Shounen is a demograpgic, battle shounen is a genre, most people refers to battle shounen as simply "shounen", it's that simple It's when the arguments goes about if a certain work is shounen or senien that things goes really silly
One day I might actually engage seriously on the topic of Sonic stories. My main problem is there is just so much to tackle. The discussions rarely go past surface level topics such as serious or light hearted plots. My problem has always been that Sonic has just never been that well written compared to something like Persona. Now Persona is certainly not perfectly written and has many problems but is light years ahead of Sonic. And the problem is that's the standard. If you are serious about making a good story, that's the base line. I think it would be most fruitful to start with Sonic's successes in narrative. Gamma on SA1. The rivalry between Sonic and Shadow in SA2. But analysing the plots in such intricate detail is intimidating.
I think that is far more leg work than Sega is willing to commit. Personally speaking, I'd either make AU's that focused on this stuff so that it doesn't contradict the main series, but that's just me. Most Sonic stories are pretty simple in nature, so there's not much to analyze or interpret without headcanon territory. Sure, things like SA2 go much deeper than the norm for a series like Sonic, but it's also something you can find in other games too.
Sonic stories were always relatively simple, but I none-the-less find the lore and world building interesting. Each game is kind of a piece of the puzzle and that's the main attraction for me, but the problem is that oh so often those pieces don't fit that well together either. Primarily because they're not even meant to in many cases; the story still serves as a justification for gameplay. It's why I've always kind of been a fan of comic/TV canons that use game elements, because they take the basic ideas and connect them to something more interesting... but then we get into the problem that no one alternative media is itself without major flaws either. To summarize for each different incarnation... - AOSTH is a parody and not meant to be much like the games at all. Best enjoyed for exactly what it was then forgotten. Though, this was my first non-game sonic media. - SATAM is, to me, a really interesting premise filled with a lot of characters and ideas that I like, but it deviates so far from the games it might as well be a separate property. I'm still in the camp that wishes the show finished, but I don't even entirely blame SEGA for cutting it short since it was so far off from everything. - Fleetway is a truly fascinating but bizarre mix of game lore that just goes off the rails because it can. I'm not that partial to it, but I respect it all the same. - Archie... I followed it to fill the gap that SATAM left in my heart, but stayed to see how they attempted to integrate game canon. We all know how odd Penders weird Star Trek fanfics in Sonic lore could get, but I did get my enjoyment from them, and it at least gave Ian and many fan creators their first chance to go pro. Rarely is it ever truly good, but I will have always nostalgia for what things it tried to do. Ashame that its original storylines will never ever be resolved, but the canon was held together by threads anyway. - Underground - I'd rather forget this one exists, honestly. At least we got Knuckles on TV in English early. - Manga... I respect what lore it created, but I don't care for the premise at all. It's a weird gag comic and not much more, even though it has ties to the original creative team. - OVA, animated Metal Sonic is precious and should always be protected, and Knuckles gets a nice hat, but little else matters with this incarnation. - Sonic X... It at least tries to add some extra lore to the adventure era, and has reasonably faithful depictions of the characters, having the most direct input from Sonic Team themselves, but the humans definitely take away from the game's premise, and the 2 worlds concept was never used in game lore. I still love the JPN version, but can't say it's held up much for most fans. Oh well. - Boom... The games are terrible. The character writing is actually... really good? Again, total parody, but self aware enough to stop caring and just let the voice cast go all out, and it makes it vastly more entertaining to watch than the show has any right to be. The dialogue is often brilliant, honestly. But again, no proper lore whatsoever. - Films, fun nostalgic inducing romps for the mainstream audience. I like the 2 movies, but have little else to say beyond that. Glad they're helping the brand stay relevant and ended up being well made. - IDW, this is the only one that attempts to sync with game lore. Ian is good at references, but I've generally not been too impressed with most of the story. If rumors of all the mandates are true, they actively hurt things I like about other takes on the lore, but oh well. Still, it's not a terrible product either. Just... not my favorite. I just find IDW Sonic to be passable, but generic and kind of boring. - Prime, very mixed for me. New cast is solid, but not my favorite either. Sonic's new VA is very good. Story quality is all over the place. I'll give it a full rewatch when Season 3 finally drops and wraps it up then probably throw it in the pile and move on. I like and dislike things about each, and I admit, they've kept me invested in the character past what should've been Sonic's expiration date, though I'm not exactly a normal fan either for following most of these as much as I have. Even with the games, I only really like the interconnected elements of Sonic 2-3K, CD's loose otherwordly premise, and SA1 and SA2. No other Sonic game story has ever gripped me in a meaningful way, sadly. Maybe Mania... And of all of those, Sonic 3 & Knuckles still remains the perfect Sonic story in terms of lore and simple but engaging visual storytelling through game progression. Honestly, I probably enjoy headcanoning the order of the games more than I enjoy most lore from the games themselves.
