Why is the tournament arc such a common arc in shonen? Is it a cultural thing? Or is it something else?

Why is the tournament arc such a common arc in shonen? Is it a cultural thing? Or is it something else?
Is it that shonen authors are fucking hacks?

>he hates tournament arcs
why

A showcase of skills learnt and an opportunity to do some worldbuilding. It's hype as fuck too. How can you not like it?

Because it's an easy excuse to get people to fight and show off powers.

Good excuse to introduce a lot of new characters and make them fight.

I'd argue it's a sign of poor pacing if you need to introduce a lot of side characters at once. Same with the fighting aspect really, since if you are worried about the series not having enough fights it's a better idea to switch the narrative to other character or group than to recycle tropes.

It's a an easy way set up fights, especially if it's between friends, and introduce a large amount of characters.

Plus the author can have characters who normally wouldn't fight each other and he can have good guys fight bad guys without killing each other. Basically it allows him to write "who would win threads" in universe but he still doesn't have to commit to anything because "they were holding back in the tournament lol".

Everyone saying that it's for reasons related to storytelling is both wrong and naive.

It's because tournaments are cheap to animate. Production gets to reuse the same simple backgrounds over and over again for a long string of episodes while also giving them an excuse to have an announcer spend half of each episode narrating whatever just happened while the characters just stand there and stare at each other.

You're a fucking idiot, when authors wrote tournament arcs, they didn't even know if they were gonna get an anime.

because in shows where competition is the driving plot device it only makes sense to boil it down to the simplest form so you can focus on showing off characters and powers rather than a contrived plot replete with arbitrary excuses for people to fight one another. Honestly I have more problems with the "heroes raid the villain base, allies say 'go on ahead I'll handle this' one by one until the protagonist faces down the antagonist alone" formula than with tournaments.