Forum - View topicDo We Still Need Shōnen/Shōjo Labels?
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5406 |
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Hiromu Arakawa said something about how when she was growing up in the 80s there was a lot of violent Shonen Manga like Fist of the North Star, that she claims girls liked. And how they grew up to write for Shonen Jump despite the fact the were making stories that were sort of aimed at girls.
But I will still say they are beneficial to have, since their are still titles that fit into those definitions nicely. |
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ChomboTheMahjongSpider
Posts: 47 |
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The Bishounen Jump phenomenon is so well-known that people have been pointing it out for almost two decades now, so I'm really not sure to whom this would seem contradictory. Periphery demographics are real, and don't invalidate the concept of demographics in the first place. |
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Swissman
Posts: 769 Location: Switzerland |
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Why not both? I've been collecting manga now for 30 years now and I'm quite comfortable using japanese demographic labels because I want to know in which japanese magazine the chapters are pre-published (or pre-shown online) and I more or less know what kind of tropes (or artstyle) I'll encouter when I grab a manga from a bookshelf. For further information, I like short descriptions in the back which let me know if I hold a "suspense thriller" in my hands, or a "coming-of-age drama", a "romantic comedy", and so on. This should be helpful enough for people who usually don't read manga and/or know little to nothing about it. The only thing I dislike about japanese labels are fans who constantly mistake them as "genres" & argue about those "genres" and publishers who sometimes mislabel titles for marketing reasons (which I really dislike). |
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tintor2
 Posts: 1894 |
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There is also how Sport series have lot of female fans too like Slam Dunk or Kuroko's. Since such series focus heavily on athletic male characters and.their bonds there tendrá to be a lot of shipping.
Saint Seiya has attacked female fans not only due to the designs but because of whatever was the director thinking when Shun healed Hyoga for 10 minutes in a suggestive way. |
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catandmouse
Posts: 214 |
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In terms of using “shonen” or “shojo” or the like, I feel like even within the fandom people just generalize things. For example they see “shojo” and immediately think “romance”, but for example “Natsume’s Book of Friends” is technically “shojo”, but it’s hardly a romance. Or there are some like Nightmare Inspector that Went from being “shonen” to “shojo” because it switched magazines. The same happened to Legal Drug. It went from shojo to seinen due to switching magazines. I’ve also seen people confused or that they get angry when some series they perceive as “BL” aren’t labeled as such because they are *technically* not BL series even they touch upon BL themes. It’s a bit of a slippery slope.
Now about localizations or translating certain words, that tends to rub me the wrong way. I’m ok with some things, but it bothers me when honorifics get dropped or names of characters get Westernized. Especially honorifics because English doesn’t really have that separation between formal and less formal. Stuff can be translated using “miss”, “sir”, “ma’am” “mister”, etc to show levels of formality, but then who talks like that? And as far as making the translations accessible to newcomers, I’m also conflicted in that. From a monetary perspective I can understand wanting to reach a wider audience, but at the same time I feel like people that are interested in reading something foreign are already willing to do some of the work. For example, I’ve mainly read manga, and I’m already used to Japanese names and pronounciations, but then I started reading The King’s Avatar and I had to do some research on Chinese name pronunciation. Now with the prevalence of web comics, I’ve gone and done some research on Korean name pronounciation. |
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Altorrin
 Posts: 314 Location: Florida, United States |
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There's no line over the o in josei. It's just josei, because there's no long o sound like in shounen and shoujo (that is, it can't be written as jousei).
