The tournament arc is the quintessential shounen anime plotline, and its enduring popularity and omnipresence across western and eastern media alike demonstrate its strength as a storytelling format. For the uninitiated, a tournament arc is a series of episodes of typically found in anime in which the main characters participate in a powerful entity’s or organization’s competition against other combatants to achieve a goal ranging from personal glory to societal advancement to the safety of the world as we know it. For example, Dragon Ball Z’s World Martial Arts Tournament, Naruto’s Chunin Exams, Yu Yu Hakusho’s Dark Tournament, Hunter x Hunter’s Heaven’s Arena, My Hero Academia’s Sports Festival, basically all of Yugioh, and more contain series highlights for fans who remember their exciting fights and character defining moments. In this article, I will focus on the structure of the tournament arc and what makes them so effective.
Tournament arcs make the storytelling idea of conflict, the basic narrative of an individual or individuals exerting his will against something, into its perhaps easiest to understand form of person v person. Without conflict, there is no story to tell, and the tournament arc takes this idea to the extreme by giving increased importance to the conflict in-universe, frequently through the simplest form of conflict: interpersonal violence. The form is reminiscent of television professional wrestling in that it presents larger-than-life characters competing against each other alongside melodramatic storytelling that is effective while easily understood. The tournament arc can be like a case study of a show that manages to capture its essence in a smaller environment or sample size that has ramifications outside of its honed-in scope like character development, world-building, and particular variations on form.
Tournament arcs allow for time spent namely on the protagonist to be shared amongst the secondary protagonists and even the tertiary protagonists for a change in a convincing enough format that does not break the series’ established point-of-view (but certainly does bend it). Given the massive crowds of people in a tournament arc and the sheer number of fights taking place, it makes sense for the main characters to have lots of downtime in-between their rounds to observe other competitors, often times foreshadowing their own challenges against those other competitors either during the tournament or later in the series. It’s a simple solution to world-building in a series with a lot of characters with odd powers to have them just showcase their personalities and abilities in rapid-succession fights in an in-universe spectacle that mirrors the viewer’s spectacle watching it for the first time. Getting to see so many different abilities and characters helps flesh out the series’ larger worlds despite their being contained within the confines of an arena. For example, Naruto’s Chunin Exams fights give the viewer an idea of then-antagonist Gaara’s powers and his weaknesses while serving as last hurrahs for lesser characters like Shino and Rock Lee before the series became increasingly centered on its namesake character. Tournament arcs also provide a path for antagonists to become part-time protagonists after they get the meaning of friendship beaten into them, rewarding viewers for investing time and interest into side characters during tournaments.
Lots of things happen during a tournament arc that don’t have much to do with the tournament itself, but are necessitated because of it in-world. It’s no surprise that a storytelling form which relies upon a larger entity to become a host, judge, or mediator so often deals with corruption and behind-the-scenes activities. In Yugioh’s Duelist Kingdom Arc, antagonist Maximillian Pegasus cheats both implicitly through using a special deck of Toon monsters with questionably rule bending effects and explicitly through mind-reading, in Yu Yu Hakusho’s Dark Tournament Arc, the tournament committee frequently imposes bad rulings and unfair penalties on team Urameshi, and in Naruto’s Chunin Exams Arc, antagonist Orochimaru skulks about as his plan to invade the Leaf Village alongside the Sand Ninja unfurls. Another common occurrence in these tournaments is their interruptions, be they for training or for more fighting. The Chunin exams take a pause between the pre-lims and final round, allowing Naruto time to train with Jiraiya before it gets interrupted by the Leaf Village invasion. The 25th World Martial Arts Tournament in DBZ gets interrupted by the appearance of Babidi and Majin Buu. Hunter x Hunter's Heaven's Arena tournament gets interrupted briefly so Gon and Killua can learn about Nen. While The Dark Tournament never stays interrupted for long, its fights are frequently interrupted with Yusuke’s training under Genkai, leading to considerable absences from the main character of the series while Kurama and Hiei (and Kuwabara to a lesser extent) are allowed to shine. This on and off relationship between the importance of the tournament itself and the characters participating within it reveals an understanding between author and viewer that both recognize the familiarity of the form and its relative unimportance to the character driven stories being presented, revealing it as a utilitarian element that allows for expectations to build-up and payoff in a formulaic way that also indulges the viewer with deeper looks into the fantasy world that make the arcs particular amongst their sameness.
Tournament arcs aren't really about the tournaments; they’re about what goes on in-between the fights and within our characters during the fights. Their organized structures and simple executions allow for the majority of their time to be spent on characters instead of plot devices and contrivances. Once the familiar premise of characters duking it out is set, the form, in some ways, works like a giant season-long bottle episode in which its fights and character moments can flow seamlessly as if the series is on autopilot, but in other ways the simplicity of the form allows for derivations from it to be much more apparent and even bold within an outwardly formulaic structure.