Yes, thank you. I fell in love with food Wars for two reasons. 1) even though the stakes could be ridiculous at times, their battles felt to me like a real battle. I found myself rooting for characters who I know we're going to either win or lose but I was still biting my nail in hope that they would win. It was mainly due to how each character with their own philosophy, idealism, and skills would fight in each of their particular battles. It's like I got to look at an in-depth analysis of each character. The second reason was for the characters and the fanservice. Hey, at least I'm willing to admit to it.
Pretty much, I'm there just 90% for the pageantry and spectacle and food porn. I wasn't concerned about battle mechanics or back and forth or etc. Just as long as what was presented on screen was interesting...and it was! They kept coming up with new cool stuff that was just familiar enough for me to know about a little but just exotic enough to be really interesting.
What’s the veal with him mentioning Steak so meaty times. Is he trying to make fun of us. Targeting our tender feelings. How about you cutlet off! Unless you got a tBone to pick. Then quit loafing around and let’s settle this BEEF! Schnitzel .......I’ll see myself out now
That was ALMOST perfect. The only missed opportunity is not turning 'fun' into 'fond'. Because that's also a meat thing. 9/10, you are a scholar and a gentlemen good sir and/or ma'am.
I only understood it once the visuals shifted away from Ed and Father and my brain could focus on just the names. It was actually kinda distracting and made me miss some of what he was saying.
"Unless you're a cook or a professional chef you won't know what's going on" - can confirm. I was a culinary student as Food Wars started airing and I actually enjoyed some of the ridiculous school hijinks because I could compare it with my actual, normal, sane schooling. Buuut it quickly went off the rails and I generally couldn't wrap my head around how they got from point A to point B. I will say it's similar to watching Iron Chef, in a way - because you don't see those "fights" in a normal way, but... the thing is that you mostly see the cooking happen realistically in stuff like Iron Chef, or Chopped, and you get everyone's PoV. You don't get that with Food Wars because it wants to inject more mystery, and that makes it fall short. The intrigue of Iron Chef is knowing both of their plans and trying to see if it will pan out, or how they intend to do it, but Food Wars leaves you floundering for the opponent's plan most of the time.
So as someone who was quite a bit of a fan, I feel like I have one extra point that wasn't brought up and a personal disagree. For the point not brought up, Food Wars shines it's best when it's about the preparation and planning, which is an aspect of battles I think could be explored more in a shonen style. To me, my favorite battles of the series are the ones where we get an idea of exactly the struggle Soma or someone else is facing and see them try to work through that issue (arguably better done in the manga, the anime kinda rushes through the content after season 1). Battles like the first shokugeki against Nikumi, the autumn election finale, and the rematch with Hayama in my opinion work because we can start to understand what they are doing because we've seen their process in planning and even if we don't know all the ins and outs of cooking, we know enough to be able to piece together what their problem is and get an idea of their solution in the end. Which leads me to my disagree, while I 100% agree most of the battles lack steaks (see, see what I did there) I mostly didn't care because I was just more engaged in the philosophical struggle between them. It absolutely would be better if the stakes (not going to do that every time) were less all or nothing, but I usually was engaged enough by the difference in philosophy and even the explanation why that despite not having touched the earlier parts of the series in a while, I still remember the philosophies shown in the competitions and how that explanation won out. I do think the battles can survive on the underlying philosophical nature and even if you don't intuitively understand what is being done, enough of an explanation is usually provided in what happened that I consistently felt satisfied and was still engaged even when the result was obvious to see "how" and "why". I don't think a battle is good only if you don't know the result, and while I would absolutely be lying if I said Food Wars got that right every time, I do think it got it right enough that I still thought it was overall a pretty good manga.
Yeah, that's always the weird thing, because as long as the series gives enough focus on the characters and what this means to them then it works way better. At the heart of a shonen battle, it doesn't really matter as much how people are fighting or what they're doing as much as who they are and why you want to root for them. That's part of why Early Naruto was so effective, because the strategies Naruto used to beat Kiba and Neji are really stupid, but you care because you're invested in these characters. You know Naruto isn't going to lose against Neji, but you still want to see him win because Neji's a cold asshole who needs to be kicked down a peg. But the problem is always kind-of there in Food Wars, where every fight has to basically be the same to the point where it becomes stupidly easy to predict that Soma's going to have some surprise in his dish that's going to give him the win. And what I think really went wrong was partially the characters and planning part of it, but the bigger thing is that having a tournament arc with lots of disposable nobodies in a system like this was always a really bad idea because there's no way to really vary things up. So when the writing falters in other areas, it strips back the layers A LOT and makes you realize just how similar these matches have to be. The fight where Megumi beats a random nobody who cooks with lobster and Soma's big final cook-off against his most dangrous foe to date feel IDENTICAL, and that's a pretty big underlying problem with the format of these encounters overall because one of these fights is meant to be a way bigger deal than the other. I think at the end of the day, Food Wars was always going to be kind-of unsustainable because they needed to evolve past their usual formula and get into actually growing these characters and having them directly compete with other resteraunts or they needed to introduce different ways of judging success, like maybe do best-of-3 matches or something. But while it tries to mix things up every now and then, it always goes back to the same style of cook-off and it gets just so tiring and repetitive by the end.
Food wars was arguably at its worse when it went all battle shounen in season 5 compared to season 3 and 4, season 5 stakes a pretty much the least theyve been, new bad guy wants to marry erina, really she can just say no, winning the blue doesnt automatically make them get married so really its just soma trying to prove hes a great chef at the end of the day, unless the tension is "oh no somas love interest could get stolen away" which is a terrible stake in a show where the majority came into it because of the actual cooking techniques yes soma will be kicked out of school if he fails ever gets old but it also makes sense as we see in the stagiare arc where failure is the same as getting fired and even summer camp was under the same rules of failure is the same as getting fired, totsuki is preparing them for the real world and real kitchen setting, messing up can make everyone fall behind or worse food not coming out in time can make customers leave All in all Food Wars did something with the shounen setting that not many shows can do, you cant do kamehameha in real life but you can cook a steak with the techniques shown and ill miss it a lot
@@sdbzfan1 I genuinely never get why Asahi was expecting any of this to work? Like okay, I can buy that maybe if everything goes according to plan then he can get Erina to marry him through force because he knows some dangerous people. Alright. But this guy does realize that doesn't mean she's suddenly going to like him or something, right? Like she's probably going to be pretty bitter. Heck, she'd probably make his life a living hell however she can, assuming they even live together, which is something she can just refuse to do! This girl doesn't even have to sleep with you, you're guaranteed to get NOTHING out of this deal! And if anyone she knows finds out about it then it's not like Erina doesn't have ties to people with money or something, she could totally afford a divorce lawyer the second she manages to get away. It's like the only framing this plan makes sense in is if you look at it from the perspective of "Asahi is Soma's evil counterpart, so he makes bad plans because this is the type of short-sighted thing Soma would come up with." Which isn't really great, because it means you have to justify your villain's actions through saying they're incompetent.
@@dracocrusher right, the manga already had pretty weird laws to follow you just go along with like, Totsuki shouldn't be the only culinary school, even if it's the best we never hear about people gong anywhere else, like we could have gotten an arc when they all became second years about how other schools don't like how Totsuki gets all the praise just because it's some elite school and see how that effects the world like 2 people trying to get a job but because one came from totsuki the employer hires them even though the other one could be just as skilled if not more, after all Soma and aldini grew up already in the working business which compensated for the skills other kids got from coming from Middle school totsuki I just really don't like how the only arc beside the autumn elections where "hey the stakes aren't you're kicked out of school" had to be "but you love interest could be taken away" the hell the show was never a romance so why does that matter suddenly, especially when Soma's never put Erina before himself ever, if anything he risked expulsion for Megumi a girl he met in episode 3, after Erina who just happened to be in the same dorm as him, she was a friend but the same way you make friends with people on the first day of school, he doesn't know her past, she could have killed someone from food poisoning once, even still he wasn't gonna let her get expelled because Shinomiya decided to be a dick that day Erina on the other hand hasn't had Soma go out of the way for her and her alone in seasons 1-4 because he's a sore loser and just wanted to make her call his food delicious, nothing about either of them showed an interest in the other beyond rivals if anything, even if it was onesided, Erina had an actual crush on Joichiro and the show made it very obvious, man Season 5 could have been interesting but the author had to resort to pandering, no wonder people started to fall off when the show swapped focus from Soma trying to increase his skill and surpass his dad to, super powers and love triangles
@@sdbzfan1 The big thing that seems to have happened is that the actual food advisor who was helping to write the manga fell off because of maternity leave and, because it's a weekly series, things were already planned out and kind-of done in the final arc before she could come back. So suddenly, you have an entire tournament where people have to do Food Wars without the food insight. This PROBABLY killed the pacing pretty hard, too, because now they have to rush through everything, and I feel like the plot suffering so much is probably a big byproduct of this. Not saying there weren't warning signs of things going south before in the Azami arc, but it seems like as soon as they lost the person behind the main focus of the series, things went to hell fast because cook-offs had to happen, but nobody's actually able to explain what the dishes are or why they're good anymore, and it's obvious that the mangaka, himself, doesn't really know how this shit works, either. So we go from a big explanation of how each flavor is intricately balanced between these specific elements to the final boss serving Shark fin ice-cream soup or something??? And that's just the final best dish in the series????? This dude beat Tsukasa offscreen. It's kind-of obvious why that happened when you realize the guy writing the series doesn't have insight on food anymore.
I love how well you put the "stakes that are too high are not stakes at all". Beautifully put. I'm a Dungeon Master in D&Dand i distinctly remember, one time, having to help a player "balance" a powerful magical item he wanted to make. When i complained that his idea for it was too powerful, he offered to give it a significant drawback, but his idea of a drawback was that in case of failure it would explode and kill the entire party. I think that that's when i realized this "stakes that are too high are not stakes at all" concept instinctively. Past a certain point, you're not upping the stakes, you're effectively holding the characters hostage, and saying "let me win OR ELSE."
I’d like to submit the best food war fight... so in one piece there’s a filler ep where Sanji faces off against a marine cook staff. The only stakes are that he’s under cover and if he gets cot it will really fuck up the plan but not out of the question. He also has his pride on the line as well but we all know that. But anyway it’s a great scene and is a super intense battle since sanji rightly flips the competition on its head and uses the leftovers of the other cooks to make his mean since in his words “this is a battle field right. It’s important that the food tastes good but it’s more important that your food stores last. You should wast even a scrap of food.” Its a super cool scene that plays to his character perfectly and if you had no idea what sanji was about watching that scene would give you everything you need to know about him.
Ah, the good ole G-8 arc. Best filler arc in anime, let alone OP. Every single person I've managed to get through OP has really enjoyed G-8 with Sanji's food war being one of the notable highlights.
I haven't watched Food Wars, but I do watch a lot of cooking competition shows like Master Chef and Chopped, and it's interesting that those shows seem to recognize that you can get some of that "who's winning" tension out of showing things going wrong, or throwing in a twist that people respond to differently, or participants second-guessing themselves. Despite the fact that these are competitions between chefs, measuring their technical ability and creativity against one another, the battle tends to be more chef vs the circumstances (time, ingredients, available equipment (I've seen multiple chefs fighting to get their ice cream into the single machine first many times)) or chefs vs themselves.