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Nev999
Posts: 136 |
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Or, hey, maybe a bunch of Japanese women don't need to follow a random western guy's advice on how their work is doing a "bad job being universal" just because some men (you) won't read? The idea that a bunch of dudes punching each other being inherently "more universal" is laughable. The explanation is simple, and has been for a long time, it's okay for girls to be interested in "guy stuff" because that's 1. the main thing we get so honestly how could we not be and 2. it's elevated as better even though the quality is rarely different or more "universal" bc male protag is default. Meanwhile what's labeled "girl stuff" is looked down on and guys are mocked for reading it. That's not going to be solved by shoujo writers, who should get to write what appeals to them and have it valued without prejudice. That's a cultural thing. Romantic, fantasy action or slice of life stories starring a girl aren't inherently less relatable to humans at large than a punchy action story starring a guy- in fact, a romance and such is a more likely thing for the average human to have actually experienced. It's just a majority of men and boys are unwilling to themselves in a woman's shoes for a romance story (or often, even an action story) because of fear of being mocked, and being being told those stories don't have value, while girls grow up expected to relate to men and their stories think of them as a default. And it's not like Rose of Versailles and Sailor Moon didn't become incredibly popular and gain a huge following. There's can be a periphery demographic of guys with shoujo too (and used to be more of that before the anime industry became more focused on courting the stereotypical male otaku). But even still, Natsume's Book of Friends is doing incredibly well in Japan- getting movies and all that- as noted above. The shoujo manga published in the 60s and 70s by the Year 49ers was a major influence on both shoujo and shonen alike. It wouldn't be how it is today without them. Battle shonen writers aren't inherently better at touching the hearts of everyone than shoujo writers. They just don't have the social odds stacked against them. They haven't cracked some secret code, and shoujo writers don't need to change for you. Rather, looking at these stories without being held back by all that bullshit that gets in the way, society shifting, that's what can change things for the better. Because by dismissing shoujo and acting like it's all the same (when it covers a wide variety of genres, tropes and styles and CLAMP writes both shonen and shoujo btw?), you miss out on a lot of good stories. That's your loss more than anyone elses, honestly. And honestly, the labels are being blurred a lot in Japan too. Digital platforms have risen, and a lot of writers (like Izumi Tsubaki) are writing manga that gets classified as both shoujo AND shonen. Also, take Kageki Shoujo, starting out as a seinen then switching to a shoujo magazine- there's several examples of manga flipping demographics because it's not as cut and dry as all that. They might end up becoming inconsequential in Japan, all on their own, without the West doing anything. Last edited by Nev999 on Thu Aug 05, 2021 1:26 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Kumashock
 Posts: 19 |
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I was hoping the article would touch on how demographic labels for magazines are falling out of fashion in Japan. Digital manga platforms continue to arise with no stated audience and physical magazines are purposefully expanding and adjusting their catalogs to target a wide array of readers rather than catering solely to the trappings of one group. Readers who rely on demographic tags to find series in their safe zone will soon be without a paddle if they don't realize what they're actually interested in beyond what a publisher has deemed acceptable for their gender.
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DaisukeReds
Posts: 11 |
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Wait.. I saw a thumbnail for this article and it had 2 toys.
What are those!? I would like to own them. |
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wing-zero-strike
Posts: 28 |
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Great article! Enjoyed reading it.
