*h, it's mainstream enough in the west, in Japan it couldn't get any more mainstream than One Piece. Either way, It's easier to just toss pretty much everything that runs in Jump into the same basket since they all pretty much use the same tropes and plot development, just change up the theme.
The issue is more with the anime than with the manga though, since manga requires at least some degree of induction into anime as a wider thing. See, objectively speaking Naruto and Bleach and the like aren't all that good, falling somewhere between mediocre and bad, but they endure in the collective fandom due to an excess of exposure.
People get stuck in this hole, watching only those and stay (often selectively) ignorant of anime as a wider thing, and have gone so far in the past to look down on wider anime as inferior to a series which is in actuality formulaic and not that great. It's not hard to understand where a militant 'anti-shonen' agenda can crop up.
12-Feb-2014 18:40:32