I haven't gotten back to @Zephyr yet (it's a long post with a lot of points to address), but I can respond to this. No... comics, animation, and music are not genres; they're mediums. We're not talking about mediums, we're talking about genres. Anime is a genre, it originated in Japan, but can be made anywhere. Genres nest inside each other and overlap. Some genres are huge umbrellas and some have a highly-specific scope. Lets use another huge genre in another medium as a point of reference: Jazz is a large over-arching genre within the medium of music. It was invented in America by African Americans. It incorporates "blue notes", a strong history of improvisation, and rhythmic techniques & influences from African/African American culture and music. It includes many sub-genres such as Swing, Dixieland, Fusion, and Soul. Similarly: Anime is a large over-arching genre within the medium of animation. It was invented in Japan. It incorporates a distinctive visual style, limited animation, and storytelling techniques & influences from Japanese culture and tradition. It includes many sub-genres such as Slice-Of-Life, """Fantasy Martial Arts""", Magical Girls, and Isekai. Lets flip it around! Is Jazz not a genre? Jazz originates in the US from African Americans but Japanese people make Jazz music all the time! Does that mean that Japanese Jazz isn't "real Jazz" because it's made in Japan? Why do the Japanese get some special claim on anime that African Americans don't get on Jazz? "There's a separate discussion about how (often) Japanese musicians insists on Jazz being a musical style and thus that they get to claim they make Jazz. I think that's stupid and wrong, but the problem here is you went a step further and claimed it a genre." You can say "Sister Marian" by T-Square is a "Japanese Jazz Fusion" song or that "The Last Airbender" is a "Western Fantasy Martial Arts Anime" if you want, but that doesn't negate the fact that "Sister Marian" is a Jazz song and "The Last Airbender" is an anime, despite them being produced in a different country and from a different culture than their overarching genre's origins.
I interpreted it as meaning that in the end, everyone (in the world) will eventually die, so the point of the story is about harmony between humanity and nature as that’s what will endure rather than the actions of individuals. Also to the, “is anime a genre” discussion: No, it’s just a term to refer to cartoons produced in Japan (to the Japanese, it just means any animation). It’s like if we called Belgian comics a genre. The jazz comparison is not good. It’s not an authoritative source, but even Wikipedia addresses this: “As a type of animation, anime is an art form that comprises many genres found in other mediums; it is sometimes mistakenly classified as a genre itself. In Japanese, the term anime is used to refer to all animated works, regardless of style or origin.”
