Well, some are okay. I mean stuff like Fullmetal Alchemist has anything but a clichéd plot.

Probably because the author is a women lol...

and @cano435, well that is possibly true about seinen... But most of the time I think it is used "correctly" and feels like it really makes sense in the story... I don't exactly know why, but it just doesn't feel as bad as the same plot device in shoujo for example. When that happens in shoujo I just feel like slitting my own throat..

yea, the shoujo rape stuff is a bit more extreme, but I always dislike how the guy who does it always gets away. I thin k there should be more killing/maiming of those guys.

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true true, Fullmetal Alchemist deffinitly has a very innovativ plot for a shounen. i am sure there are others, but for some reason all the ones that pop into my head now are completly cliche,
but since i read shonen more for comedy and fun than plots, i am still ok

I don't know if this was mentioned or not... but why do most heroes give fancy names to their attacks & then shout them for the whole world to hear when they execute them.
Wouldn't it be better to just shut up & surprise u'r enemy instead of letting him know what u'r next move is.

Hehehe that reminds me of an anime I saw a few episodes of, called "Blazing Transfer Student" (no idea what the original Japanese title was, it was an old VHS dub). The guy comes up with a great new fighting move, but then in the actual fight discovers that the name is too long because by the time he finishes yelling it out, the other guy has already attacked.

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
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That's pretty much what the first half of white fang is about. All the other puppies spent so much time barking before they would gang up to fight him so he took that time to just run up and bite at their neck. That was always my favorite part of that book.

But the pages with the attacks and all the name screaming usually make for cool looking art.

The Cliche i hate the most is that a girlfriend of the hero gets kidnapped and he has to rescue her... but most of the time she doesn't want to be rescued because she made a deal or something like that with the bad guy who kidnapped her!
(it happend in Flame of Recca, 3x3 Eyes, bleach (in bleach that sh*t happend twice) and n much more shounen mangas...)
But why? Is that kind of story such a great plot? Every time i read that a girl got kidnapped i just want to drop the manga.

Another cliche that happens often (but isn't that bad) is that inside of the hero is a monster or demon or he makes a deal with one (Naruto, Bleach, 666Satan...)

or that the main character is 15 and lives alone after his parents/whole family/foster parents/etc were killed in a strange accident (is that even legal!? o_O?? a 14-16 year old who lives alone? without a legal guardian?)

and if the character can't remember his whole past and there is a strange shadowy mysterous enemy who is jumping around you can bet on it that they are related and the enemy is the brother of the hero or at least was the one who killed his family.

That reminds me of Harry Potter. ^.^

And I agree about tournaments. I mean, if they don't participate in the tournaments in the first place, bad guys will have better chances of beating the good guys because they haven't learned techniques that they would have learned in tournaments. (yuyu hakusho and flame of recca)

lol, that's automatically what I thought of!


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umm biggest shonen cliche i can think of is, despite being near-death shonen characters defy what should be physically impossible.

... I know for a FACT that even if the good guys are/were bumbling idiots or the weakest of the weak, they will STILL somehow, magically win over the villians... It's just IRRITATES me sometimes!! It actually makes me wish the villians won. Sympathizes with the villians. .... That's about as cliche it gets!

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Well yeah. Also Shounen almost always sucks to me. The only time its good is when something weird/horrible is happening, like Gyo.

Why is there so little seinen and so much of that cheesy junk? T-T
Yeah, it is rather idiotic thing when those whelps beat the badasses.
Argh, I must try to stay away from this topic for I get enraged.

well i hate it when the main characters are little kids barely even 16 and they take on the bad guys all being adults and stuff...
and i mostly hate it when the main character gets uber powerful all of a sudden and makes the story totally unbalanced..