Japanese Tropes and Why They Might Exist

A cliche doesn't have to show up in EVERY SINGLE WORK of a single genre to be a cliche.

As much as I agree with you, I'd advise not to bring Death Note into this. It's very much an exception to the rule.

edited 7th Apr '13 7:52:45 PM by Watchtower

Of course, but that's exactly why we can look at the ebb and flow of popular tropes.

How so? It's part of a trend of "smart" series becoming popular. For a given value of "smart".

edited 7th Apr '13 7:55:31 PM by Clarste

The tropes mentioned would be for Shounen action manga. Death Note isn't an action manga and so wouldn't count.

I'm not sure you could find a trope consistent in most Shounen in general whether it be action, drama, romance, comedy, or whatever.

The idea that the world should be fair? That it's somehow obligated to follow rules?

It's ridiculously easy to come up with counterexamples to fairness, but I'm curious what you mean by "rules". You mean like, social rules? Narrative rules? Magic A Is Magic A?

Social rules. And that first sentence is tied in with the second; I don't mean fair as in 'conforming to an ethical code', I mean 'consistent'. There're always at least two characters in any shounen who get completely blindsided by events or people because of their limited expectations of reality, even after that view of reality has been fucked with a dozen times over the course of the series. Ever played the Masaka! Drinking Game?

edited 7th Apr '13 9:33:02 PM by FurikoMaru

Hmm. Well, ignoring your rather harsh opinion of "Masaka" (which admittedly is a somewhat lazy trope to tell the audience when something is supposed to be shocking), that's almost the complete opposite of how I interpreted your original statement. You mean that the characters believe in rules that consistently get overturned. The trope isn't "the series is obligated to follow rules" but rather that "characters are consistently unimaginative in proportion to how much the author wants to make events seem shocking".

Which I guess is a trope of sorts.

edited 7th Apr '13 9:47:27 PM by Clarste

Harsh...? I fucking love Masaka! It's one of my favourite stock phrases.

The trope in question is here.

edited 7th Apr '13 9:53:12 PM by FurikoMaru

Does that really happen so often in anime? Most of the time they're in a fantasy world world with strict riles already in place (Magic A Is Magic A). While it's certainly a writing technique to call something impossible and then do it anyway just to make it arbitrarily "shocking", I wouldn't really blame the characters for it.

—eyes the decent-sized list of titles in the anime folder—

Seems it does.

edited 8th Apr '13 12:30:59 AM by Colonial1.1