what distinct visual style are you telling me Monster looks the same as Pingu in the City and Umaru what limited animation does it stop being anime when the movement becomes smooth? what storytelling techniques avatar the last airbender if anything feels the most western in its storytelling, aren't you yourself giving the argument it's not anime, now it's not a genre, it's a medium. the medium is "japanese produced animation". the term is a loanword that comes to replace the earlier term "japanimation". can you guess what "japanimation" specifically meant? by making it about an art style, you're boxing it in an untenable way. because you can always find a different anime or manga that has a different art style from what you mean. what most american productions that claim to be anime are really meaning, for marketing purposes, is "we're not a cartoon, because cartoon sounds childish, and we're serious". No surprise that examples that get used for this are last airbender, korra, castlevania, which are claiming to look more serious like a dragonball or berserk by contrast to something like spongebob. doesn't this mean osomatsu-kun isn't an anime though, because it's cartoonish, and we're establishing anime means "it looks serious"? the only definition that can withstand all the variety in the medium is, "anime is a japanese production". in turn, by necessity, that means it has to exclude what isn't japanese. it's a geographical descriptor, like how champaigne comes from the region of champaigne. Your comparison to Jazz is absurd, because Jazz is a genre, not a medium. It's got a ton of subgenres, all of which are recognisable as Jazz. And while it's famously originated in black American culture, it was never defined by its geography; there's been jazz composers worldwide for a century. By your logic, Avatar TLA and Chargeman Ken are recognisable as the same wide-reaching genre. I'd say they are- if the genre is called "animation". Oops, that's a medium. You know what would be a music comparison? Saying Americans can make K-Pop, despite the "K" in "K-Pop" literally standing for "Korean". There's no shame to this, it's not like saying Avatar isn't anime means it's bad. "Anime" doesn't mean "serious", doesn't mean "good", doesn't mean "specific art style", because you can find anime that don't match any of that very easily, every season. If this is refused and impossible to understand inherently, the rest of the discussion is moot. You can't talk about how much should Sonic take influences from X or Y if you're going to insist in a definition of X or Y that makes no sense, is untenable, and unagreed by most.
It might be easier to claim american productions styled like some anime can be treated as "western animation inspired by japanese animation". Long title? Weak meaning? Well, given the circunstances, it might be the best term to it all without triggering masses of anime fans worldwide.
I would have quit Chaos Island if it wasn't for how beautiful the OST of that island is. I also love how the music becomes more hopeful and uplifting as it progresses. Which definitely wasn't intended to fit my mood of 'thank God this horrible game experience is increasingly coming to an end' but it works!
Not only do I find the tone/east vs west stuff wrongheaded, I find it doesn't really get to the heart of the issue with Sonic storytelling. My problem re: Sonic storytelling is that people (both the fanbase and ST itself) always look outside the series to find handhold instead of looking inward. They don't think enough about what challenges would be interesting for the character of Sonic to encounter, what tone/artstyle fits his design and character the best, or who would be an interesting foil to him. They usually just take ideas from other series without much thought on how to integrate them. For an example: Should an athletic character design like Sonic star in a story revolving almost entirely around dialogue with no action whatsoever? The answer is obviously that you should shy away from something like that if you can help it, so Sonic Colors is out and so is stuff like Sonic Boom. Fantastic sequences like Sonic CD and physical comedy like Mania Adventures are the types of things that resonate. If the only reason you don't want to lean into that is because dialogue focused stories are cheaper then you don't have the series best interest in mind. The most successful Sonic characters are exceptions to this...Knuckles serves as a good foil for Sonic, Shadow manages it too but imo less so, and then Silver feels like he was built more with Shadow in mind than Sonic, for instance, which moves the story away from Sonic, who should be the heart and core of the series tone in an ideal world instead of feeling like an outsider in his own game who feels like he has to contort himself to work. Third, Sonic is a nomad, so does it make sense to have a consistent squad of characters, or is it more to the spirit of the thing to constantly have him meet new people in each installment? People should constantly be asking themselves questions like that. Don't change Sonic to make the story work, build the story around Sonic. The priority is never to preserve the tone of the original games or the personalities of those characters, but to transform it to be like xyz popular thing. Dragon Ball and other manga aimed at young people was at least an influence on the original series, so I can make some kind of sense of that comparison, but why are american comic books being brought up, other than the fact that they're financially successful so Sonic should be like them?
