"Listen. The yucks who look at television don't know the difference between Ernest Hemingway and Huntz Hall. What do they care about important writers? What they want is shows where one guy kicks another guy in the belly while a dame leans over 'em with her cakes falling out of her negligee. Or domestic comedies where the whole family gets together to screw gruff old Dad. Or quiz shows where people get put in isolation booths and develop coronary occlusion before your very eyes ... Important writers! Remember when NBC tried to beef up their Sunday nights with important writers? Plays by Robert Sherwood--Thornton Wilder--Ferenc Molnar. Important enough for you? ... So what happened? I'll tell you what: forty million people nearly broke off their dials turning back to Ed Sullivan to watch a dog fart 'The Star-Spangled Banner!'"
—Oscar Hoffa, Rally Round the Flag, Boys!
No mountain of theoretical lucubrations can compensate for the absence of an outstanding fictional work as a lofty model. The criticism of experts in historiography did not undermine the status of Sienkiewicz's Trilogy, for there was no Polish Leo Tolstoy to devote a War and Peace to the period of the Cossack and Swedish wars. In short, inter caecos luscus rex - where there is nothing first-rate, its role will be taken over by mediocrity, which sets itself facile goals and achieves them by facile means.
What the absence of such model works leads to is shown, more plainly than by any abstract discussions, by the change of heart which Damon Knight, both author and respected critic, expressed in SFS #3. Knight declared himself to have been mistaken earlier in attacking books by van Vogt for their incoherence and irrationalism, on the grounds that, if van Vogt enjoys an enormous readership, he must by that very fact be on the right track as an author, and that it is wrong for criticism to discredit such writing in the name of arbitrary values, if the reading public does not want to recognize such values. The job of criticism is, rather, to discover those traits to which the work owes its popularity. Such words, from a man who struggled for years to stamp out tawdriness in SF, are more than the admission of a personal defeat - they are the diagnosis of a general condition. If even the perennial defender of artistic values has laid down his arms, what can lesser spirits hope to accomplish in this situation?
Indeed, the possibility cannot be ruled out that Joseph Conrad's elevated description of literature as rendering "the highest kind of truth to the visible universe" may become an anachronism - that the independence of literature from fashion and demand may vanish outside SF as well, and then whatever reaps immediate applause as a best-seller will be identified with what is most worthwhile. That would be a gloomy prospect. The culture of any period is a mixture of that which docilely caters to passing whims and fancies and that which transcends these things—and may also pass judgment on them. Whatever defers to current tastes becomes an entertainment which achieves success immediately or not at all, for there is no such thing as a stage-magic exhibition or a football game which, unrecognized today, will become famous a hundred years from now. Literature is another matter: it is created by a process of natural selection of values, which takes place in society and which does not necessarily relegate works to obscurity if they are also entertainment, but which consigns them to oblivion if they are only entertainment. Why is this so? Much could be said about this. If the concept of the human being as an individual who desires of society and of the world something more than immediate satisfactions were abolished, then the difference between literature and entertainment would likewise disappear. But since we do not as yet identify the dexterity of a conjurer with the personal expression of a relationship to the world, we cannot measure literary values by numbers of books sold.
—Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans
A “mainstream shonen” is a shonen that is DESIGNED to become mainstream. It’s built and filled with a series of elements that have the intention of making the anime wildly popular with any kind of person at the expense of quality.
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There ARE people THAT dumb and a mainstream shonen tries to have them as audience as well, so they try to dumb everything down to the most ridiculous levels so they’re liked by huge amounts of people who would not follow the anime otherwise. It’s really understandable since the target audience range of this works begins at around 12. I’ll point out some of the ways mainstream shonens dumb down, and will use some anecdotes of my own comics.
Plot: For a shonen to be mainstream it needs to have a very, very simple plot. It has to be understood with no problems by kids of even 12 years old, and by the kind of people who thought the “female titan” revelation was unexpected. Every single thing you add that could need any kind of thinking by the spectator means audience you’re losing. You wanna introduce a plot twist? Well guess what, some people will not get it, and others will not like it (cause that’s what happens with plot twists, some love them, other hate them), so that’s a number of people who stop watching. You wanna introduce some complex power or premise? Well throw some big percentage of people out the window as well. You wanna introduce some politics or aristocracy games? Oh god, you’re in for losing half your audience there.
