The Fire Force anime was a surrealist shonen masterpiece and not enough people watched it

Genre labels like shonen use a manga or anime’s target demographic to pin down and describe works in that vast field. However, such labels are often ineffective. A lack of clearly defined boundaries is, in fact, one of the main creative impulses that led to the medium’s steady expansion over the past decades. One Piece and Haikyu!!, for example, were serialized in the same magazine and are both described as shonen, but they look as different as night and day. Even within the same subgenres, such as sports or battle manga, you’ll find wildly different spins on common tropes.