The Shonen World Will Never Have Another Big Three
In the mid-2000s, shonen fans began to hear about the establishment of the Big Three: Masashi Kishimoto. Naruto, This is Tite Kubo’s place brush, and Eiichiro Oda One piece. Three manga exist and run in Shonen Jump Magazine at the same time, are famous for their worldwide popularity and length, and prominently appear on the covers. They weren’t the biggest sellers of the magazine, but they were the people who knew them, mainly because of their equally adapted anime.
Years later, manga fans have attempted to enter the present day series in hopes of crowning a new Big Three. For the shonen people, trying to follow in recent years has been Kōhei Horikoshi’s masterpiece. My High School Hero and Gege Akutami’s action-horror series Jujutsu Kaisen. Like the legendary trio before them, the two are linked by existence and popularity at the same time, and end up close: Horikoshi closed the book My Hero last August, when This is the place for Jujutsu the final chapter will drop on September 30. When all is said and done, have either of these two truly earned the status recommended to them in their communities? Well…no, not really.
That’s what he said they are bad; I enjoyed reading and watching what I did in both over the years. At their best, they’re both compelling stories that put a fun spin on the kind of tropes they’re playing with, and you can see why they were picked up for anime adaptation. If they are properly informed, their individual superiority can be high. (Second My Hero movie, 2019 Heroes Rise, it has interesting, surprising things going on.) But their successive appearances aren’t quite as surprising, lightning-in-a-bottle moments as their predecessors, and that’s a big reason why they’re not really anything else. a pair of excellent shonen stories that could cut a quarter of their length and be stronger for it.
When you get down to it, My Hero High School he just rode the burgeoning superhero wave of the 2010s that moved away from the MCU, into the (mostly) endless “new hero” market that Marvel and DC weren’t fully embracing. New Justice he went off the air for the first time. In as good a way as possible, it is equivalent to Japan and Sky High since almost two full decades ago. Jujutsu Kaisen is in the same boat: horror never goes out of style, and there have been series that are well regarded as Tokyo Ghoul again Attack on Titan that helped lay the groundwork. (Anime-wise, both of them The Titan adapted by the animation studio MAPPA, which is also involved in the material.) In the same way you can tell that Horikoshi loves certain cape comics, it would be easy to see what influenced Akutami, such as Hunter x Hunter, Bleach, again Naruto. The Big Three of the 2000s had their own influence, but they were also trendsetters who continued to inspire future creators in clear and direct ways.
The same can be said anywhere My Hero or Jujutsu are they not widely used in the species they belong to? There’s no doubt that this is a popular series, as explained by the marketers and arena fighters fired by Bandai Namco, but in an era where anything can or wants to be a franchise, that doesn’t mean as much as it did 20 years ago. And yes, you will find a Gojo reference in the comic Miles Morales or the single Megan Thee Stallion, but what kind of legacy will these two manga leave us? What can the next generation take from the stories of Deku Midoriya and Yuji Itadori that is different from them see?
The thing about the Big Three is that it was a unique moment, rooted in a time that will never really exist again. It happened through a combination of many things, one of which is shonen medium being big enough, but not. so The main thing is that things can easily get lost in the printing process. It is a problem with the state of our current media in general; How many times do people talk about not knowing something exists until it comes incredibly close to being removed or ignored because it failed to find an audience? Under different circumstances, it is easy to imagine either My Hero or Jujutsu they can be ignored and end prematurely if something else has caught the attention of the fans. Not really Bleach, Naruto, or One pieceand much of that can be owed to the block of Cartoon Network’s Toonami and Fox’s 4KidsTV in the mid-2000s. One piece premiered in 2004, then jumped ship to Toonami in 2005 (the same year Naruto began airing), and A brush in 2006. These two networks are doing heavy lifting in the west to help them become the juggernauts they are. In contrast, My Hero it’s the only one of these two modern anime that will be broadcast on actual television instead of just getting Crunchyroll drops every week and going to DVD or another streamer.
Most of this current shonen boom is covered in time: My Hero High School it started in 2014 as manga and anime were becoming more popular here in the west. At that time Jujutsu Kaisen arriving on the scene in 2018, the west began to openly embrace both these structures. Bookstores began to build up their manga stock and make them more prominent, while anime spread from Crunchyroll to Netflix and other broadcasters, not to mention the theatrical release of big movies like Promare again Demon Slayer. My Hero again Jujutsu popular in Japan, but outside of their home country (and especially the US), they were a revelation, helped even more by their ease of access, legal or otherwise.
If there is My influence A hero again This is the place for Jujutsu they were different from them, to help a society that was leaking and bursting. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Twitter leakers will reveal the events of the next chapter that will hit Shonen Jump on Sunday, providing screenshots and page-by-page summaries. These were events for them, and if you don’t want to be offended, the internet will tell you that these are the breaks. The main plot and character changes of both the series have been spoiled for a few days, and it will be trending immediately once the great moment was sent. This was such an epidemic that a couple of leakers in Japan were arrested in February, which caused some to step back for a while while the heat died down, but there is no doubt that they will return for another, ongoing series. .
Again, there is none My High School Hero or Jujutsu Kaisen they are bad; even if they go up a lot. But the shonen community has done more harm than good by trying to put it on the same level as the manga community that has managed to endure to this day, and has firmly entrenched itself in the history of the medium and animation as a whole. But there is nothing wrong with being a completely solid material; in fact, I would say that both series are ultimately perfect as a whole. Sometimes, it’s good not to be the best.
But if you are a power leveller who is absolutely requirements supporting something as second coming… well, it seems Kagarachi it’s there and ready to shine.
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