Thank you so much for mentioning March Comes in Like a Lion when discussing stakes. The match between Shimada and Saku is one the most gripping "fights" I've ever seen in anime. The symbolic fight between rising new generation and slowly vaning, but still proud and masterful old one, use of metaphors of burnt field and heavy sashes of the past weighing Saku down are both masterful in setting the mood and telling the story visually. But what I love the most is how you feel sympathy for both men fighting: Shimada, an extremely likeable and kind man who just wants to make people who believed in him proud and Saku, who's so desperate to win this last time, because this might quite literally be that for him. I knew from that no matter who win, I would be at same time cheering for him and crying for the loser.
Honestly, the whole stakes being so high that they aren't stakes at all is prevalent in a lot of anime. A good example being MHA. In season 1 the stakes of Midoroya passing and also the fear of him getting expelled by Aizawa several times aren't going to happen because it's my hero Academia so there has to be school involved. In following seasons the show literally starts with Madoryia telling us that this is the story of *how* he becomes the world's greatest hero meaning any fight he gets into with dangerous villains already has a set ending. It's not until the stakes become "Midoriya has to figure out his quirk and get it under control or else he is going to lose function of his body" that I actually cared about any of his stakes. The overly long point here is that I don't think the point of....well any Shonen anime is who wins fights. It generally isn't hard in any Shonen anime to spot the eventual winner of a battle, because unless for that specific battle the stakes are low, the protag is going to win it. The point is *how* and *why* they win. I feel this is actually a really strong point for Food Wars because it's easier to translate creativity, practice, and technique into food than courage, powering up when needed, and having the most faith in my friends is with most Shonen.
I think that's a big thing, because 90% of shonen is basically just this. Goku isn't going to just lose to Frieza because then Frieza's worldview would be right, but how that fight actually goes down is interesting. If you start focusing on your meta knowledge of "Well, the hero has to win because they're the hero" then you're going to miss out on the journey getting to that point and just how clever or meaningful that can be.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it makes the entire show predictable. Yes, I understand that you're trying to argue that's irrelevant, but it really isn't. Even if the choreography, the pacing, the atmosphere, and everything else about a fight is perfect, knwoing who'a going to win removes tension, which while it's certainly an aspect in all action anime, it's the building block of shounen. If the fight's going to end with the protagonist winning, then that cheap trick the antagonist pulled to turn the tables instantly means nothing, and as a result, the viewer's either going to be bored out of their mind at having to waste another 5 minutes on a red herring or get frustrated in the same regard. Dragon Ball Z was mentioned, and honestly that's a really good example for my point, for two reasons. First, it's got nothing going for it besides its fights and its occasional humor. Its soundtrack is forgettable, its characters are less than one-dimensional, its pacing is honestly horrid, and aside from the choreography being every once in a while interesting it has no resemblance to the martial arts anime that spawned it. Secone, it's the single most popular anime in the west. Despite all of its flaws, despite the vomit-inducing 291 episode count for 5 arcs including the Garlick Jr. filler arc, despite the fact that not a Kai-damn person alive remembers Spopavitch who was a plot-introducing antagonist, despite the fact that its canon power scaling is horribly inconsistent at the best of times and outright impossible at the worst of times, the ONE thing it does right? The main character can die, and he isn't guaranteed to protect everyone. Episode 4 (which comes after one padded out fight and an outright filler episode for its series introduction, how did we not see the signs?) is when Goku first dies. His friends all die later that arc, and some of them die again in the next one. Earth actually gets obliterated once, too. Now, none of these changes are permanent, the name of the franchise being why, but the fact remains that to a kid in the 90's, seeing Goku with a hole straight through his chest (that hit his internal organs, yes, *all of them*) sets the tone that death is a possibility.
@@imaginaryboy2000 "the ONE thing it does right? The main character can die, and he isn't guaranteed to protect everyone." I want to throw a big counterpoint to that, which is that in DBZ, death means basically nothing. Even when Goku's dead, he can just come back and keep fighting without even using the Dragonballs. It does keep Goku away from time to time, but that's the thing... the series HAS to keep finding ways to keep Goku away because he's way too powerful, so keeping Goku away is the only way for other characters to actually do stuff. Which is why when they stop doing those tricks in Super, it feels even worse because now Goku actually is the only one who can do stuff because why would Tien or Gohan get to be useful when Goku just keeps getting stronger? I also want to throw another wrench into this with One Piece. In One Piece, outside of backstories, death almost never happens. I can count the number of One Piece deaths on one hand, and that's across almost 1,000 chapters/episodes. BUT, the big thing is that Luffy can lose and it's made clear that people other than Luffy do get their own fights and moments, where they can also be at risk. So even if you expect Luffy to win, you're going to get a unique feeling climax every time because there's always so much in play between all the characters and the unique elements, and even if everything comes together in a unique fight, like Luffy vs Eneru, there's still no guarantee that Luffy's going to come out on top. Heck, there's three seperate Luffy v Crocodile fights and it's just as engaging every single time because he has a completely different strategy and approach for each one until you get to the super badass satisfying conclusion where Crocodile finally goes down for good.
@@imaginaryboy2000 predictability isn't necessarily a bad thing tho. Not at all actually. I mean, taking Naruto as an example, when Naruto goes up against Neji in the Chuunin exams, it's set up so that we know for a fact that Neji is the favorite to win this one, since he has a powerful Kekkei Genkai, the Byakkugan, since he's part of the most powerful clan in the village, and he's known as a genius even among said clan. Neji is incredibly powerful, and Naruto up until that point hadn't really done anything all too impressive yet, but we still know that Naruto is going to win this one, because there's no way the main character is losing in the first match of the tournament, especially after we've just spend a good number of episodes focusing on Naruto's Chakra training. We know before the fight even starts that Naruto is going to win, and that he's going to teach Neji why his worldview is flawed by defeating him in battle. The characters in the show however, do not know this. They believe for sure that Neji is going to win because so far he's clearly shown to be the better fighter, and that's what adds interest. Sure, us as viewers can predict that Naruto is going to win, but because of how the fight is set up, we're not sure how he's gonna do it, and that is what makes us want to see it. If all that mattered was the outcome, then yes I would agree with you, a predictable outcome generally makes things boring, but in cases like this, it can be interesting even if you know the outcome, because you don't know how it ended up like that. Goku defeating Frieza was also obvious from the start, I mean of course he was going to win, he wasn't just going to lose to Frieza after everything that had happened, but even tho the outcome is predictable to us and we know he's gonna win, we still want to watch it because we don't know how it will happen.
@@Da_Swifta You're just reiterating the same point that was said before. Alroght, my bad, instead of explaining around it, I should have plowed right through it. In that situation you described, the fact that the viewer knows the outcome doesn't make it any more enjoyable or engaging, whereas having the air of mystery does. Knowing for a fact that Naruto will win probably because of friendship (haven't watched the show but come on, early-00's anime) doesn't improve the fight, since the question of "how will the protagonist win?" is asked either way, and in the long run it hurts the show's pacing and tone a lot because the question can never be answered with "they don't." -The character interactions work better when the viewer's reacting along with them, as opposed to the viewer getting bored by the fact that the sideliners haven't figured out the outcome a mile in advance -The fight's pacing works better when its not apparent that exactly half of the upsets in a given fight are irrelevant, or at least don't serve the fight in any meaningful way -The story as a whole suffers a lot less if the outcomes if the major fights aren't set in stone before they begin, since it allows the writers more creativity to deal with loss (which by the way, in Shokugeki no Souma in particular is a core theme that's just abandoned on the main character despite being one of his core characteristics, how about that huh?). Now, that's not to say that a guaranteed victory or loss can't be interesting. It can, absolutely, but only when written for that outcome. If the writer specifically paces and plans for the fight to be an apparent loss or victory, they can work with the emotions of the characters much more interestingly, as well as making the whole flow of combat more involved. However, most shounen don't operate this way, and in fact the example you brought up sounds like a perfect one to use. Of course, I wouldn't know, and you likely wouldn't admit it of your own accord, so let me just take a guess: Naruto fights Neji, almost loses, has some revalation about friendship or whatnot, finds the strength to fight and wins using a technique he was taught by his master earlier that arc, or maybe an arc before. Am I more or less accurate?
I think Food Wars battles are actually pretty okay because in the end the passion for cooking really made it way through to me. Each person had a specialty that they wanted to perfect and it wasn't some fight to the death that regular people won't truly understand but cooking something good to eat. I used to think it wasn't as good as I thought until I watched ChiefPK's reviews on the series.
I know the show is played up for humor and absurdity but anyone who's ever been in training to become a kitchen worker or chef or has ever worked as that knows that this is very relateable. Culinary careers often come with intense never ending stress and trauma so this show is always really cathartic when you consider that. To me it really helped with my own trauma just from training alone. The food industry is so full of toxicity and aggressive work environment systems that it's genuinely cathartic to see a bunch of characters just ace these environments and creating a vibe that feels compforting. Sure the stakes are never truely real and you as a viewer know it. But for many of us coming out of this hellish system all we really need is some humor and power fantasy of owning and dominating a industry that in real life grinds you down into a pile of pathetic emotionally broken dust in just a few years.
I was not expecting this today but I'm veryyyy much into it This is more or less the first video you've made where I really disagreed with the premise. Dont get me wrong though this video was still really fun. I also completely agree with the issue with stakes. Especially once all of the elite 10 were introduced all at once. By then we were beyond the point of no return. I think my conflict with this analysis is that I, personally, didn't quite see food wars as a shonen. I saw it more like kakegurui where you kinda throw some high schoolers in a pot and watch them try and eat each other and break the pot. When you look at it that way, the show kinda becomes more fun. I'm not really watching to see *if* soma gets out, I'm watching to see *how.* And it feels almost like he wiggles out in a fun and interesting way (kinda until everything goes completely off the rails). I think some of the most fun parts was seeing how characters other than soma reacted to situations. That's where most of my entertainment came from besides the gorgeous food and... pLoT. I can't remember if food wars was actually advertised as a shonen so I think my lense is the problem here not yours, but I dunno I wanted to put my two cents in hahahaha And please notice me explanation point senpai and do a video on march comes in like a lion or ouran host club or something wosidbdiwowksn
I agree. For Food Wars, the winner is almost guaranteed, even when Soma isn't fighting, but seeing how those young chefs go about winning is inspiring. For the majority of the show, they use real techniques that chefs actually use. A lot of what they cook can be done in our homes. It's not how everyone watches the show, but that is how I watch it. And yes, it is a shonen. It ran in Shonen Jump before it was an anime.
but it is a shounen? it was literally published in shounen jump. i think you're mixing up demographics and genre. a shounen by itself is just a manga for teen boys, i think you mean food wars isn't a battle manga in your view. (I never got past the first three episodes and that was years ago so i cant debate on the quality of the battles lol)
@@mangetsu9725 oh no it’s cool lol it’s just something i see a lot of manga fans mix up. like chihayafuru is a high school sports anime but is a josei manga (meaning it’s marketed towards adult women) so while a shounen or a shojo has expected plot elements it’s doesn’t define what genre it is y’know. sailor moon is an action series but also a shojo manga and nisekoi is a romance but also a shounen manga
I would make the same critique about Kakegurui that ExPoint makes about Food Wars. The lack of stakes make for a spectacle with no tension. It *can* be fun to somebody, but I certainly didn't find it fun. Btw just because you ran in Shonen Jump doesn't mean you're "a Shounen". The word is being used in 2 seperate contexts, both to describe stories written for young boys and to describe a particular genre of *Battle* Shonen. Shounen Jump runs manga that isn't Battle Shounen.
