Shonen as a genre is meant to be teenagers between 14 and 18, specifically young males who are hoping to achieve great dreams whether for their own reasons or for the betterment of the world. The genre encouraged and even inspired many young boys to work for their dreams and to work hard, with the promises that doing so will reward them in the long run, via achieving their dreams or even beating certain competitors. Which brings to a really important staple of the genre, the rival character. Of course, rival characters have always existed even in early Shonen Manga, but many famous rivalries in anime are correlated to three of them in particular. Dragon Ball, My Hero Academia, and most famously Naruto.
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Looking At The Classic Rivalries
For many fans of the genre, Goku and Vegeta were some of their first introduction to a Shonen Rivalry. One that started off strikingly with a similarly to Naruto and Sasuke later on. The core of a rivalry is two individuals who are either relatively close in power or have a power gap, and pitting them both against each other for personal reasons. In the case of Goku and Vegeta, it starts with Goku and Vegeta’s first fight, but truly develops into a rivalry when Goku becomes the Super Saiyan, and Vegeta later on achieves this exact same form. From there on, Goku and Vegeta are pitted against each other with varying degrees of familiarity or antagonism in the pursuit of improving themselves via training or wanting to surpass someone they consider a baseline for their standards as rivals.
When following this baseline from Dragon Ball, Naruto and Sasuke have a similar, if albeit more story-driven rivalry that is eventually revealed to be supported by fate and destiny. Naruto and Sasuke hold similar traits, and a similar background, both struggling to grow as people in a village that has failed them in some way or another. However, despite their rivalry becoming heated and almost deadly when Sasuke leaves the village and becomes a public enemy, Naruto doesn’t give up on improving to help his former friend and rival, and Sasuke doesn’t stop in his endeavors to gain power or get revenge. Eventually, it culminates in their final battle in Naruto, where they both have achieved equal strength, and their friendship and rivalry is rebuilt from the ground up.
How My Hero Academia Changed The Shonen Rivalry
My Hero Academia as a Shonen changed a lot of things associated with a story related to it, but it also directly changes the dynamic between its rivalry duo of Izuku and Bakugou. It is important to remember that where the previous pairs started off with antagonism and eventually grew to silently respect each other, or even respected each other on some level prior; Izuku and Bakugou’s rivalry started off rather volatile and one-sided. Where Izuku wanted to improve himself so that he could reach up to Bakugou and eventually be his equal, Bakugou didn’t want to consider Izuku even anywhere close to being an equal because of his views surrounding Izuku. For the majority, despite Bakugou denying it, he’s constantly working to try and improve because of Izuku’s improvement, but for volatile and straight up aggressive reasons.
The Shonen story of My Hero Academia has made Shonen Rivalries move from being friendly rivalries, to being more competitive and even at times aggressively disliking each other despite acknowledging their strengths. This is what could cause many fans to not acknowledge Izuku and Bakugou as rivals to begin with, considering their history as former best friends and eventually the bully-victim dynamic they have at the first episode prevents anybody from seeing them as such. Even so, this takes the antagonism that both Dragon Ball and Naruto took from their stories, and amps it up in Bakugou into the rivalry, only slowly mellowing out after nearly 3 seasons at the time.
Despite all that, the characters and Shonen Rivalries have changed over the course of the story, and some Shonen anime don’t even include rivalries in their story when it isn’t the main focus, such as Jujutsu Kaisen. Even so, the rivalries have all shared the need to grow stronger or to improve themselves against another character as a baseline for their improvement. The biggest change one could say, is how the rivalries are tied into the story, and how big the antagonism can be between both parties of an ongoing rivalry. Not to mention, that the possibility of the rivalry ending poorly was a real threat to Izuku and Bakugou’s dynamic in the early seasons, up until season 3. Despite all that, Shonen remains ever popular and integral to a lot of audiences around the world because of rivalries in the genre. Dragon Ball, Naruto, and My Hero Academia are the important ones to remember considering the gap in time between these three.
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