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NEWS: New York Times Manga Best Seller List, April 4-10

I am not happy until at least one volume of ONE PIECE gets 1st place!! Maybe the volumes 57/58?? *The record-breaking volumes BTW*

Are One Piece fans happy now?

"Shounen" and "shoujo" are entirely determined by what magazines they run it, content be damned. Of course, as in America, it is more acceptable in Japan for girls to read "boys'" series than vice versa, which is why you have a lot of stories in seinen and shounen magazines that appeal to female readership as much or even more than males - whereas shoujo and josei rarely throw men a bone.

Wow for once, Naruto isn't on the list. One Piece is a great series. I'm glad it's up there.

One Piece massacred the entire NYT list. Wow. Only Black Butler and Naruto managed to hang on after that.

I specifically mentioned Saiyuki because the first leg ran in G-Fantasy which is marked shonen, but every other segment (Reload, Gaiden, etc) have been in josei magazines & I really don't see that a guy following Saiyuki from G-Fantasy to Zero-Sum would notice the story is any different from when it was in the shonen zine other than the stories surrounding it.

CCSYueh wrote:

I specifically mentioned Saiyuki because the first leg ran in G-Fantasy which is marked shonen, but every other segment (Reload, Gaiden, etc) have been in josei magazines & I really don't see that a guy following Saiyuki from G-Fantasy to Zero-Sum would notice the story is any different from when it was in the shonen zine other than the stories surrounding it.

Well, and if Kuroshitsuji ever switches to a different magazine, that'll be an apt analogy.

Honestly, I think it is a series intended to... well, pander is a bad word, but it is meant to appeal to the very-real female readership of shounen magazines. When you take the series on its own, it comes across as further to the shoujo end of the spectrum; its magazine, though, is at the shounen end. And it is kind of a spectrum, not entirely distinct categories. The same can apply on the other axis (youth to adult), where publishers in Japan can't settle on whether Nana is shoujo or josei.

So yeah... in magazines that generally target boys/men, there are still girls/women who read them, so you'll see elements of "shoujo" or "josei" material in them. But since hardly any boys/men read shoujo/josei, they'll be exaggeratedly girlish.