For shows that Netflix did not create... 8:58 Region locks exist because Netflix paid for a license/permission from the people who made the show to show it to a country/region. Like paying for a song to be played on a certain radio station in USA would cost less than playing it on all radio stations world wide. If Netflix then showed that show to the whole world instead of just that one region, then they would be sued since they didn't pay extra to show it to the world. Netflix chooses which shows would probably do well in a region and eliminates others, passing the savings onto your low monthly netflix subscription. They don't buy everything for everyone and then charge an astronimcal price no one wants to pay, sorta like cable TV. If you paid for the North American Netflix Library, it doesn't mean you paid to have the Global Netflix Library. Although if a Global Netflix Library existed you probably would think it is way too expensive since you bought every show being sold. If you got to pay to view the one show you wanted, then that show would also be relatively expensive for what you are getting since you de-bundled the savings. I could be wrong, please correct me.
I’ve watched a ton of Iron Chef and Chopped and Top Chef for years. I’ve mostly found the competition consistently compelling. Food Wars does this but heightened through the lens of anime. The writers, directors, and editors of those show frequently highlight tension. And that’s just cooking. Project Runway and Forged operate similarly. I know it’s not a literal fight, where choreography can be used as a point-counterpoint, but a sense of momentum and a back and forth are established. Can this style of conflict portrayal successfully exist in the shounen space? Because it is absolutely successful outside of it. As far as the Food Wars’ issues with broader narrative stakes, I’m with you.
Enjoyed the video. I don’t necessarily think your argument actually makes sense. ‘Soma can’t lose due to expulsion’ is no different than ‘Luffy can’t die in a battle in One Piece or the story would screech to a halt’. Few stories can kill their main cast and not have that derail their story. Does that mean that One Piece is bad because Luffy is generally without stakes from the viewers perspective. DBZ does kill its main cast but they screwed it the other way by making it so death isn’t actually a big deal (I.e. you can just come back). If you have a show that is marked as a continuing series, these “problems” will nearly always come up. But still ... I get your point, though I think it more-or-less just demonstrates issues with any long running show. Enjoyed the video. Thanks
You know i forget that FW is Shonen. One im not a big Shonen fan, and two (to me) its more of a cooking show that has interesting ways of creating food. If it weren't for the "battles" I'd put it in the cozy anime section, which truthfully is what I'm more into.
It's like food porn that's really more about the spectacle than it is about anything else. I don't care who wins really, I just want to see them explain the taste and impact of it in ludicrous ways like 5 japanese men dressed up as cabbage versions of sailor moon.
I would like to direct your attention to something Mr.Exclaimation Point!!! In the part where you said that 'there is no proper way of discerning whether someone wins or loses before the dishes are served', that problem is....partially solved...? *spoilers below* With the match between Hayami...(?) Akira and Souma which happened later in the series. When they both go to present their dishes there is an escalation of their conflict as they both have sauces with their dishes, which have not been applied upon a first tasting, and its a real tense fight overall because it shifted the dynamic. It's probably my favorite in the series. I do wish more fights were like that though, dishes are about so much more than the taste of the food. They're about the techniques. The plating, and about many other things that the show fails to focus on often. Its a good show, but not a great one. Its the first manga I ever read though so that was a downward spiral.
This show came out when I was starting Culinary School years ago. My classmates and I would all watch it during breaks from class because it was funny and the recipes were practical and we wanted to test out.
Man, I miss Food Wars. I loved that show. Seriously, it was so ridiculous and so much fun, and I actually really liked the character interactions. Sure, it's far from perfect, and I agree with everything you said in this video, but I love it despite it's imperfections, or perhaps partly because of it. It's unique, it's ridiculous, but it's all just fun.
I more or less fully agree on your second point but I want to touch on your first one. The threat of expulsion as a steak (see the joke I made there) isn't inherently bad as it's narratively equivalent to the threat of death in a more traditional shonen story. Both would result in the end of their respective stories. Rather, the reason the steaks don't work aren't inherent to the steaks themselves, but because of the structure and rigidity of the fights limit the possible outcome of the fights. For example, in my hero academia's first season, during the usj attack we know deku can't die but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll win. There's a number of different turn of events that can allow him to survive, and the one that ends up happening is that All Might and the teachers show up to save them. However in food wars, because the fights are essentially structured bets, that leaves only 2 options. Either you win or you lose (and in some cases tie). Someone can't barge in and cook for soma because that would violate the rules of the match. Since there are only two options, combined with the steaks being so high that loss is narratively impossible, this is what ruins the tension of the battle and leaves only the option of victory on Soma's part.
I think part of what makes Food Wars its own anime isnt the predictability of the outcome, as we know Soma and his gang will always win because they have the winning “good” mindset and are better characters than anyone on Totsuki’s side, but this isnt the point of the anime IMO. Let me explain. My favorite arc is throughout seasons 3-4, where they go through their midterms, then the white hair guy takes over totsuki, and they battle 10 v 10 for the student council spots. Like the rest of the anime, you know Soma’s gang is going to win because they have the “winning” philosophy and are just frankly characters with more depth. Food Wars sets this in stone, and allows itself to focus more on the cooking and background aspects of the battle, such as what they did to prepare and how they deal with challenges. Its not about winning or losing, but why they win or lost. I also liked Food Wars for the food they prepared and the explanations of the food they made, it seems like a minor detail but I personally loved when they would explain their ingredients to the judges like a cooking show, as if it were masterchef or something like that. And this explanation always had culminating details from the background of each character, eg. Soma makes simple dishes but adds surprising elements to it because he learned to cook from his father in a family diner, or how the Italian brothers add Italian twists to their food because theyre Italian. Where it fails as a Shonen, Food Wars almost excels as a comforting slice of life about cooking at an absurd culinary school and the relationship of background and cooking styles, something you can see irl (like how if someone learned to cook in America but are Asian, they create Asian Fusion cuisine or something like that)
Good analysis! I think I enjoyed Food Wars in the beginning because I loved seeing the characters figure out some cool way to get the upper hand, or a clever way to incorporate the challenge and stuff like that. The threat of being thrown out of school kinda got left in the background for me, as well as missing the banter and knowing who's doing well or not. Though I do think those things are what made me lose interest in the end, because after a while you're able to pick up on the rythms of the show. I've mused on some solutions, if a manga or anime wants to do this idea again, that would help keep it "in line" and be more exciting: - Don't use "stopping the story" as a threat. You've already gone through that. If we consider sports anime, we know people don't have to die or be expelled for us to care. If we care about the characters, we want to see them achieve their dreams, and win! - Use several cook-offs to help establish banter and the idea of "trading blows" in a culinary setting. Things would get more exciting if, like you said, we can keep track of who's doing well, so picking the idea of "sets" from sports and sports anime would do really well, I think.
You know the thing that I enjoy the most about Food Wars isn't just that it's a shonen anime... it's the most shonen anime that ever shonened. It's maximum overshonen, at least in its trappings. It's positively campy in a way that in my eyes matches other ridiculous stories like Keijo!!!!!!!!, it either doesn't realize just how utterly ridiculous it's being with its premise or absolutely does and just barrels forward without truly acknowledging it by intentionally including characters or events that would clash with the established rules of its world. And camp is the operative word; it's not a parody like Bobobo or a deconstruction like Kill la Kill, but rather is sincere in its absurdity (although it could be argued that in its final season it was trying a become self-aware in ways that didn't fully work). It doesn't call out the tropes inherent to the genre so much as it revels in them. It *loves* those tropes... It *needs* them, even, because without them as a framework to hang the food porn and the uh, people porn onto, it might not have any bones whatsoever. Just my take, anyway.
Please, please make another follow up SAO Abridged video. The series' improvements on the original show are especially good this season, so I think there's a lot of content to work with (Asuna retaining her personality and fighting abilities instead of being a damsel, the relationship between Kirito/Kurt and his sister , etc). Either way, love your stuff.
Only issue I have is actually there is power dynamics during food battles: surprise ingredients. For example during the meatmeat battle soma initially looks like he's gonna lose (ignoring the fact he's obviously gonna win cause the show ends otherwise) and then sudden his food smells really good because of the technique he used. Also wasn't the entire point of that guy who stole the loser's utensils was that he never lost because he copied everyone else's technique so Some changed his plans on the fly to create a surprise masterpiece? That's where the paper dynamics, if any, come from, cause you never know what's actually gonna end up on that plate when alls said and done. Basically he jojos his way through every battle, which could be a complaining point on its own depending on who you are.
You know what gets me about stakes in food wars. There's no reason for it to be so high I can't believe them. They could just have the steaks be a failing grade. High enough to effect the protag if they lose, low enough to actually lose.
Food wars is a shonen? I thought it was more of a sports anime, like that volleyball anime or the bike riding anime. It takes a niche competitive sport in this case battle cooking and go super in depth and exaggerated with the techniques and styles of that type of competition. Like how the meat girl has that aspect of cooking being her entire identity in cooking at the start, while the biking anime has the main character basically starting out as a mountain climbing master cause he always had the heaviest gear on and was always sitting down when going to school up a huge hill.
I had never really been able to figure out why I got bored of Food Wars and dropped it after season 2. Now I know thanks to this video perfectly encapsulating the problem(s) I was subconcsiously having with it.
"Soma and me have one thing to say to you. 'You're Welcome" So you watched the dub? Then I have to hate you ideologically and we must fight a shounen battle and shout rhetorically at each other until the other gives in.
I see your points. I merely feel you do not give the series the credit it is due early on. Honestly until Asami appears this series feels like it nails everything it needs to in order to be incredibly fun and satisfying.
4:13... about the steaks getting higher in the food show. ... I have to disagree. In the typical shonen anime the stakes are already high. Its death. We know the main character wont die.... or the internet would be on fire. Which has happened a couple times. But most likely the main character isn't going to die when threatened with death. We know they are going to win. Same with food wars. We know he's going to win... now we just sit back and wait for the silly way it happens.
I don't really agree with the interplay thing, I mean I *might* be miss remembering but I seem to recall them doing a lot of it in both the preparation and the cooking. Things like: -"Haha, this ingredient will get me the edge," -"What he got ingredient, I'll have to up my game!" and -"What are you doing now, nothing can save your pathetic meal!" -"My meal HAS no pathetic ingredient Kaiba, but it does have specially prepared fish!" -"NOOOOO!"
What are you talking about? There were much higher stakes than Soma getting expelled and Totsuki's structure actually makes quite a bit of sense save for how much power the Elite 10 has. And you left out most of the actual ideological conflicts in Food Wars. Mostly from Azami, and arguably Mimasaka and Asahi. Azami believed that anyone who hasn't been extensively trained in fine dining (which is most of them) can't be trusted to know what good food is and as such can't be trusted to experiment with new recipes. He doesn't accept trial and error as an acceptable system. Why wander the wilderness of discovery when you can already know where to go? Soma had to fight against him to preserve the very educational nature of the school, protect it from his innovation-stifling curriculum.
A yes, A Practical Guide to Anime. Where our hero ExCatnation Point uses their knowledge of story tropes to avoid letting their opponents get the 'rage power-up' or be transported to another world after their death.
for me, easily the worst part about the expulsion steaks is that I could see so much opportunity for it to not be so. the transfer exam? yeah, that totally makes sense to be a do or die, I mean it's literally a test to see if he can enter the school. we know he'll win but this early on that's whatever Megumi's introduction being a whole expulsion thing? sure, we kinda need to establish how elitist and cutthroat the school is, so we know for a fact that the rest of the students are in it to win it so after that, well outside of the classes where grading is the main crux of conflict, we could have Souma start amassing "wealth" within the school, equipment and usage rights that he could then flex against other students in shokugekis, but then also risk losing that "wealth" by wagering it. once he has enough he could challenge one of the elite 10, and then at that point his seat would absolutely count as his primary steak. but then we get the duel with Nikumi, where it's save a club that he has no interest in, or get expelled. it would have been so more satisfying if it was "if you (souma) lose, you have to be subservient to me and Erina" or something. hell I feel like the humiliation of that outcome is even acknowledged by "if you (Nikumi) lose, you have to join the donburi club"
The upside of listening to a rambling argument is entertainment. The downside is that I have no way to put an upvote and a down vote at the same time Have a comment instead! For the algorithm!
