What Shonens avoid doing this? It might be the most immersion breaking thing for me. From the top of my mind, HxH has the main kids just trying to survive against the adults.
Then you get Ichigo awakening powers to defeat thousand years old Samurai spirits who live fighting demons and training in military squads, Naruto catching up to the adults and and surpassing the kage level after 2 years of training where he only learnt how to do a bigger rasengan and to control up to 3 tails, and One Piece which is fine for the most part, the enemies Luffy beat like Crocodile, Moria, Kuro and Don Krieg were explicitly not at theit peak... But then it had the team of rookies defeating the CP9, a trained band of secret government assassins with Lucci being a prodigy kid who killed tons since birth and supposedly mastered all techniques, and lately Luffy is beating commanders who have been feared in the sea for the last 20 years.
Every single fight in One Piece is literally "My Ambition > Your Ambition" That matters more than the actual on paper strength of characters every time
Parker Mitchell
Most of the time Dragon Ball. Fighting Manga are usually pretty good about this, so Kengan, Baki, and Teppu.
Hudson Baker
JoJo avoids this from part 3 onwards because no one needs to train for anything
Cooper Perry
Naruto only clearly got Kage level with the Sage Mode doe, which came from shadow clones hax, but the point still stands
To answer the question, FMA maybe? It was never very about power levels so the problem never came about I think
Jason Hill
Big Mom hasnt lost a fight yet
Juan Hernandez
>15 year old takes down entire mafia through asspulls >JoJo avoids this
Matthew Richardson
Beastars, by having the main character train for 1/4 of the manga and then proceed to get immediately slammed against a brick wall.
Aiden Gray
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY OP is fine. Rubber-boy getss his ass handed to him plently of times not to mention them running away from almost every other fight.
Austin Wilson
Lucci and CP9 killing since young doesn't make them strong. They were probably killing innocents or weak criminals without Devil Fruit powers. That and in the end most of CP9 only ate Zoan-type fruits, Leopard, Giraffe, Wolf etc. Luffy grew up fighting with Ace and Sabo or training under Garp (Much stronger than any CP9). Then he got a rubber paramecia that makes him almost immune to blunt force and increases his attack's strength by storing elastic energy and releasing it as force.
