RepresentingWrath
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A month has passed since the day I asked for modern shounen manga recs. In that month I've tried out 20+ shounens. To ease the search, I made up my own criterias of what is a modern shounen. A Japanese manga that is tagged as shounen, came out 2018+, no isekais.
Majority of those shounens is fucking trash. Boring, unimaginative, generic, tropey pieces of trash. It's not about me liking them or disliking them. It's an objective fact. We have five or six stories about assassins, we have three or more stories about onmyoji, gazillion sports shounens about dancing, and so on.
All while themes of the stories are the most predictable crap ever. Oh wow, a story about human-like androids? We should definetely write the whole story around a question of "what is soul, and what makes a human, human." Of course we have to, cause it's so new and unique, no one has done it before.
Oh, we have a middle-aged MC? Yeah, make him act like a highschooler. Put the most blatant, obvious "red and blue oni" trope in your story. Don't forget to kill off a character that readers do not care about, cause deaths make your work mature. Make lots of absurd humor cause you are funny, and you must make your characters act as if all the absurdities are normal, it is also very unique.
Don't you dare make normal people with understandable motivations, every character have to be soooooo deep, deeper than mariana trench. By the way, MC has to gather comrades one by one, MC has to have a squad, and every new member of the squad has to have a sobby backstory. Make the most contrived powers if you are writing a battle shounen. And sometimes, you can even make a manga with a plothole the size of a Mirny's diamond mine, readers are gonna read it anyway.
There are obviously exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean of mediocrity. Welp, at least I understand why there is no new "big three."
Majority of those shounens is fucking trash. Boring, unimaginative, generic, tropey pieces of trash. It's not about me liking them or disliking them. It's an objective fact. We have five or six stories about assassins, we have three or more stories about onmyoji, gazillion sports shounens about dancing, and so on.
All while themes of the stories are the most predictable crap ever. Oh wow, a story about human-like androids? We should definetely write the whole story around a question of "what is soul, and what makes a human, human." Of course we have to, cause it's so new and unique, no one has done it before.
Oh, we have a middle-aged MC? Yeah, make him act like a highschooler. Put the most blatant, obvious "red and blue oni" trope in your story. Don't forget to kill off a character that readers do not care about, cause deaths make your work mature. Make lots of absurd humor cause you are funny, and you must make your characters act as if all the absurdities are normal, it is also very unique.
Don't you dare make normal people with understandable motivations, every character have to be soooooo deep, deeper than mariana trench. By the way, MC has to gather comrades one by one, MC has to have a squad, and every new member of the squad has to have a sobby backstory. Make the most contrived powers if you are writing a battle shounen. And sometimes, you can even make a manga with a plothole the size of a Mirny's diamond mine, readers are gonna read it anyway.
There are obviously exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean of mediocrity. Welp, at least I understand why there is no new "big three."
More work for Naruto fanfics.