5:48 This what you want ASCII character man, a fight about FMA? You know damn well his name is wrath and you can't do a damn thing about it. I like the original but I will die on this hill if you think FMA is better than Brotherhood. Thanks for another great video and reminding my sister's taste in shows trash
It's not true that we can't follow the duel as its happening. Other characters comment on the technique, ingridients etc during the cooking. Sometimes they aren't reliable and assume one of the cooks is doing something poorly only for it to turn out the cook had a plan. Sometimes they are relaible and accurately point our mistakes. What matters a lot is how the author plays with the order in which the meals are presented to the jury. It the beggining the common formula is "the first dish is praised a lot, but the second one gets praised even more, so it wins". But as the time goes on that formula is sometimes shifed to "the second means is praised more than the first, but on second thought the frst one was actually better". Sometimes the jury is divided. The actual battle continues at the jury bench and the suspense is high during the tasting. All that said I do NOT like how the author uses metaphors of nudity or horniness to potray excitement and intensity of the taste. It makes the most important part of the battle less serious and sometimes distracting.
Really liked the points you made and for some reason I'm really craving steak right now.... I suppose maybe the ecchi aspect blinded me to the lack of narrative tension. Never really thought about it before
To be fair. I grew up in a kitchen and seasons 1 and 2 were great because I could follow and guess the cooking. Of course that first egg dish was damn shocking it was cool, but later fights (using honey being a major one) felt great to guess. (personally I would have used papaya). Just a minor point, highly specific point to me, but go on
I haven't watched food wars, but as someone who watches a bit too much cooking competition shows. There is definitely ways you can show a back and forth of who is more likely to win between two or more chefs. If food wars failed on that, it is an issue of the writing rather than the topic.
I don't think Aristotle said objects have no essence. Just that their essence isn't self-existent like it is with Platonic forms. I'd also contend the idea that there's no turning points in fights. It's true that one can hardly follow the fight while the cooking is happening, but turning points can happen when the judges are judging the food. A lot of the times it is simply "A makes great thing but then they try B's thing and it's even better meaning B wins." But (especially during the more important fights) I recall it often happens that even though B's food is good, it doesn't outbeat A's. This is all speaking from memory of course.
I get that the stakes point you’re making, but so many series follow the pattern “the show isn’t over so I know the main character can’t lose yet” also having “no interplay” is part of why the show is so popular since it’s at least something different
I’d disagree with your point about expulsion, you could say the same thing for any fight to the death, you could say the same thing about midoriya’s fight with any villain in BNHA, of course they don’t die because then the show would be over. I guess I can see your point about the fights and gaining the upper hand but I personally don’t think it makes the show any worse because I think they handle it well. I do love your content and have watched for years but can’t agree with this video, we just have different opinions
Ah but see here's the thing. Death combat is more than a binary pass-fail scenario. Deku isn't allowed to die, but he is allowed to be horribly injured, there's nothing stopping side characters from dying or otherwise getting long term incapacitated, and the stakes are often about emotion or relationships rather than life and death. It's entirely possible for Deku to have loss conditions that don't end the narrative, or to win at great cost. Soma can do neither of these things most of the time. The best the show ever was was in the fancy cooking competition specifically because that asinine expulsion clause was gone.
@@hockeater Much like the tournament arc is often a flimsy excuse to force fights so was the expulsion threat. Essentially the expulsion threat just created a tournament arc :P.
@@Ralathar44 The reason the actual tournament arc was good was that nothing would permanently end if a main character lost, and lo and behold the show took this allowance to have its main characters lose. For one blessed arc the biggest problem in the show didn't exist.
@@hockeater No, it was because the excellent character development going into it plus the slick animation. We cared about the combatants and what they wanted. There are different KINDS of appeals to tournament arcs. For example Baki The Grappler of Kengan Ashura survive almost completely just on the majesty of how well the fights are choreographed, animated, and sold. MHA depends mostly on character stories and slick animation but outside of that the fights are very basic. Hunter X Hunter is done well in many ways but one of the largest appeals is HOW the fights are won via creative power usage. Deep Purple being a prime example of that. Saying one style or another of what a tournament arc lives in is better is like saying one style of art is better than another or like one food is better than another. There are many different good kinds of tournament arcs that run by slightly different rules of what makes them good.
@@Ralathar44 Wait you actually cared about the rock simple characters in food wars as people? The only things interesting in most of food wars were interesting cooking techniques, and simple humor. And for all of one arc actual tension due to inability to predict outcome.
You should really look into Medaka box!! The manga specifically. It’s a really enjoyable deconstruction of the shounen genre, especially once it gets really into what it means to be a main character!!
That Practical Guide to Evil deep cut tells me that it's time to completely alienate your core audience and do a Worm video. Do it, I double dog dare you.
@@ExplanationPointAnime Yeah, deep cut is pretty hyperbolic. I'm really just surprised to see it come up at all outside of the damp corners of the internet where serials are usually found
@@ExplanationPointAnime No worries, I'm just goofing around. Sorry for the confusion. Said corners are my regular haunts too. Really dig the video btw. I've never been able to articulate why food wars didn't click with me despite containing every element of a capable shonen excluding an ensemble cast of child soldiers. Good stuff as always!
My only experience with Food Wars is that one Sanji one-shot the mangaka did for One Piece. Which automatically makes it the best thing ever because Sanji. I think it's probably what ! is wanting out of the series if I'm reading things right. The point of the one-shot is the ideological 'battle' between the food critic's belief that the point of restaurants is to create high-end art in the form of food for sophisticated people like her to consume and harshly judge as sport versus Sanji's belief that restaurants exist to provide people of all stripes with the means of basic survival. The stakes were basically nonexistent (the Baratie cooks just wanted to defend their pride and Sanji just wanted the woman to not waste her existing food) and it being critic vs cook rather than cook vs cook makes what ! was saying about not having points of comparison before the final dish is revealed irrelevant. Again, if I'm reading !'s point right, taking what he says at face value. I'm just here as someone who loves Blackleg Sanji.
It would've been interesting to see a comparison to Iron Chef here, a show which does basically the same thing for "battles", except makes it actually work
When Deku was threatened with expulsion, I (an anime-only fan) seriously thought that he was going to be expelled. Given that the show is called "My Hero ACADEMIA" I thought that he maybe would continue to learn outside of the UA, or that his expulsion was going to be prevented by the director or AllMight pulling strings from behind. But nop; LOL, the teacher was joking. If I did that in my classes, the whole class would pursue me with pichforks and fire.
I just watch it for the Food mah dude... We all know he isn't going to lose, we're just there to see him show off how Awesome he is compared to everyone else.
I have to do a double take every time I see you reference a web serial. I don't even know anything about A Practical Guide to Evil, but I've heard it mentioned repeatedly in Wildbow fan circles. You should do a video on Wildbow books sometime. Worm is the obvious choice but you could throw a curveball and do Pact or Twig. Maybe even Ward or Pale. Or maybe something about Wildbow as a whole.
I have one question: why is it that expulsion is not a real stake in Food Wars, but death is often a real stake in other anime? I’ve been watching One Piece (up to the first 44 episodes), and death seems to be on the table for most of the fights. But I know that Luffy doesn’t die since the show goes on for quite a while, so why do I still feel like there’s weight to the fights? Again- not a criticism of your argument. I’m just genuinely curious.
About five and a half minutes into this I'm wondering if the makers banked too much on the "Will he or won't he" tension and not enough into the "How will he" tension. Six and a half minutes in: I want to see her cook with lasers! Eight and a quarter minutes in: Aww thanks... wait-
Just gonna say this, 2 years after the video came out, there's Food Wars real life shows on television, basically some up to 6 people cooking then a chef tasting and getting them into the next round -1 person. You don't see any battle or making the other participants put more salt into another persons dish or anything, just one food will taste the chef less good than another being the decider. I'm just watching them to see cool new dishes I could potentially cook myself, also having the ability to drop your disbelief i.e. not thinking meta that the Show is all about Soma and that he can't be expelled, just turn of your brain and watch the show.
I already know this is going to mention how every fight is already settled before the fight takes place. I gurantee he didnt try to cook any of the meals.
I GET. THE JOKE. ABOUT. THE STAKES.
steaks
this. we get it. please stop now.
I don't. Can you please explain it again?
He did not. Follow. The Rule of Three.
It stopped being funny.
So it's a joke about vampires ?
I love how in food wars it doesn't matter who wins but how they win.
Yes, thank you. I fell in love with food Wars for two reasons. 1) even though the stakes could be ridiculous at times, their battles felt to me like a real battle. I found myself rooting for characters who I know we're going to either win or lose but I was still biting my nail in hope that they would win. It was mainly due to how each character with their own philosophy, idealism, and skills would fight in each of their particular battles. It's like I got to look at an in-depth analysis of each character. The second reason was for the characters and the fanservice. Hey, at least I'm willing to admit to it.
@@allisondempsey982 this is also seen in Ngnl tazerlad made a vid on it
Pretty much, I'm there just 90% for the pageantry and spectacle and food porn. I wasn't concerned about battle mechanics or back and forth or etc. Just as long as what was presented on screen was interesting...and it was! They kept coming up with new cool stuff that was just familiar enough for me to know about a little but just exotic enough to be really interesting.
@@e-male896 thanks for the recommendation. I finally just found the video that you mention plus the UA-camr, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it right now.
@@allisondempsey982 Nice he's so underrated
I'm disappointed the joke about the stakes didn't go higher, it really was a funny joke
It appears he didn't....RAISE THE STAKES
I think they were "well done"
Those kinda of jokes are “Rare” and often barley “Meat” expectations
Can y'all stop grilling me about this, your searing comments are more than just sizzling attention grabs
I remember tomo vs spice king. They literally said that spice king food was better but because it wasn't made with friends tomorrow wins
What’s the veal with him mentioning Steak so meaty times. Is he trying to make fun of us. Targeting our tender feelings. How about you cutlet off! Unless you got a tBone to pick. Then quit loafing around and let’s settle this BEEF!
Schnitzel
.......I’ll see myself out now
You've earned a like.
Steak puns: A rarely well-done medium.
@@ExplanationPointAnime I hate both of you
That was ALMOST perfect.
The only missed opportunity is not turning 'fun' into 'fond'. Because that's also a meat thing. 9/10, you are a scholar and a gentlemen good sir and/or ma'am.
I think you're making people have the Schnitz with you. Good work :D
The Edward father joke made me go cross-eyed, I had to mentally jump through 3 different shows
Lmfao i was scrolling through the comments and actually laughed out loud when I realized what happened.
I only understood it once the visuals shifted away from Ed and Father and my brain could focus on just the names. It was actually kinda distracting and made me miss some of what he was saying.
timestamp?
Who was the father? I’ve seen FMA and Bebop but not whatever that other one was
@@stellam8936 it was father from codename:kids next door.
"Unless you're a cook or a professional chef you won't know what's going on" - can confirm. I was a culinary student as Food Wars started airing and I actually enjoyed some of the ridiculous school hijinks because I could compare it with my actual, normal, sane schooling. Buuut it quickly went off the rails and I generally couldn't wrap my head around how they got from point A to point B.
