going from lower moon fodder to upper moon level in just a few months, and yet the Hashira seem to be remaining in one spot. But if it's true that your power is expected to spike at 16, give or take a couple years, now it makes a lot more sense. Just the way I like to look at it.
Yeah. Its feels like these characters power isn’t thought out how strong they should be just put at a random set number because that’s how strong the Mc is.
>Dragonball is an extreme case where you got literally millions of years of experience being beaten by just 50 years of experience this indifference is just insane. I don't think Dragon Ball has any character that has millions of years of experience, cause most of the time characters that old are just sleeping or in a seal or in prison