To be fair to @Lambda because he's getting pretty heavily disagreed with on here and I think unfairly, I would agree at least on the point (which I'm not sure he's explicitly making but is pretty easily understood) that a lot of anime has a shared pool of tropes. Whether that makes anime a genre or not is beside the point, but I'd definitely say that there's more difference between European animation and Japanese animation than anime is simply animation made in Japan. If I put a show on the communal TV which was an anime, there would be loads of tropes which would make my flatmates say "wow this is so anime". Has no bearing on whether it's made in Japan or not. It's all very complicated of course and is tied up in Japanese socio-cultural differences. But these tropes and conventions also form a lexicon which form a base inspiration for western produced anime. @The KKM's own analogy of Champagne is nonsensical because there is a strict understanding that Champagne must come from the Champagne region of France. It's a legal requirement and not an artistic signifier (and even that is ultimately subjective). Anime has no strict legal rules along those lines. Also, Champagne clearly has an expectation of a unique taste and sparkling texture which is captalised on by derivatives such as Prosecco, which do not need to originate from their home regions (such as Italy). So all that example does is prove that fact that Champagne, much like anime itself, may be associated with a certain geographical region, but can influence a 'genre' or product which has shared taste expectations. So that is quite literally one of the worst examples you could have used for your argument. So I'd strongly disagree with the idea that anime is simply any animation that is made in Japan. That is clearly not true at all, otherwise anime which was made in Europe or European animation which is evoking anime styles (such as Love, Death, and Robots episodes) would be by definition not anime. I don't care whether anime is a genre or a semiotic field. Whatever you call it, it's clearly not just animation made in japan.
A soundtrack can have an incredibly huge impact on how enjoyable a game is. In the case off Frontiers, the music does a lot of the heavy lifting when the game is otherwise boring or tedious. It can set the tone and give you something to occupy your mind whilst just making your way through a game that you aren't enjoying. This is where I find myself during the Final Horizon DLC; the new Ouranos Island is absolutely pants, but vibing to Blood Flow with Knuckles makes the experience bearable.
But your roommates' opinions don't matter. To say "there's more difference between European animation and Japanese animation than animation within Japan" not only assumes there's innate traits to either of those, but also ignores the diversity of both of these places' shows. It's more accurate to say there's more difference between the European and Japanese cartoons you've personally seen than distinctions between anime you've seen on their own. The tropes aren't signifiers of "anime", they're popular tropes put into cartoons by people making them, because people who make cartoons do that. Look at every cartoon in the past 20 years to take part of itself from Spongebob! If a cartoon from Japan did all of that, does it not get to be anime because of it? What could possibly give anyone the right to determine something like that? At least geography tends to stay still for a while. The champagne analogy actually works perfectly, because just like anime, the geographic origin is the only real thing standing between that sparkling wine and any other sparkling wine. The legal definition doesn't matter, it's not an "artistic signifier", and just because someone does a bad job on an anime or a drink, that doesn't mean it stops being itself. You can buy a bottle marked "champagne" from quite a lot of places that aren't that specific region, and...well, why is the colloquial definition wrong for this but not for cartoons? I think it's wrong to define these things by subjective traits in the first place, but you should at least do it consistently. And like...yeah! Love Death and Robots is not anime! Avatar is not anime! If those things are anime, what specific objection is there to Steven Universe, The Owl House, Adventure Time and Family Guy being "anime"? If they don't look the part, who decides what anime "looks like"? If they don't tell the story the same way, who gets to decide what "anime storytelling" is? Who gets burned when that definition inevitably, suddenly excludes their extremely conventionally-produced Japanese cartoon? It's ridiculous. No matter how realistic and convincing your painting is, that will never make it a photograph. The irony of course is that anime and cartoons are the same medium. Like I said, geography is the only "real" distinction, and even that's imperfect. I'd be happy if nothing ever got called "anime" ever again outside of Japan using it for every cartoon. But as it stands, if we're stuck with the term, we should at least know better than to redefine it in increasingly-elitist manners. That's where this ultimately goes, right? It imbues the term with undue significance, maybe even coated in a bit of the old "mysterious, exotic eastern artifact" stereotype. People want to call Avatar or Miraculous or whatever "anime" because they don't want to call it a cartoon. It's a distinction specifically catered to people with bad ideas about what shapes these forms of art should be allowed to take in the first place, and I see it as not just misguided, but also a bit inherently unjustifiable.
Your point makes no sense. You say champagne is determined by its geographical origin. But then you say that actually champagne can come from any region but is now still champagne. What?
1-2 popping off because of the strict time limit and dope as hell track really cemented among general audiences.
It's not champagne, the same way shows that "look like anime" aren't anime. It's all colloquial. I'm saying that you don't have a good justification to apply this to one but not the other.