I will say it's similar to watching Iron Chef, in a way - because you don't see those "fights" in a normal way, but... the thing is that you mostly see the cooking happen realistically in stuff like Iron Chef, or Chopped, and you get everyone's PoV. You don't get that with Food Wars because it wants to inject more mystery, and that makes it fall short. The intrigue of Iron Chef is knowing both of their plans and trying to see if it will pan out, or how they intend to do it, but Food Wars leaves you floundering for the opponent's plan most of the time.
So as someone who was quite a bit of a fan, I feel like I have one extra point that wasn't brought up and a personal disagree. For the point not brought up, Food Wars shines it's best when it's about the preparation and planning, which is an aspect of battles I think could be explored more in a shonen style. To me, my favorite battles of the series are the ones where we get an idea of exactly the struggle Soma or someone else is facing and see them try to work through that issue (arguably better done in the manga, the anime kinda rushes through the content after season 1). Battles like the first shokugeki against Nikumi, the autumn election finale, and the rematch with Hayama in my opinion work because we can start to understand what they are doing because we've seen their process in planning and even if we don't know all the ins and outs of cooking, we know enough to be able to piece together what their problem is and get an idea of their solution in the end.
Which leads me to my disagree, while I 100% agree most of the battles lack steaks (see, see what I did there) I mostly didn't care because I was just more engaged in the philosophical struggle between them. It absolutely would be better if the stakes (not going to do that every time) were less all or nothing, but I usually was engaged enough by the difference in philosophy and even the explanation why that despite not having touched the earlier parts of the series in a while, I still remember the philosophies shown in the competitions and how that explanation won out. I do think the battles can survive on the underlying philosophical nature and even if you don't intuitively understand what is being done, enough of an explanation is usually provided in what happened that I consistently felt satisfied and was still engaged even when the result was obvious to see "how" and "why". I don't think a battle is good only if you don't know the result, and while I would absolutely be lying if I said Food Wars got that right every time, I do think it got it right enough that I still thought it was overall a pretty good manga.
Yeah, that's always the weird thing, because as long as the series gives enough focus on the characters and what this means to them then it works way better. At the heart of a shonen battle, it doesn't really matter as much how people are fighting or what they're doing as much as who they are and why you want to root for them. That's part of why Early Naruto was so effective, because the strategies Naruto used to beat Kiba and Neji are really stupid, but you care because you're invested in these characters. You know Naruto isn't going to lose against Neji, but you still want to see him win because Neji's a cold asshole who needs to be kicked down a peg.
But the problem is always kind-of there in Food Wars, where every fight has to basically be the same to the point where it becomes stupidly easy to predict that Soma's going to have some surprise in his dish that's going to give him the win. And what I think really went wrong was partially the characters and planning part of it, but the bigger thing is that having a tournament arc with lots of disposable nobodies in a system like this was always a really bad idea because there's no way to really vary things up. So when the writing falters in other areas, it strips back the layers A LOT and makes you realize just how similar these matches have to be. The fight where Megumi beats a random nobody who cooks with lobster and Soma's big final cook-off against his most dangrous foe to date feel IDENTICAL, and that's a pretty big underlying problem with the format of these encounters overall because one of these fights is meant to be a way bigger deal than the other.
I think at the end of the day, Food Wars was always going to be kind-of unsustainable because they needed to evolve past their usual formula and get into actually growing these characters and having them directly compete with other resteraunts or they needed to introduce different ways of judging success, like maybe do best-of-3 matches or something. But while it tries to mix things up every now and then, it always goes back to the same style of cook-off and it gets just so tiring and repetitive by the end.
Food wars was arguably at its worse when it went all battle shounen in season 5 compared to season 3 and 4, season 5 stakes a pretty much the least theyve been, new bad guy wants to marry erina, really she can just say no, winning the blue doesnt automatically make them get married so really its just soma trying to prove hes a great chef at the end of the day, unless the tension is "oh no somas love interest could get stolen away" which is a terrible stake in a show where the majority came into it because of the actual cooking techniques
yes soma will be kicked out of school if he fails ever gets old but it also makes sense as we see in the stagiare arc where failure is the same as getting fired and even summer camp was under the same rules of failure is the same as getting fired, totsuki is preparing them for the real world and real kitchen setting, messing up can make everyone fall behind or worse food not coming out in time can make customers leave
All in all Food Wars did something with the shounen setting that not many shows can do, you cant do kamehameha in real life but you can cook a steak with the techniques shown and ill miss it a lot
@@sdbzfan1 I genuinely never get why Asahi was expecting any of this to work? Like okay, I can buy that maybe if everything goes according to plan then he can get Erina to marry him through force because he knows some dangerous people. Alright.
But this guy does realize that doesn't mean she's suddenly going to like him or something, right? Like she's probably going to be pretty bitter. Heck, she'd probably make his life a living hell however she can, assuming they even live together, which is something she can just refuse to do! This girl doesn't even have to sleep with you, you're guaranteed to get NOTHING out of this deal! And if anyone she knows finds out about it then it's not like Erina doesn't have ties to people with money or something, she could totally afford a divorce lawyer the second she manages to get away.
It's like the only framing this plan makes sense in is if you look at it from the perspective of "Asahi is Soma's evil counterpart, so he makes bad plans because this is the type of short-sighted thing Soma would come up with." Which isn't really great, because it means you have to justify your villain's actions through saying they're incompetent.
@@dracocrusher right, the manga already had pretty weird laws to follow you just go along with like, Totsuki shouldn't be the only culinary school, even if it's the best we never hear about people gong anywhere else, like we could have gotten an arc when they all became second years about how other schools don't like how Totsuki gets all the praise just because it's some elite school and see how that effects the world like 2 people trying to get a job but because one came from totsuki the employer hires them even though the other one could be just as skilled if not more, after all Soma and aldini grew up already in the working business which compensated for the skills other kids got from coming from Middle school totsuki
I just really don't like how the only arc beside the autumn elections where "hey the stakes aren't you're kicked out of school" had to be "but you love interest could be taken away" the hell the show was never a romance so why does that matter suddenly, especially when Soma's never put Erina before himself ever, if anything he risked expulsion for Megumi a girl he met in episode 3, after Erina who just happened to be in the same dorm as him, she was a friend but the same way you make friends with people on the first day of school, he doesn't know her past, she could have killed someone from food poisoning once, even still he wasn't gonna let her get expelled because Shinomiya decided to be a dick that day
Erina on the other hand hasn't had Soma go out of the way for her and her alone in seasons 1-4 because he's a sore loser and just wanted to make her call his food delicious, nothing about either of them showed an interest in the other beyond rivals if anything, even if it was onesided, Erina had an actual crush on Joichiro and the show made it very obvious, man Season 5 could have been interesting but the author had to resort to pandering, no wonder people started to fall off when the show swapped focus from Soma trying to increase his skill and surpass his dad to, super powers and love triangles
@@sdbzfan1 The big thing that seems to have happened is that the actual food advisor who was helping to write the manga fell off because of maternity leave and, because it's a weekly series, things were already planned out and kind-of done in the final arc before she could come back. So suddenly, you have an entire tournament where people have to do Food Wars without the food insight. This PROBABLY killed the pacing pretty hard, too, because now they have to rush through everything, and I feel like the plot suffering so much is probably a big byproduct of this.
Not saying there weren't warning signs of things going south before in the Azami arc, but it seems like as soon as they lost the person behind the main focus of the series, things went to hell fast because cook-offs had to happen, but nobody's actually able to explain what the dishes are or why they're good anymore, and it's obvious that the mangaka, himself, doesn't really know how this shit works, either. So we go from a big explanation of how each flavor is intricately balanced between these specific elements to the final boss serving Shark fin ice-cream soup or something??? And that's just the final best dish in the series?????
This dude beat Tsukasa offscreen. It's kind-of obvious why that happened when you realize the guy writing the series doesn't have insight on food anymore.
It's a shame how Food Wars ended, but at least its beginning was amazing.
You're always everywhere and it triggers me
@SoulReaper 85 I miss some guy without a mustache he was cooler
@@RavingRaven887 I like to think that they’re all one person or robot
So almost every shounen now
5:48 ... that is Wrath (FMAB) ...
I love how well you put the "stakes that are too high are not stakes at all". Beautifully put.
I'm a Dungeon Master in D&Dand i distinctly remember, one time, having to help a player "balance" a powerful magical item he wanted to make. When i complained that his idea for it was too powerful, he offered to give it a significant drawback, but his idea of a drawback was that in case of failure it would explode and kill the entire party.
I think that that's when i realized this "stakes that are too high are not stakes at all" concept instinctively. Past a certain point, you're not upping the stakes, you're effectively holding the characters hostage, and saying "let me win OR ELSE."
I’d like to submit the best food war fight... so in one piece there’s a filler ep where Sanji faces off against a marine cook staff. The only stakes are that he’s under cover and if he gets cot it will really fuck up the plan but not out of the question. He also has his pride on the line as well but we all know that. But anyway it’s a great scene and is a super intense battle since sanji rightly flips the competition on its head and uses the leftovers of the other cooks to make his mean since in his words “this is a battle field right. It’s important that the food tastes good but it’s more important that your food stores last. You should wast even a scrap of food.” Its a super cool scene that plays to his character perfectly and if you had no idea what sanji was about watching that scene would give you everything you need to know about him.
Ah, the good ole G-8 arc. Best filler arc in anime, let alone OP. Every single person I've managed to get through OP has really enjoyed G-8 with Sanji's food war being one of the notable highlights.
I haven't watched Food Wars, but I do watch a lot of cooking competition shows like Master Chef and Chopped, and it's interesting that those shows seem to recognize that you can get some of that "who's winning" tension out of showing things going wrong, or throwing in a twist that people respond to differently, or participants second-guessing themselves.
Despite the fact that these are competitions between chefs, measuring their technical ability and creativity against one another, the battle tends to be more chef vs the circumstances (time, ingredients, available equipment (I've seen multiple chefs fighting to get their ice cream into the single machine first many times)) or chefs vs themselves.
Thank you so much for mentioning March Comes in Like a Lion when discussing stakes. The match between Shimada and Saku is one the most gripping "fights" I've ever seen in anime. The symbolic fight between rising new generation and slowly vaning, but still proud and masterful old one, use of metaphors of burnt field and heavy sashes of the past weighing Saku down are both masterful in setting the mood and telling the story visually. But what I love the most is how you feel sympathy for both men fighting: Shimada, an extremely likeable and kind man who just wants to make people who believed in him proud and Saku, who's so desperate to win this last time, because this might quite literally be that for him. I knew from that no matter who win, I would be at same time cheering for him and crying for the loser.
Honestly, the whole stakes being so high that they aren't stakes at all is prevalent in a lot of anime. A good example being MHA. In season 1 the stakes of Midoroya passing and also the fear of him getting expelled by Aizawa several times aren't going to happen because it's my hero Academia so there has to be school involved. In following seasons the show literally starts with Madoryia telling us that this is the story of *how* he becomes the world's greatest hero meaning any fight he gets into with dangerous villains already has a set ending. It's not until the stakes become "Midoriya has to figure out his quirk and get it under control or else he is going to lose function of his body" that I actually cared about any of his stakes. The overly long point here is that I don't think the point of....well any Shonen anime is who wins fights. It generally isn't hard in any Shonen anime to spot the eventual winner of a battle, because unless for that specific battle the stakes are low, the protag is going to win it. The point is *how* and *why* they win. I feel this is actually a really strong point for Food Wars because it's easier to translate creativity, practice, and technique into food than courage, powering up when needed, and having the most faith in my friends is with most Shonen.
