this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

the equivalent of shonen in america isnt childrens movies tho???

Right, it's children's comics

it's more young adult if you had to pick one,

Right, if you mean it in the YA sense, i.e. a demo of children

but shonen is so popular even among adults you get stuff like demon slayer that is much more intended for adults

"Shonen" is literally a demographic designation, the term means "young male" (specifically here young adolescence). If that's not the target demo, it's not shonen. It can be action, slice of life, mystery, whatever, what makes it a "shonen" is that it's primarily intended for young males. It can have deliberate appeal to other audiences -- and despite(?) being tremendously sexist, Demon Slayer has a huge female following as well as an adult one -- but you are flatly incorrect to say that it is not intended for teenage boys.

(the first fucking chapter has mutilated corpses of children there is no country in the world that is going to put something like that into a "children's movie")

You're making it sound more graphic than it is. There are dead bodies and blood everywhere in one scene, but it's not like there are entrails or something really graphic, it's just limp bodies with blood everywhere. Even if it was more graphic, that doesn't really address the point regardless because you're projecting cultural assumptions in a silly way, and you can easily find things that are more morbid aimed at still-younger audiences, like some of the work of Roald Dahl

[–] barrel_of_a_gun@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

can you please give me an example of something more morebid than finding your entire family slaughtered by a demon in a ronald dahl book?

also curious, would you describe the upcoming chainsaw man movie as a children's movie...?

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

can you please give me an example of something more morebid than finding your entire family slaughtered by a demon in a ronald dahl book?

I said "gruesome" because that's more pertinent to the age rating than something being conceptually dark. For example, in Dahl's telling of Cinderella, one of the stepsisters hacks her own foot apart with a knife to get the stub to fit into the glass slipper. "Revolting Rhymes," where that scene is from, has a lot of other stuff like that.

I generally wouldn't say that Dahl's work is all that conceptually dark, it's mostly in the direction of shock, but for example there's an aside in "The Witches" about a girl who is trapped in a painting which stays in the possession of her parents, who watch her age within the painting over the course of years (changing position, implying that she is conscious even though she only appears at a given time as a static image) until eventually she stops appearing, implicitly ending up as a corpse that has fallen out of view.

But you can find no shortage of material that is aimed at children that is much conceptually darker as well, most obviously in historical fiction (look at many stories about the Civil War or WWII) and semi-historical fiction like the Book Thief, but I'd even consider Coraline to be much darker at times than that scene in Demon Slayer. Gaiman (who I think is a pretty good author but, besides being personally monstrous, also just fucking sucks sometimes as an author when he's not writing for children) has a lot of work that's pretty dark, another example being Graveyard Book, which I'd say skews on the younger side of YA but has more or less the expected level of morbidness, starting with the protagonist's family being killed not by a demon but a dude with a knife while the protagonist is still a toddler.

Another one I read as a teen that mercifully wasn't by Gaiman was the Thin Executioner, which has some pretty brutal deaths and fates-worse-than-death, like I think some guys who are literally named Bush and Blair after that Bush and that Blair end up fused into a cliff face while remaining conscious and aware, seemingly just left to suffer forever. More than their deaths though, what I tend to remember is how they killed people, because they had a "magic trick" with some balls that had metal triangles affixed to them. They would toss the ball at their target's throat, it bounces back, and they reveal that the triangle is gone. The audience is then directed to look at the victim's throat, which now has a triangular bulge visibly pressing out of it as they choke and sputter before dying.

also curious, would you describe the upcoming chainsaw man movie as a children's movie...?

Chainsaw Man really pushes the shonen thing because it really does have strong seinen elements (including things much more interesting than just the gore and nudity), but overall I'd say probably yes, it's targeted mainly at teenage boys. Naturally, it also probably won't be received that way in America, but that's how the manga was written and the anime is pretty faithful to it.

[–] barrel_of_a_gun@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

i think maybe i just have a very very different idea of a children's movie in my head then if you can call chainsaw man a children's movie

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

To be clear, I do think it's a) on the oldest end of the demo and b) pretty edgy even for that, but again, see the content that I described before, which is variously for kids from about 8 - 14. I can see my claim about chainsaw man being regarded as a little controversial and honestly I myself don't really understand how it gets published in Jump when compared to all the other series there, but even if we just assume that I'm wrong, I think you're taking a very narrow view of what children's media is. Even so-called YA is still intended to be pretty accessible to tweens and agreeable to their parents, which is a more restrictive in America than in some other places (including Japan). Chainsaw Man is I think a more reasonable depiction of what it looks like to make media aimed firmly at brainrotten teenage boys specifically.

Come to think of it, it was pretty clever to make the Reze arc a movie since that's the one arc that has a substantial degree of romance, so it could help them get a broader audience.