User blog comment:Faisal Shourov/Why is Highschool DxD so popular?/@comment-3290441-20160406213625

Well for starters it nails it's target audience very effectively, straight male youth's, flash bare boobs in a commercial or two and you'll have yourself a audience for life.

Except that, and granted this is coming from one of those straight male youth's, it gets boring after a while. That is why the show injects lore from the various mythologies. Yes the main focus is on Christianity, but as soon as Issei's sacred gear starts talking to him and calls himself Ddraig and people look him up they start to realize that he's a reference to a obscure mythological creature.

I like that they establish that from the get go, that you don't have to be christian to understand everything that goes on in this show, that a general knowledge of pop culture and what they explain in it will do. I mean, in spite of the massive lore that the bible or Dante's inferno presents, it's still a comparatively limited source material that can get boring after a while.

The way that the writer does this, as long as he doesn't run out of myths and legends he'll be good. I also like how they tackle the anime troop of 'main character nearly gets killed so they power up and beat the bad guy' with the sacred gears.

At the end of the day the Sacred gears have wills and desires of their own, among them to not be destroyed, so they release a tiny bit of the limiter on the creature they got inside to save their hosts. On top of that we show them doing actual legitimate training, they don't go through a spiritual what cha ma call it or get dipped in a vat of radioactive waste every other day, they legitimately work hard to get stronger.

Then we have the characters, oh yes we have characters. Looking at each of the main character's pages, granted a good chunk of which I wrote myself, you see at least three good chunks of content in the 'before the series started' section. They build these characters up, they give them lore, fears, desires and history of their own.

The girls aren't just masses of animated flesh attached to boobs for the audience to stare at, they don't just randomly fall in love with the main character on sight, I'm looking at you, Rosario Vampire. Heck, Koneko couldn't even stand Issei for four point five volumes.

And unlike in some anime I can think of, 'Cough'Bleach'Coughcough,' they don't have to rely on the main character to do everything. Think about how many times Issei would have been mince meat if not for Asia, or if Kiba wasn't backing him up, or Rias wasn't holding everyone's mess together.

Everyone can hold their in some way or another in a fight and they provide a sufficiently balanced mix that they can cover each other's weak points without being invincible. They have been beaten, they have been broken, heck our main character has died at least twice!

I don't want to watch something that I already know the outcome to, it's not entertaining, it's boring. In some anime the hero usually meets the villain, gets their butts handed to them, and when they meet again in the next episode they can beat them no sweat.

Here, some times we have entire story arcs revolving around villains, heck Cao Cao took three whole light novel volumes to beat, that's not including the one in between that he didn't appear in, and he's still a serious threat even as a ally.

Take a look at villains like the Joker or Lex Luthor, they weren't just throwaway villains, they're some of the defining characters of their series, and they consistently put guys like Batman or super man in a tight spot, that's why they're popular.

With the exception of a few mistakes at the beginning that If it was me I would correct before I did any re-releases, the show has stayed true to it's own massively expanding lore and still has room to grow. They aren't too serious about it, and it's not to comical either, it just works.