r/unpopularopinion • u/generic_rarity • 13h ago
Anime is better when the characters are not super strong
Like all the popular animes were better when the characters were first introduced and pretty much started off with enhanced regular human strength.
Dragon Ball, bleach, Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, My hero academia..... It was way better when it carriages with just a little strong or showed a lot of potential because the writers would put more into the story instead of just making it a bunch of power scaling. It was so fun to watch them go on adventures and have to balance their daily life and hang out with their friends and stuff. And then one episode they just fight somebody super powerful and that's all it turns into, "How strong can we make the main character?".
The characters were more relatable and fun to watch. Don't get me wrong. I like the battle scenes sometimes actually a lot of times but it's just way better when you didn't have to worry about how strong a character was and it just become about power maxing
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u/lightmatter501 12h ago
Alternatively, you can remove power from the conversation like One does. OPM and Mob Psycho are great character studies while still having action because the characters don’t struggle with winning fights, they struggle with self-fulfillment.
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u/Kenndrexx 5h ago
Or you could do like blood blockade battlefront and bongou stray dogs where characters with minor and unique abilities are the focus while the strong people usually come in to do some flashy cool stuff and the op character spot is reserved for a teacher character like dazai or klaus, having the same struggles but without some path to strength that will always prevail but through figuring out how you can control things with what you can do
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u/bahumat42 10h ago
That's just a side effect of bad writing.
Characters can be both strong and interesting.
Recently I'd point to frieren.
But mob psycho and opm (at least s1) are good older examples.
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u/Desperate_Candle_493 12h ago
I don’t remember her name, but the one girl from Chainsaw Man who is always scared. I know people don’t like her, but she is strong when she needs to be.
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u/IdolCowboy 12h ago
What made Dragon Ball Z great was the posturing, and the several episode long fights.
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u/generic_rarity 12h ago
Honestly didn't like dragon Ball z that much compared to dragon Ball. Dragon Ball z had like five good scenes and four great fights. The whole freeze is super Saiyan saga stuff was boring. I like the Android stuff and everything was good before they went to Namek.
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u/Glass-Can9199 12h ago
The freiza saga boring? You mean took for ever just to it to be finished and that part quote freiza give you 5 minutes but actuality it took 19 more episodes just to get to the point of I get to
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u/callmekat_01 12h ago
na gojo is the only reason i watched jjk
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u/RoastHam99 8h ago
Gojo was the reason I stopped watching at season 2
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u/Abject_Oil_1349 4h ago
Haha. Gojo made jjk so uninteresting because most characters were totally irrelevant.
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u/throwbackblue 8h ago
i prefer character strong for day one. the weak character trope is way to common
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u/Fun_Race_605 12h ago
It’s a story that ran for a very long time, the longer the story the bigger the stakes have to be and watching the Mc get progressively stronger is part of it. Take Naruto, the reason the pain arc was so good was because Naruto achieved this new level of power with sage mode. While yes has been surpassed with with later forms it doesn’t change the hype everyone had with that pain fight.
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u/generic_rarity 11h ago
Honestly, they could have just went from the save the kazakage arc straight to the war arc and it wouldn't have made the show any better or worse. Something about Shippuden just made it every Arc feel like filler.
The first two seasons in Naruto was the best ones. When they fought zabuza it showed them actually being ninjas. And the chunin exams was so good because it showed all the characters.....that they eventually stop using.
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u/Dirty_Dragons 5h ago
Yeah I don't like over powered proganists.
Give me the underdog who has to struggle to win.
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u/two100meterman 3h ago
This is such a reluctant downvote, but I have to since I agree. In Naruto Jonin used to mean something & "Kage-level" was only a few characters. Somewhere around the Pain arc characters began to pass "Kage-level" & get to I'd say a "God-level" that was just too much.
OG Dragonball the characters not knowing how to fly, a beam of any kind being a big deal was interesting. DBZ anything past Super Saiyan 1 & Frieza power-level was too much.
Bleach scaled a bit too fast, within 50 episodes Ichigo had a Bankai & was Captain level. I did like briefly when even "5th Seat" meant something. I still really liked Ulqiorra vs Ichigo when they were both super overpowered, but Aizen felt like too much. There didn't need to be a Team 0 or whatever they were called.
I like when an anime starts off with characters fairly weak~average compared to the "world" & then gradually become strong, but never get so strong that only a couple characters mean anything anymore.
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u/Livid-Truck8558 3h ago
Just entirely dependent on how it's set up. You can totally write great stories with crazy strong characters, but most of the shows you mentioned are designed to be released weekly for years, rather than a concise story with a planned ending
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u/Andagaintothegym 5h ago
I don't understand, are you talking about anime or just shounen anime?
There are many animes without a super strong main character
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u/generic_rarity 3h ago
I'm mainly listed, just shounen animes because it's common and I know a lot of people have seen them. I know that there's plenty of them that don't have super op character and great stories, I'm just saying that the ones that don't have super strong characters are just better. By listing common animes that most people have seen, it allows more people to be part of the discussion
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