I think that's a big thing, because 90% of shonen is basically just this. Goku isn't going to just lose to Frieza because then Frieza's worldview would be right, but how that fight actually goes down is interesting. If you start focusing on your meta knowledge of "Well, the hero has to win because they're the hero" then you're going to miss out on the journey getting to that point and just how clever or meaningful that can be.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it makes the entire show predictable. Yes, I understand that you're trying to argue that's irrelevant, but it really isn't. Even if the choreography, the pacing, the atmosphere, and everything else about a fight is perfect, knwoing who'a going to win removes tension, which while it's certainly an aspect in all action anime, it's the building block of shounen. If the fight's going to end with the protagonist winning, then that cheap trick the antagonist pulled to turn the tables instantly means nothing, and as a result, the viewer's either going to be bored out of their mind at having to waste another 5 minutes on a red herring or get frustrated in the same regard.
Dragon Ball Z was mentioned, and honestly that's a really good example for my point, for two reasons.
First, it's got nothing going for it besides its fights and its occasional humor. Its soundtrack is forgettable, its characters are less than one-dimensional, its pacing is honestly horrid, and aside from the choreography being every once in a while interesting it has no resemblance to the martial arts anime that spawned it.
Secone, it's the single most popular anime in the west. Despite all of its flaws, despite the vomit-inducing 291 episode count for 5 arcs including the Garlick Jr. filler arc, despite the fact that not a Kai-damn person alive remembers Spopavitch who was a plot-introducing antagonist, despite the fact that its canon power scaling is horribly inconsistent at the best of times and outright impossible at the worst of times, the ONE thing it does right? The main character can die, and he isn't guaranteed to protect everyone. Episode 4 (which comes after one padded out fight and an outright filler episode for its series introduction, how did we not see the signs?) is when Goku first dies. His friends all die later that arc, and some of them die again in the next one. Earth actually gets obliterated once, too. Now, none of these changes are permanent, the name of the franchise being why, but the fact remains that to a kid in the 90's, seeing Goku with a hole straight through his chest (that hit his internal organs, yes, *all of them*) sets the tone that death is a possibility.
@@imaginaryboy2000 "the ONE thing it does right? The main character can die, and he isn't guaranteed to protect everyone."
I want to throw a big counterpoint to that, which is that in DBZ, death means basically nothing. Even when Goku's dead, he can just come back and keep fighting without even using the Dragonballs. It does keep Goku away from time to time, but that's the thing... the series HAS to keep finding ways to keep Goku away because he's way too powerful, so keeping Goku away is the only way for other characters to actually do stuff. Which is why when they stop doing those tricks in Super, it feels even worse because now Goku actually is the only one who can do stuff because why would Tien or Gohan get to be useful when Goku just keeps getting stronger?
I also want to throw another wrench into this with One Piece. In One Piece, outside of backstories, death almost never happens. I can count the number of One Piece deaths on one hand, and that's across almost 1,000 chapters/episodes. BUT, the big thing is that Luffy can lose and it's made clear that people other than Luffy do get their own fights and moments, where they can also be at risk. So even if you expect Luffy to win, you're going to get a unique feeling climax every time because there's always so much in play between all the characters and the unique elements, and even if everything comes together in a unique fight, like Luffy vs Eneru, there's still no guarantee that Luffy's going to come out on top. Heck, there's three seperate Luffy v Crocodile fights and it's just as engaging every single time because he has a completely different strategy and approach for each one until you get to the super badass satisfying conclusion where Crocodile finally goes down for good.
@@imaginaryboy2000 predictability isn't necessarily a bad thing tho. Not at all actually. I mean, taking Naruto as an example, when Naruto goes up against Neji in the Chuunin exams, it's set up so that we know for a fact that Neji is the favorite to win this one, since he has a powerful Kekkei Genkai, the Byakkugan, since he's part of the most powerful clan in the village, and he's known as a genius even among said clan. Neji is incredibly powerful, and Naruto up until that point hadn't really done anything all too impressive yet, but we still know that Naruto is going to win this one, because there's no way the main character is losing in the first match of the tournament, especially after we've just spend a good number of episodes focusing on Naruto's Chakra training. We know before the fight even starts that Naruto is going to win, and that he's going to teach Neji why his worldview is flawed by defeating him in battle. The characters in the show however, do not know this. They believe for sure that Neji is going to win because so far he's clearly shown to be the better fighter, and that's what adds interest. Sure, us as viewers can predict that Naruto is going to win, but because of how the fight is set up, we're not sure how he's gonna do it, and that is what makes us want to see it.
If all that mattered was the outcome, then yes I would agree with you, a predictable outcome generally makes things boring, but in cases like this, it can be interesting even if you know the outcome, because you don't know how it ended up like that. Goku defeating Frieza was also obvious from the start, I mean of course he was going to win, he wasn't just going to lose to Frieza after everything that had happened, but even tho the outcome is predictable to us and we know he's gonna win, we still want to watch it because we don't know how it will happen.
@@Da_Swifta You're just reiterating the same point that was said before. Alroght, my bad, instead of explaining around it, I should have plowed right through it.
In that situation you described, the fact that the viewer knows the outcome doesn't make it any more enjoyable or engaging, whereas having the air of mystery does. Knowing for a fact that Naruto will win probably because of friendship (haven't watched the show but come on, early-00's anime) doesn't improve the fight, since the question of "how will the protagonist win?" is asked either way, and in the long run it hurts the show's pacing and tone a lot because the question can never be answered with "they don't."
-The character interactions work better when the viewer's reacting along with them, as opposed to the viewer getting bored by the fact that the sideliners haven't figured out the outcome a mile in advance
-The fight's pacing works better when its not apparent that exactly half of the upsets in a given fight are irrelevant, or at least don't serve the fight in any meaningful way
-The story as a whole suffers a lot less if the outcomes if the major fights aren't set in stone before they begin, since it allows the writers more creativity to deal with loss (which by the way, in Shokugeki no Souma in particular is a core theme that's just abandoned on the main character despite being one of his core characteristics, how about that huh?).
Now, that's not to say that a guaranteed victory or loss can't be interesting. It can, absolutely, but only when written for that outcome. If the writer specifically paces and plans for the fight to be an apparent loss or victory, they can work with the emotions of the characters much more interestingly, as well as making the whole flow of combat more involved. However, most shounen don't operate this way, and in fact the example you brought up sounds like a perfect one to use. Of course, I wouldn't know, and you likely wouldn't admit it of your own accord, so let me just take a guess: Naruto fights Neji, almost loses, has some revalation about friendship or whatnot, finds the strength to fight and wins using a technique he was taught by his master earlier that arc, or maybe an arc before. Am I more or less accurate?
I think Food Wars battles are actually pretty okay because in the end the passion for cooking really made it way through to me. Each person had a specialty that they wanted to perfect and it wasn't some fight to the death that regular people won't truly understand but cooking something good to eat. I used to think it wasn't as good as I thought until I watched ChiefPK's reviews on the series.
I know the show is played up for humor and absurdity but anyone who's ever been in training to become a kitchen worker or chef or has ever worked as that knows that this is very relateable. Culinary careers often come with intense never ending stress and trauma so this show is always really cathartic when you consider that. To me it really helped with my own trauma just from training alone. The food industry is so full of toxicity and aggressive work environment systems that it's genuinely cathartic to see a bunch of characters just ace these environments and creating a vibe that feels compforting. Sure the stakes are never truely real and you as a viewer know it. But for many of us coming out of this hellish system all we really need is some humor and power fantasy of owning and dominating a industry that in real life grinds you down into a pile of pathetic emotionally broken dust in just a few years.
I was not expecting this today but I'm veryyyy much into it
This is more or less the first video you've made where I really disagreed with the premise. Dont get me wrong though this video was still really fun. I also completely agree with the issue with stakes. Especially once all of the elite 10 were introduced all at once. By then we were beyond the point of no return.
I think my conflict with this analysis is that I, personally, didn't quite see food wars as a shonen. I saw it more like kakegurui where you kinda throw some high schoolers in a pot and watch them try and eat each other and break the pot. When you look at it that way, the show kinda becomes more fun. I'm not really watching to see *if* soma gets out, I'm watching to see *how.* And it feels almost like he wiggles out in a fun and interesting way (kinda until everything goes completely off the rails). I think some of the most fun parts was seeing how characters other than soma reacted to situations. That's where most of my entertainment came from besides the gorgeous food and... pLoT. I can't remember if food wars was actually advertised as a shonen so I think my lense is the problem here not yours, but I dunno I wanted to put my two cents in hahahaha
And please notice me explanation point senpai and do a video on march comes in like a lion or ouran host club or something wosidbdiwowksn
I agree. For Food Wars, the winner is almost guaranteed, even when Soma isn't fighting, but seeing how those young chefs go about winning is inspiring. For the majority of the show, they use real techniques that chefs actually use. A lot of what they cook can be done in our homes. It's not how everyone watches the show, but that is how I watch it.
And yes, it is a shonen. It ran in Shonen Jump before it was an anime.
but it is a shounen? it was literally published in shounen jump. i think you're mixing up demographics and genre. a shounen by itself is just a manga for teen boys, i think you mean food wars isn't a battle manga in your view. (I never got past the first three episodes and that was years ago so i cant debate on the quality of the battles lol)
@@kate2282 yeah that's it lmao. Thanks! I'm literally so bad at vocalizing my thoughts so I'm glad you figured out what I was trying to say hahaha
@@mangetsu9725 oh no it’s cool lol it’s just something i see a lot of manga fans mix up. like chihayafuru is a high school sports anime but is a josei manga (meaning it’s marketed towards adult women) so while a shounen or a shojo has expected plot elements it’s doesn’t define what genre it is y’know. sailor moon is an action series but also a shojo manga and nisekoi is a romance but also a shounen manga
I would make the same critique about Kakegurui that ExPoint makes about Food Wars. The lack of stakes make for a spectacle with no tension. It *can* be fun to somebody, but I certainly didn't find it fun.
Btw just because you ran in Shonen Jump doesn't mean you're "a Shounen". The word is being used in 2 seperate contexts, both to describe stories written for young boys and to describe a particular genre of *Battle* Shonen. Shounen Jump runs manga that isn't Battle Shounen.
Food Wars: How do I solve my escalation problem?
Gurren Lagann: I don't understand the question.
Taylor Hebert: JUST DO IT! DON'T STOP ESCALATING!
GURREN: WITH FIGHTING SPIRIT!!!
For shows that Netflix did not create...
8:58 Region locks exist because Netflix paid for a license/permission from the people who made the show to show it to a country/region.
Like paying for a song to be played on a certain radio station in USA would cost less than playing it on all radio stations world wide.
If Netflix then showed that show to the whole world instead of just that one region, then they would be sued since they didn't pay extra to show it to the world.
Netflix chooses which shows would probably do well in a region and eliminates others, passing the savings onto your low monthly netflix subscription.
They don't buy everything for everyone and then charge an astronimcal price no one wants to pay, sorta like cable TV.
If you paid for the North American Netflix Library, it doesn't mean you paid to have the Global Netflix Library.
Although if a Global Netflix Library existed you probably would think it is way too expensive since you bought every show being sold.
If you got to pay to view the one show you wanted, then that show would also be relatively expensive for what you are getting since you de-bundled the savings.
I could be wrong, please correct me.
