I was killing some time on Twitter earlier while hard at work procrastinating instead of writing when I came across a tweet from a fellow author on the #WritingCommunity topic. The tweet was a fairly simple; What are some of your writing influences?

I’ve written in length about my love for Golden Age Science Fiction and how Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein were constant companions growing up. Other authors, such as R.A. Salvatore, also had huge impacts on the way I write my characters, settings, action, etc. However, I always neglected to bring up one of the largest impacts on my writing, which is anime and mange, specifically the seinen genre.

For those unfamiliar with the term, seinen is a category of manga/anime that targets men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Unlike the more well known shonen genre, which is marketed towards teenage boys, seinen is typically very much more adult oriented in theme and content. For example, the popular series Naruto is a great example of a shonen while Cowboy Bebop or Ghost in the Shell would be prime examples of seinen.

Like most Americans around my age, I was first introduced to anime through Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. I remember staying up late every night and watching the likes of Blood+, Trigun, or Neon Genesis Evangelion. These shows were dark and contemplative, with detailed narratives and some downright gruesome scenes (Blue Gender anyone?) The stories told in these shows rivaled anything found on prime time cable, and I was absolutely enthralled.

I have watched and read an insane amount of anime and manga over the years and fell in love with the way they told their stories. While I try not to generalize, I found that the media that I was absorbing from Japan treated their characters in a much deeper manner than much of Western media. Take Hiroya Oka for example; he wrote a long running manga called Gantz. There was a rather average anime adaptation of the first couple arcs, only notable for having the single best English dubbed line ever. Characters in this manga literally died by the dozen but each and every one was given enough back story and reason for their death to leave a lasting impact. For example, a secondary character named Sakurai, was one of the last characters in the manga to die. Early in the series we learn that he was horribly bullied, which led to him attempting suicide and subsequently becoming part of the Gantz team. As the series progresses, he becomes more self-confident and due to his psychic powers becomes one of the most powerful members of the group. During the final invasion he basically is brutally maimed and uses the last of his energy to save some nearby civilians from some falling debris. He went from selfishly trying to kill himself to selflessly sacrificing his life to save complete strangers, and as I said, he was only a secondary character.

There were dozens of secondary characters in Gantz, and almost all of them received this same level of development. I have always speculated that the reason they spend so much time on these secondary characters is to make the story more relatable. For example, the reason that I chose to recall Sakurai’s story was because his plight was so familiar to me. I was bullied relentlessly when I was younger and while I never took it to the level that Sakurai did, I’d be lying if I said the thought of suicide never crossed my mind as a young man. Sakurai’s death in Gantz absolutely wrecked me, even more than the loss of some of the primary characters because of how I related to him on a personal level. That level of character development is something I absolutely aspire to be able to replicate.

The other major part of seinen that I hope to emulate in my writing is the action. For me, action scenes cannot be written any better than how R.A. Salvatore did it in The Legend of Drizzt series of fantasy novels. Every single fight served a purpose, be it character growth or plot progression, and they were written with such detail and precision that it was impossible to not be completely immersed in these battles. However, these action scenes were held back by their commitment to realism (as much realism as you can expect from a fantasy novel featuring dragons and orcs that is). In seinen, much like its shonen counterpart, realism takes a back seat to the wow factor. While the scene is still there to tell a story or build a character, it is the literary equivalent of going for style points. I could try to explain, but I’ll let the video below show you what I mean.

Is this scene realistic? Absolutely not. Is it cool as hell? You better believe it. Physics and realism are out the window in favor of just over the top, jaw dropping action. There is no pretense of a suspension of disbelief, it is just supposed to be raw, pure fun.

That’s not to say that this scene doesn’t serve a purpose. This scene, from the anime One Punch Man, is actually a dream of the main character, Saitama. The intensity and action of his dream are what he craves, as opposed to his reality, in which he is so absurdly overpowered that every supervillain that he fights dies after his first punch. The series itself is a very entertaining deconstruction of the superhero genre.

While it is certainly difficult to reproduce that level of action in script, the idea of writing an action scene that is just ridiculously fun and wildly unbelievable is incredibly appealing to me. I toyed with this a tiny bit in Kidneys and Rayguns during the ending scene. The whole idea with Detective O’Malley destroying an entire dockyard with a single swing of a baseball bat was for the wow factor. I didn’t care if people thought it was realistic, I wanted it to be cool.

There are so many other factors of seinen that I would love to get into that I want to integrate into my writing. The social commentary of Pyscho-Pass, the world building of Last Exile, the philosophical musings of Ghost in the Shell, the religious iconography in Neon Genesis Evangelion; these are just a few of the brilliant themes explored in seinen.

Seinen is not just a major influence on my writing, but a genre that I enjoy partaking in multiple media formats. I hope that I can the best of what seinen has to offer and integrate it with my love of classic science fiction to produce some genuinely enjoyable works of fiction.

Any other seinen fans out there? If so, let me know your favorite seinen series in the comments!( Mine is Tutomu Nihei’s Knights of Sidonia!)

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