There are really two (related) debates here happening at the same time. #1 - do demographic labels artificially narrow a work's audience? #2 - how much insider terminology (read: Japanese words) is acceptable? At the core to both of those is "can we make this more accessible to new readers/viewers?" and "should we"? As usual, I think the answer really is "it depends". Some titles have such wide appeal, it would be a shame to limit their audience or turn people off because of poor categorization, and even more so because of a bunch of "in" words. But I wonder how often this happens? My Hero Academia has a very wide audience of both genders and all orientations, but I'm not sure it's shonen / fighting labels have ever been a barrier to that happening. IIRC My Hero Academia doesn't use much Japanese terminology (haven't read it in a while, could be wrong) but would that have been a barrier, or would the appeal of MHA been strong enough to overcome it anyway? One problem here is in predicting the potential appeal of something before its published. If something is niche, you might be tempted to widen the net as much as you can to boost small sales, but it likely won't work. If something has wide appeal, you might be tempted to widen the net even more, but it might not be necessary. Ultimately, demographic labels like Shoujo and Shounen are really only meaningful to insiders who already know the tropes, and I don't think they are so prominently displayed that they turn newcomers away. The real question here is, with such diversity of content under both labels, are the current demographics actually applicable to insiders anymore? Are insiders being kept from things they might like because "I don't like shoujo" when really they would absolutely love Clamp's X? Maybe. I think we can (and should) use more genre descriptions in addition to the demographic label, and in time I think the demo labels will go away naturally. But that doesn't really solve the problem. Genres are a double edged sword. They both attract people and push people away. How many times have you recommended a book/manga/anime/TV show/movie to someone, and they scoff because of the genre. "A sci-fi show? No thanks!" "No, really, this one has relationships and strong characters and very few space battles, you'll love it" Game of Thrones is a great example of this. Once it hit a certain threshold, everyone started watching just because everyone else was. SO many people told me they first dismissed it for being "a weird, nerdy fantasy show with dragons" who then fell in love with it. So, genres will always push people away from something they might like. But we can't get rid of them, because sometimes you just want to find something with romance, or mecha, or swords and shields. The hope is that the really good stuff with wide appeal will rise to the top regardless, and mostly it does, but there are always exceptions. There will always be that indie band that the world would love, if only the radio stations played it. The terminology debate is more difficult, though, because unlike genre and demo labels, which can co-exist, terminology cannot, and its appeal is often mutually exclusive. Unlike Cook's example where readers "bet that this means tsundere", sometimes reading a constant "dancing around" a Japanese term with "not-quite-right" English alternatives gets exhausting. If you've consumed a lot of manga / anime, you know the cultural nuances and when something applies, and it's just easier to read and understand the Japanese term. But if you're a newcomer, even if you've looked up a Japanese word, it's exhausting having to parse it every time you see it. So, go in one direction, you alienate the fandom, go in another, you alienate newcomers. In a way, you might say the early 2000s anime model worked for this. Newbies get to see Dragon Ball Z with heavy rock music and some dialogue that livens things up, broadening the appeal, while fans get the DVDs with the subtitled version. Or Saint Seiya, which had not only a TV version dubbed, but also an uncut version. But that's not tenable for manga, so the best we've got is trying to guess the audience of a series and translate (or not translate) to what seems reasonable to the audience most likely to read it. Hopefully, if something has wide enough appeal, it won't be overlooked either way. |
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SparkTFS
Posts: 32 |
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As this is a personal opinion, I'm gonna talk about it in my point of view. I personally don't see the point of stopping of using those labels, as they are mostly about the conventions that those types of works utilize rather than necessarily some type of gatekeeping, or something making it difficult for others to enjoy.
I think people who decide to not watch something just because of its genre are the ones on the losing end, and it's up to them to go out of their confort zone and experiment different things. |
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anpansparking
Posts: 40 |
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I absolutely think these labels are still needed. Simply telling me something is in the romance genre, for instance, isn't super useful, because I expect very different things in shojo romance than I would in a shonen romance. I mean, of course there's plenty of variety even within shojo romances, but being able to narrow it down by the target audience is still useful.
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kgw
 Posts: 1085 Location: Spain, EU |
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I don't think we really need them, it's just a way of telling "JUST FOR BOYS! GIRLS NOT ALLOWED!" (or vice versa) which belong to a past era. Seriously, it reminds me to the all "girly comics" of the late 70s.
Let's take Blue Box by Kôji Miura. A heart-warming sport romantic comedy by a female artist… which is published in Shueisha's Shônen Jump. How many readers will miss it because its magazine? Would they lose their "Japanese" spirit if we lose those labels and "obscure-slang works no one outside the niche uses anymore"? I don't think no more than when an American movie is released overseas, translated into other languages, losing sometimes their private jokes, uncomprehensible for not-American audiences. In a nutshell, Japanese it is not a arcane mystical language you need to keep as it is so the magic still happens. |
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ChomboTheMahjongSpider
Posts: 47 |
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How are you to reconcile this assertion with the fact that authors have been aware of and catering to periphery demographics for decades? |
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Number 6
Posts: 46 |
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So... my comment got deleted? Why?
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