1:07 It may not work as a shonen, but boy does it work as a way to make me hungry
I’ve watched a ton of Iron Chef and Chopped and Top Chef for years. I’ve mostly found the competition consistently compelling. Food Wars does this but heightened through the lens of anime. The writers, directors, and editors of those show frequently highlight tension. And that’s just cooking. Project Runway and Forged operate similarly.
I know it’s not a literal fight, where choreography can be used as a point-counterpoint, but a sense of momentum and a back and forth are established. Can this style of conflict portrayal successfully exist in the shounen space? Because it is absolutely successful outside of it.
As far as the Food Wars’ issues with broader narrative stakes, I’m with you.
Enjoyed the video. I don’t necessarily think your argument actually makes sense. ‘Soma can’t lose due to expulsion’ is no different than ‘Luffy can’t die in a battle in One Piece or the story would screech to a halt’. Few stories can kill their main cast and not have that derail their story. Does that mean that One Piece is bad because Luffy is generally without stakes from the viewers perspective. DBZ does kill its main cast but they screwed it the other way by making it so death isn’t actually a big deal (I.e. you can just come back).
If you have a show that is marked as a continuing series, these “problems” will nearly always come up.
But still ... I get your point, though I think it more-or-less just demonstrates issues with any long running show.
Enjoyed the video. Thanks
You know i forget that FW is Shonen. One im not a big Shonen fan, and two (to me) its more of a cooking show that has interesting ways of creating food. If it weren't for the "battles" I'd put it in the cozy anime section, which truthfully is what I'm more into.
It's like food porn that's really more about the spectacle than it is about anything else. I don't care who wins really, I just want to see them explain the taste and impact of it in ludicrous ways like 5 japanese men dressed up as cabbage versions of sailor moon.
I would like to direct your attention to something Mr.Exclaimation Point!!! In the part where you said that 'there is no proper way of discerning whether someone wins or loses before the dishes are served', that problem is....partially solved...?
*spoilers below*
With the match between Hayami...(?) Akira and Souma which happened later in the series. When they both go to present their dishes there is an escalation of their conflict as they both have sauces with their dishes, which have not been applied upon a first tasting, and its a real tense fight overall because it shifted the dynamic.
It's probably my favorite in the series. I do wish more fights were like that though, dishes are about so much more than the taste of the food. They're about the techniques. The plating, and about many other things that the show fails to focus on often. Its a good show, but not a great one. Its the first manga I ever read though so that was a downward spiral.
This show came out when I was starting Culinary School years ago. My classmates and I would all watch it during breaks from class because it was funny and the recipes were practical and we wanted to test out.
Man, I miss Food Wars. I loved that show. Seriously, it was so ridiculous and so much fun, and I actually really liked the character interactions. Sure, it's far from perfect, and I agree with everything you said in this video, but I love it despite it's imperfections, or perhaps partly because of it. It's unique, it's ridiculous, but it's all just fun.
I more or less fully agree on your second point but I want to touch on your first one.
The threat of expulsion as a steak (see the joke I made there) isn't inherently bad as it's narratively equivalent to the threat of death in a more traditional shonen story. Both would result in the end of their respective stories. Rather, the reason the steaks don't work aren't inherent to the steaks themselves, but because of the structure and rigidity of the fights limit the possible outcome of the fights.
For example, in my hero academia's first season, during the usj attack we know deku can't die but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll win. There's a number of different turn of events that can allow him to survive, and the one that ends up happening is that All Might and the teachers show up to save them.
However in food wars, because the fights are essentially structured bets, that leaves only 2 options. Either you win or you lose (and in some cases tie). Someone can't barge in and cook for soma because that would violate the rules of the match. Since there are only two options, combined with the steaks being so high that loss is narratively impossible, this is what ruins the tension of the battle and leaves only the option of victory on Soma's part.
Food wars is my favorite anime of all time. Just thought I'd put that out there.
I think part of what makes Food Wars its own anime isnt the predictability of the outcome, as we know Soma and his gang will always win because they have the winning “good” mindset and are better characters than anyone on Totsuki’s side, but this isnt the point of the anime IMO. Let me explain.
My favorite arc is throughout seasons 3-4, where they go through their midterms, then the white hair guy takes over totsuki, and they battle 10 v 10 for the student council spots. Like the rest of the anime, you know Soma’s gang is going to win because they have the “winning” philosophy and are just frankly characters with more depth. Food Wars sets this in stone, and allows itself to focus more on the cooking and background aspects of the battle, such as what they did to prepare and how they deal with challenges. Its not about winning or losing, but why they win or lost.
I also liked Food Wars for the food they prepared and the explanations of the food they made, it seems like a minor detail but I personally loved when they would explain their ingredients to the judges like a cooking show, as if it were masterchef or something like that. And this explanation always had culminating details from the background of each character, eg. Soma makes simple dishes but adds surprising elements to it because he learned to cook from his father in a family diner, or how the Italian brothers add Italian twists to their food because theyre Italian.
Where it fails as a Shonen, Food Wars almost excels as a comforting slice of life about cooking at an absurd culinary school and the relationship of background and cooking styles, something you can see irl (like how if someone learned to cook in America but are Asian, they create Asian Fusion cuisine or something like that)
I loved the “Forms vs Objects have no essence” reference, that was great, finally that philosophy class I took paid off.
2:50 That spoiler dodge though
Good analysis! I think I enjoyed Food Wars in the beginning because I loved seeing the characters figure out some cool way to get the upper hand, or a clever way to incorporate the challenge and stuff like that. The threat of being thrown out of school kinda got left in the background for me, as well as missing the banter and knowing who's doing well or not. Though I do think those things are what made me lose interest in the end, because after a while you're able to pick up on the rythms of the show.
I've mused on some solutions, if a manga or anime wants to do this idea again, that would help keep it "in line" and be more exciting:
- Don't use "stopping the story" as a threat. You've already gone through that. If we consider sports anime, we know people don't have to die or be expelled for us to care. If we care about the characters, we want to see them achieve their dreams, and win!
- Use several cook-offs to help establish banter and the idea of "trading blows" in a culinary setting. Things would get more exciting if, like you said, we can keep track of who's doing well, so picking the idea of "sets" from sports and sports anime would do really well, I think.
You know the thing that I enjoy the most about Food Wars isn't just that it's a shonen anime... it's the most shonen anime that ever shonened.
It's maximum overshonen, at least in its trappings.
It's positively campy in a way that in my eyes matches other ridiculous stories like Keijo!!!!!!!!, it either doesn't realize just how utterly ridiculous it's being with its premise or absolutely does and just barrels forward without truly acknowledging it by intentionally including characters or events that would clash with the established rules of its world.
And camp is the operative word; it's not a parody like Bobobo or a deconstruction like Kill la Kill, but rather is sincere in its absurdity (although it could be argued that in its final season it was trying a become self-aware in ways that didn't fully work).
It doesn't call out the tropes inherent to the genre so much as it revels in them. It *loves* those tropes... It *needs* them, even, because without them as a framework to hang the food porn and the uh, people porn onto, it might not have any bones whatsoever.
Just my take, anyway.
God, March Comes in like a Lion is a good show.
Indeed
All MCs have plor armor, that's where suspension of disbelief comes in. This applies to 99% of shows, specially shounen.
Please, please make another follow up SAO Abridged video. The series' improvements on the original show are especially good this season, so I think there's a lot of content to work with (Asuna retaining her personality and fighting abilities instead of being a damsel, the relationship between Kirito/Kurt and his sister , etc). Either way, love your stuff.
Wow. I was not ready to be reminded that Fighting Foodons existed... 8:03
I love this concept: using Nontraditional Battle Shonen to examine the genre. I wonder if you could do it with other genres?
i dont remember much from food wars but I do remember that onions make meat tender so at least I learned something
Only issue I have is actually there is power dynamics during food battles: surprise ingredients. For example during the meatmeat battle soma initially looks like he's gonna lose (ignoring the fact he's obviously gonna win cause the show ends otherwise) and then sudden his food smells really good because of the technique he used. Also wasn't the entire point of that guy who stole the loser's utensils was that he never lost because he copied everyone else's technique so Some changed his plans on the fly to create a surprise masterpiece? That's where the paper dynamics, if any, come from, cause you never know what's actually gonna end up on that plate when alls said and done.
Basically he jojos his way through every battle, which could be a complaining point on its own depending on who you are.
You know what gets me about stakes in food wars. There's no reason for it to be so high I can't believe them. They could just have the steaks be a failing grade.
High enough to effect the protag if they lose, low enough to actually lose.
Food wars is a shonen? I thought it was more of a sports anime, like that volleyball anime or the bike riding anime. It takes a niche competitive sport in this case battle cooking and go super in depth and exaggerated with the techniques and styles of that type of competition.
Like how the meat girl has that aspect of cooking being her entire identity in cooking at the start, while the biking anime has the main character basically starting out as a mountain climbing master cause he always had the heaviest gear on and was always sitting down when going to school up a huge hill.
I had never really been able to figure out why I got bored of Food Wars and dropped it after season 2. Now I know thanks to this video perfectly encapsulating the problem(s) I was subconcsiously having with it.
"Soma and me have one thing to say to you. 'You're Welcome"
So you watched the dub? Then I have to hate you ideologically and we must fight a shounen battle and shout rhetorically at each other until the other gives in.
Good luck with that, your words won't hit as hard if people don't understand them
3:27 “ok there are 3 pages of this”
“Should I comment that I got it?”
I see your points. I merely feel you do not give the series the credit it is due early on. Honestly until Asami appears this series feels like it nails everything it needs to in order to be incredibly fun and satisfying.
A channel I like on the interwebs offhandidly reference the Guide - Life. Is. Good.
Seeing EP notification was the equivalent of a jump scare
"It's a test to see if they intended if they learned the lesson they intended to" that's really good!!!
4:13... about the steaks getting higher in the food show. ... I have to disagree. In the typical shonen anime the stakes are already high. Its death. We know the main character wont die.... or the internet would be on fire. Which has happened a couple times. But most likely the main character isn't going to die when threatened with death. We know they are going to win. Same with food wars. We know he's going to win... now we just sit back and wait for the silly way it happens.
EP: *Says "Anime"*
EP: *Shows Legend of Korra*
Me: *Waits for screaming*
I don't really agree with the interplay thing, I mean I *might* be miss remembering but I seem to recall them doing a lot of it in both the preparation and the cooking.
Things like:
-"Haha, this ingredient will get me the edge,"
-"What he got ingredient, I'll have to up my game!"
and
-"What are you doing now, nothing can save your pathetic meal!"
-"My meal HAS no pathetic ingredient Kaiba, but it does have specially prepared fish!"
-"NOOOOO!"
I haven't watched food wars but what I've gotten from it is the main character is Shirou emiya if the holy grail war didn't exist
Always happy to see you upload
What are you talking about? There were much higher stakes than Soma getting expelled and Totsuki's structure actually makes quite a bit of sense save for how much power the Elite 10 has. And you left out most of the actual ideological conflicts in Food Wars. Mostly from Azami, and arguably Mimasaka and Asahi. Azami believed that anyone who hasn't been extensively trained in fine dining (which is most of them) can't be trusted to know what good food is and as such can't be trusted to experiment with new recipes. He doesn't accept trial and error as an acceptable system. Why wander the wilderness of discovery when you can already know where to go? Soma had to fight against him to preserve the very educational nature of the school, protect it from his innovation-stifling curriculum.
