Spoiler: very important, but they can’t happen too often.
Summary:
- Fans argue about how important training arcs are in battle shounen anime.
- It’s hard to show progress without them.
- They can definitely get tiring if they happen too often.
Training arcs in battle shounen anime have always been somewhat controversial. While they are sometimes fun to watch, many also consider them completely unnecessary, feeling that a lot of the time, they are too drawn out for too little gain.
Others argue that training arcs are essential to the battle shounen genre, and cutting them out would make protagonists’ victories undeserved. It seems that fans really can’t agree on this one — but the truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.
Why Training Arcs Are Needed
First of all, the genre wouldn’t really work if the training arcs didn’t exist. A huge staple of the genre itself is the protagonist’s progression. We have to see them getting stronger. It’s hard to show it without having at least some training arcs.
In fact, training arcs are a thing even outside of the battle shounen genre. If you think about it, the recently released Solo Leveling (Ore dake Level Up na Ken) is just one big training arc. Seeing the protagonist getting stronger is one of the most natural ways to show their progression.
Potential Issues
On the other hand, if you have training arcs too often, they might start feeling stale. In fact, that is what some arcs of My Hero Academia (Boku no Hero Academia) were criticized for.
While for that series, it makes sense — after all, the characters are literally school students who are supposed to be getting stronger — but that still doesn’t excuse there being so many of them.
In longer series, the issue gets even worse, as we have way too many training arcs, and they practically become routine.
It’s hard to make such an arc exciting more than once, and in some cases (Naruto Shippuden, for example), the training arc actually goes on while other characters are fighting somewhere else. This can completely destroy the pacing.
They Are Probably Going to Be a Trope Forever
Training arcs are such a common trope in anime that they often get parodied in other series. A good example is One Punch Man, and Saitama’s training routine (100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats, 10 kilometer run) has become a meme of its own.
While some people argue that we have to abandon tropes of the past, this one's here to stay. It’s just too hard to show progression otherwise in a convincingly natural way.