User blog comment:FairyRaven/Fairy Tail Chapter 453: A Father's Job, Review and Commentary/@comment-180.191.134.131-20150919121527/@comment-4829046-20150922191416

@Nick It's basically a proper action shounen. Dealing with all kinds of conflicts and motivations while simultaneously being fun enough for kids to appreciate. Bleach tries to use this but just flat-lines. Naruto made it look really forced and unnatural due to inconsistency. FMA and Rave on the other hand did it really well, with the mature bits well woven with some of the best jokes of our time. Heck, in Rave even the matter of sex was in joke format. But we all know that One Piece lorded over them in sales, popularity and everything for good reason. It's style was a winner. Oda created the style and stuck to it. The pattern is well ingrained into the audience and only people that don't care would fail to see the pattern. Oda fills the manga with a variety of factors that make it appealing to a wider range of people than the others do. It deals with different political ideologies, different racial and social standards, and many other things while always keeping some element of amusement. Note how at least one person cracked a joke during a dark scenario? Some characters were invented specifically for this and sometimes it was dark humour. Shingeki no Kyoujin was the only one that near rivaled OP with its style, but sadly its target market was much smaller than OP for obvious reasons and hype died down after a while. Hopefully it will revitalize with Season 2 but who knows.