Shounen aren’t all about fights in the first place though. Sure some of them are, but as covered by other posts in this thread there are plenty of shounen romance series too.
Comment on [Discussion] What are some anime whose demographics fans tend to get wrong?
keimevo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If people think Frieren’s most important parts are the fights, they need to watch more media (and a variety of it, western and eastern).
Unboxious@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Endmaker@ani.social 3 weeks ago
AFAIK the target demographics are determined not by the eventual audience, but by the publishers. So if they think it would appeal to shounen, it gets classified as shounen.
Personally, I can see why Frieren gets classified as shounen even after discounting the fight scenes. I find that the characters’ thinking lack a certain depth / maturity / dimensionality of seinen and josei anime.
The reason Frieren is classified as shounen is because the manga is serialized in Weekly Shounen Sunday.
Today I learned the “shounen” label is useless for categorization lol
I wouldn't exactly say that. It's a broad category, but it is a fairly well defined category. Frieren ticks pretty much every shounen box.
Unique_Emerald_Sol_I@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. It’s like the fact that you cannot create a category that includes all “fish” that doesn’t also include humans (or, if you want to exclude humans by way of things like body plan or living on land, then you have to include cetaceans and start excluding things like lungfish).
To use your example, most people would probably say there are actually pretty clear expectations of tone & pacing between “a Netflix show” vs. “an HBO show” vs. “a syndicated television show (from before streaming services)” despite them all being the same on the surface.