A yes, A Practical Guide to Anime. Where our hero ExCatnation Point uses their knowledge of story tropes to avoid letting their opponents get the 'rage power-up' or be transported to another world after their death.
for me, easily the worst part about the expulsion steaks is that I could see so much opportunity for it to not be so.
the transfer exam? yeah, that totally makes sense to be a do or die, I mean it's literally a test to see if he can enter the school. we know he'll win but this early on that's whatever
Megumi's introduction being a whole expulsion thing? sure, we kinda need to establish how elitist and cutthroat the school is, so we know for a fact that the rest of the students are in it to win it
so after that, well outside of the classes where grading is the main crux of conflict, we could have Souma start amassing "wealth" within the school, equipment and usage rights that he could then flex against other students in shokugekis, but then also risk losing that "wealth" by wagering it. once he has enough he could challenge one of the elite 10, and then at that point his seat would absolutely count as his primary steak.
but then we get the duel with Nikumi, where it's save a club that he has no interest in, or get expelled. it would have been so more satisfying if it was "if you (souma) lose, you have to be subservient to me and Erina" or something. hell I feel like the humiliation of that outcome is even acknowledged by "if you (Nikumi) lose, you have to join the donburi club"
2:10 Bleach being hidden in the corner was funny
The upside of listening to a rambling argument is entertainment.
The downside is that I have no way to put an upvote and a down vote at the same time
Have a comment instead!
For the algorithm!
This is....fair. This is a very fair assessment, and these points become even more apparent after the Regiment Shokugeki arc
It's a miracle, ex point put out two videos in two months!
As somebody who’s never seen food wars this video was a fucking fever dream and I loved every second of it
5:48 This what you want ASCII character man, a fight about FMA? You know damn well his name is wrath and you can't do a damn thing about it. I like the original but I will die on this hill if you think FMA is better than Brotherhood.
Thanks for another great video and reminding my sister's taste in shows trash
That Tim Minchin gag was quite the treat.
At 5:45 you were talking about pride, but used a picture of the homonculus Wrath.
That makes me führeous.
Ah shit u right.
The "edward vs father" part was so many layers removed I needed a second to process it.
*THAT* ..... is the MOST TL;DR version of Food Wars I have ever heard; Burger-Flipping Kirito goes to Ultra-deluxe burger-flipping High School.
2:49 Something is off here... but i can see it work.
It's not true that we can't follow the duel as its happening. Other characters comment on the technique, ingridients etc during the cooking. Sometimes they aren't reliable and assume one of the cooks is doing something poorly only for it to turn out the cook had a plan. Sometimes they are relaible and accurately point our mistakes. What matters a lot is how the author plays with the order in which the meals are presented to the jury. It the beggining the common formula is "the first dish is praised a lot, but the second one gets praised even more, so it wins". But as the time goes on that formula is sometimes shifed to "the second means is praised more than the first, but on second thought the frst one was actually better". Sometimes the jury is divided. The actual battle continues at the jury bench and the suspense is high during the tasting.
All that said I do NOT like how the author uses metaphors of nudity or horniness to potray excitement and intensity of the taste. It makes the most important part of the battle less serious and sometimes distracting.
guys my brownies are coming out dry what do i do to fix it
I always somehow forget this channel exists until I see an upload
Thank God Expoint released a new vidoe! I love his stuff but I assume everytime I see it will be the last.
Really liked the points you made and for some reason I'm really craving steak right now.... I suppose maybe the ecchi aspect blinded me to the lack of narrative tension. Never really thought about it before
To be fair. I grew up in a kitchen and seasons 1 and 2 were great because I could follow and guess the cooking. Of course that first egg dish was damn shocking it was cool, but later fights (using honey being a major one) felt great to guess. (personally I would have used papaya).
Just a minor point, highly specific point to me, but go on
6:30 wait you missed one...
Is hers anyone can cook except me, because my nerves are shot?
wow i never thought about food wars from that point of view
Fuck I badly want to hear more steak jokes they absolutely carry this video 🥺
I haven't watched food wars, but as someone who watches a bit too much cooking competition shows. There is definitely ways you can show a back and forth of who is more likely to win between two or more chefs. If food wars failed on that, it is an issue of the writing rather than the topic.
It doesn't fail at it. EP somehow missed it.
I don't think Aristotle said objects have no essence. Just that their essence isn't self-existent like it is with Platonic forms.
I'd also contend the idea that there's no turning points in fights. It's true that one can hardly follow the fight while the cooking is happening, but turning points can happen when the judges are judging the food. A lot of the times it is simply "A makes great thing but then they try B's thing and it's even better meaning B wins." But (especially during the more important fights) I recall it often happens that even though B's food is good, it doesn't outbeat A's.
This is all speaking from memory of course.
I get that the stakes point you’re making, but so many series follow the pattern “the show isn’t over so I know the main character can’t lose yet” also having “no interplay” is part of why the show is so popular since it’s at least something different
Welp, i know what im doing this weekend. Thanks for the breakdown!
I’d disagree with your point about expulsion, you could say the same thing for any fight to the death, you could say the same thing about midoriya’s fight with any villain in BNHA, of course they don’t die because then the show would be over. I guess I can see your point about the fights and gaining the upper hand but I personally don’t think it makes the show any worse because I think they handle it well. I do love your content and have watched for years but can’t agree with this video, we just have different opinions
Ah but see here's the thing. Death combat is more than a binary pass-fail scenario. Deku isn't allowed to die, but he is allowed to be horribly injured, there's nothing stopping side characters from dying or otherwise getting long term incapacitated, and the stakes are often about emotion or relationships rather than life and death.
It's entirely possible for Deku to have loss conditions that don't end the narrative, or to win at great cost. Soma can do neither of these things most of the time. The best the show ever was was in the fancy cooking competition specifically because that asinine expulsion clause was gone.
@@hockeater Much like the tournament arc is often a flimsy excuse to force fights so was the expulsion threat. Essentially the expulsion threat just created a tournament arc :P.
@@Ralathar44 The reason the actual tournament arc was good was that nothing would permanently end if a main character lost, and lo and behold the show took this allowance to have its main characters lose. For one blessed arc the biggest problem in the show didn't exist.
@@hockeater No, it was because the excellent character development going into it plus the slick animation. We cared about the combatants and what they wanted. There are different KINDS of appeals to tournament arcs. For example Baki The Grappler of Kengan Ashura survive almost completely just on the majesty of how well the fights are choreographed, animated, and sold. MHA depends mostly on character stories and slick animation but outside of that the fights are very basic. Hunter X Hunter is done well in many ways but one of the largest appeals is HOW the fights are won via creative power usage. Deep Purple being a prime example of that.
Saying one style or another of what a tournament arc lives in is better is like saying one style of art is better than another or like one food is better than another. There are many different good kinds of tournament arcs that run by slightly different rules of what makes them good.
@@Ralathar44 Wait you actually cared about the rock simple characters in food wars as people? The only things interesting in most of food wars were interesting cooking techniques, and simple humor. And for all of one arc actual tension due to inability to predict outcome.
You should really look into Medaka box!! The manga specifically. It’s a really enjoyable deconstruction of the shounen genre, especially once it gets really into what it means to be a main character!!
That Practical Guide to Evil deep cut tells me that it's time to completely alienate your core audience and do a Worm video. Do it, I double dog dare you.
It's not a deep cut. I haven't even read Practical Guide, to be honest. But its characters are tropes. That's the premise, isn't it?
@@ExplanationPointAnime Yeah, deep cut is pretty hyperbolic. I'm really just surprised to see it come up at all outside of the damp corners of the internet where serials are usually found
@@Boxglove Well, I hang out in those deep corners, so. . . /shrug
@@Boxglove Also, I thought you meant I was saying PGTE was bad. I misunderstood. Sorry.
@@ExplanationPointAnime No worries, I'm just goofing around. Sorry for the confusion. Said corners are my regular haunts too. Really dig the video btw. I've never been able to articulate why food wars didn't click with me despite containing every element of a capable shonen excluding an ensemble cast of child soldiers. Good stuff as always!
I chocked on "I forgot Deku still had arms"
Damn covid
Am I sensing... a March comes in like a Lion video in the making?
My only experience with Food Wars is that one Sanji one-shot the mangaka did for One Piece. Which automatically makes it the best thing ever because Sanji.
I think it's probably what ! is wanting out of the series if I'm reading things right. The point of the one-shot is the ideological 'battle' between the food critic's belief that the point of restaurants is to create high-end art in the form of food for sophisticated people like her to consume and harshly judge as sport versus Sanji's belief that restaurants exist to provide people of all stripes with the means of basic survival.
The stakes were basically nonexistent (the Baratie cooks just wanted to defend their pride and Sanji just wanted the woman to not waste her existing food) and it being critic vs cook rather than cook vs cook makes what ! was saying about not having points of comparison before the final dish is revealed irrelevant.
Again, if I'm reading !'s point right, taking what he says at face value. I'm just here as someone who loves Blackleg Sanji.
It would've been interesting to see a comparison to Iron Chef here, a show which does basically the same thing for "battles", except makes it actually work
4:11
I don't usually mind that
But the only thing close that I've ever experienced is Naruto and death note so not really a comparison but still
When Deku was threatened with expulsion, I (an anime-only fan) seriously thought that he was going to be expelled. Given that the show is called "My Hero ACADEMIA" I thought that he maybe would continue to learn outside of the UA, or that his expulsion was going to be prevented by the director or AllMight pulling strings from behind. But nop; LOL, the teacher was joking. If I did that in my classes, the whole class would pursue me with pichforks and fire.
I didn't realize that Food Wars was supposed to be a shonen. I absolutely thought it was just an animated cooking show that's kinda goofy
Why dont I get these videos in my recommended until 2 days after release.
I just watch it for the Food mah dude...
We all know he isn't going to lose, we're just there to see him show off how Awesome he is compared to everyone else.
I have to do a double take every time I see you reference a web serial. I don't even know anything about A Practical Guide to Evil, but I've heard it mentioned repeatedly in Wildbow fan circles.
You should do a video on Wildbow books sometime. Worm is the obvious choice but you could throw a curveball and do Pact or Twig. Maybe even Ward or Pale. Or maybe something about Wildbow as a whole.
The more I hear him say "expulsion" and "raising the steaks" the more YuGiOh GX looms over my shoulder, cackling evilly
I have one question: why is it that expulsion is not a real stake in Food Wars, but death is often a real stake in other anime? I’ve been watching One Piece (up to the first 44 episodes), and death seems to be on the table for most of the fights. But I know that Luffy doesn’t die since the show goes on for quite a while, so why do I still feel like there’s weight to the fights?
Again- not a criticism of your argument. I’m just genuinely curious.
I hope you're ok. A hiatus during a pandemic isn't a great sign.
About five and a half minutes into this I'm wondering if the makers banked too much on the "Will he or won't he" tension and not enough into the "How will he" tension.
Six and a half minutes in: I want to see her cook with lasers!
Eight and a quarter minutes in: Aww thanks... wait-
You should join Tomska in his war with surfshark. I feel that would be entertaining.
Just gonna say this, 2 years after the video came out, there's Food Wars real life shows on television, basically some up to 6 people cooking then a chef tasting and getting them into the next round -1 person.
You don't see any battle or making the other participants put more salt into another persons dish or anything, just one food will taste the chef less good than another being the decider.
I'm just watching them to see cool new dishes I could potentially cook myself, also having the ability to drop your disbelief i.e. not thinking meta that the Show is all about Soma and that he can't be expelled, just turn of your brain and watch the show.
I already know this is going to mention how every fight is already settled before the fight takes place.
I gurantee he didnt try to cook any of the meals.
I was right.