On the philosophy and legacy of Dragon Ball and the shonen genre.
As Wisecrack illustrates, Dragon Ball is not just a high-action brawler modeled after Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies; in essence, Dragon Ball aimed to teach Buddhist lessons of compassion and open-mindedness through its emulation of Journey to the West. Though a lot of people are getting buff at the gym, the aesthetic and ethics of Dragon Ball and the shonen titles heavily inspired by it (namely One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach) lie not in becoming the “very best” at something so you can beat an overpowered villain who’s vaguely trying to conquer or destroy the world. It’s not about being singularly focused on your goal. It’s about all the sidetracks along the way. It’s about the people you meet and learn about and helping them to solve their problems. It’s about relating your strife to the world around you. It’s about having new and surprising experiences that make you question your place in the world. In my opinion, people who use shonen to prop up their missions to excel at physical training or self-defense techniques in order to achieve a specific body type or become popular are not just shallow. Their super-controlled, super-individualist mindset is antithetical to Eastern philosophy and plays exactly into the hands of Western media values. They live in a space where flexibility, doubt, wonder, and diversity are undervalued or non-existent. Here, your unique talents shouldn’t be valued and put to good use in reciprocity with others – instead, you need to mold yourself into what the social structure deems to be the most valuable asset, because you know that achieving social dominance is the only thing that matters when you can’t trust anyone else to have your back.
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Already Ridiculous 