By: Ethan Rogers
Some of the most memorable heroes in anime don’t become powerful overnight. They train, fail, meet people who know more than they do, discover weaknesses they didn’t realize they had, and return to the work. Sometimes that process unfolds over a few episodes. In other series, viewers follow it for years.
That gradual progression is one reason these stories can be surprisingly relatable. The worlds may contain supernatural abilities, impossible martial arts techniques, or characters capable of destroying mountains, but the process of becoming better at something often resembles real life more closely than the setting suggests.
For longtime anime and donghua fan Elijah Ladapo, that connection is a large part of the appeal. He is particularly drawn to stories in which characters have to earn their progress rather than simply receive new abilities when the plot requires them.
“I’ve always found it more satisfying when you can actually see the work behind a character’s growth,” Ladapo says. “When someone struggles with a skill, trains for it, fails a few times, and eventually succeeds, the accomplishment means more because you’ve been there for the entire process.”
It’s a storytelling formula that appears across generations of anime and, increasingly for international audiences, Chinese donghua. Beneath the spectacular battles and fantasy settings is a simple idea: meaningful improvement takes time.
Progress Is More Interesting When It Isn’t Linear
Real personal growth rarely follows a smooth upward trajectory. Someone can spend months getting stronger in the gym and suddenly hit a plateau. A student can understand one subject quickly and struggle with another. A promising career can include promotions as well as disappointments, bad decisions, and periods when progress seems almost nonexistent.
Anime frequently allows its heroes to experience the same frustration.
Dragon Ball offers one of the most recognizable examples. Goku’s identity has always been closely connected to training, but what makes his progression compelling is that there is almost always someone stronger. Each achievement reveals another level he hasn’t reached yet.
That keeps the character moving forward. Victory isn’t presented as the end of development.
It also serves as a useful counterpoint to how success is often presented in everyday life. We tend to see the finished result: the athlete winning a competition, the entrepreneur announcing a successful company, or the musician performing before thousands of people. The years spent developing the ability are much less visible.
Long-form storytelling has the luxury of showing those years.
Battle Through the Heavens Makes Improvement the Story
This theme becomes even more explicit in cultivation stories, a genre that has become a major part of Chinese animation.
Battle Through the Heavens, one of Ladapo’s favorite donghua series, follows Xiao Yan, who begins as a celebrated young talent before mysteriously losing his abilities. Once admired, he becomes a target of ridicule as his reputation collapses.
Eventually, Xiao Yan learns that the spirit of an ancient cultivator, Yao Chen, has been absorbing his energy. Yao Chen subsequently becomes his teacher, setting Xiao on a much longer path toward rebuilding and eventually surpassing what he once was.
The cultivation system makes improvement itself central to the narrative. Xiao doesn’t simply unlock his potential in a single dramatic moment. He trains, studies techniques, gains experience through difficult battles, and gradually becomes capable of things that would have been impossible for him earlier.
Skills introduced early can continue developing much later in the story.
That continuity matters because viewers remember where the character started. The distance between the beginner and the expert becomes part of the emotional payoff.
Elijah Ladapo: Good Mentors Don’t Remove the Difficulty
Another lesson these stories often teach is that mentorship isn’t the same as rescue.
A good fictional mentor may provide knowledge, identify weaknesses, or push a character toward challenges they wouldn’t choose themselves. But the student still has to do the work.
Think about Master Roshi training Goku and Krillin in Dragon Ball. Their early training famously includes delivering milk, plowing fields with their hands, swimming while pursued by a shark, and performing construction work. The exercises are exaggerated for comedy, but the underlying principle is recognizable: their teacher creates conditions in which they have to develop themselves.
Yao Chen plays a comparable role in Battle Through the Heavens. His knowledge dramatically changes Xiao Yan’s trajectory, but he cannot simply hand Xiao the experience required to become a great cultivator.
That distinction applies far beyond anime.
Teachers, coaches, managers, parents, and mentors can shorten learning curves and help people avoid unnecessary mistakes. What they can’t do is substitute their experience for someone else’s. Eventually, the learner has to practice, make decisions, encounter failure, and develop judgment independently.
“One of the things I appreciate about great mentor characters is that they don’t make the journey easy,” Ladapo says. “They give someone the tools to become better, but the character still has to decide how hard they’re willing to work and what they’re willing to learn from the setbacks.”
Failure Has a Purpose
Popular culture often treats failure as the opposite of success. In good character-development stories, it’s usually part of the route toward it.
A protagonist who wins every battle immediately becomes predictable. More importantly, there’s little reason for that character to change.
Defeat creates information.
A fighter discovers that a particular technique isn’t sufficient. A leader realizes strength alone won’t solve a problem. A character who has relied on natural ability encounters someone whose preparation is better. Failure forces an adjustment that victory might never have required.
That’s one reason training arcs remain such an enduring feature of anime. The interesting part isn’t simply watching someone perform repetitive exercises. It’s watching a character respond to the realization that who they are today isn’t yet enough for the challenge ahead.
That can be uncomfortable in fiction and even more uncomfortable in life. Yet many worthwhile pursuits involve exactly that experience.
Consistency Isn’t as Dramatic as Transformation
Anime certainly isn’t immune to miraculous transformations and sudden power increases. Some of its most famous moments are built around them.
But even those transformations are usually more satisfying when a story has established what came beforehand.
The audience has watched the character practice. They’ve seen previous losses. They understand the sacrifices involved. When the breakthrough finally arrives, it feels like the culmination of something, not an arbitrary reward.
Real improvement is considerably less cinematic.
There isn’t usually dramatic music when someone adds five pounds to a lift after weeks of training. Nobody sees the hours a student spends mastering a difficult subject. Learning to communicate better, becoming more patient, developing professional expertise, or changing an unhealthy habit may happen so gradually that the person doing it barely notices from one day to the next.
Look back after a year, however, and the difference can be enormous.
The Hero at Episode One Isn’t Supposed to Be Finished
Perhaps that’s one reason growth stories remain so appealing.
Characters such as Goku and Xiao Yan remind viewers that being inexperienced isn’t the same as being incapable. Struggling with something today doesn’t tell us where someone will be several years from now.
It only tells us where they are in the story.
Anime and donghua exaggerate that idea through fantasy worlds and extraordinary characters, but the underlying lesson is remarkably ordinary. Progress requires repetition. Teachers can accelerate development, but they can’t do the work for us. Failure can expose what needs to change. And the most impressive achievements often look much less impressive while they’re being built.
We naturally want the transformation scene. Real life usually gives us the training arc.
Perhaps the training arc is the more important part anyway.
