Forum - View topic

Answerman - Who Watches Late Night Anime in Japan?

Obsession with high school characters are not only reserved to otaku. Most Japanese live action dramas are in High school environment. I suppose that is because of nostalgia or because the obsession with been young.

Most Japanese live action dramas are in High school environment.

Removed flamebait lines. Leave name-calling out of arguments. --willag

Late night anime's audience is indeed otaku (male or female). But I still think most 'otaku" are supposed to be teens or young adults. That's the reason why a lot of anime features high schoolers/middle schoolers as main characters and with a lot of teen life situations (like who has a crush on who while denying it, such trival stuff). Someone older than that age range is obviously not supposed to be an anime fan in Japanese society. And even if they are, they are not suppsed to make up the majority of the audience (even the authors/companies think so). Older adult otaku have to somewhat put up with all the middle/high schooler characters in anime. They might not like it, but they have to put up with that to keep watching anime.

Or maybe the older adult otaku are also identified with all the anime teen.

WTF, they make shows with heavy ecchi every 3 seconds while the characters are still talking about who has a crush on who while denying it, while blushing!

I do not care if the characters are teens or not ,if the story is good I will watch it .

I find alot of shows with teems more interesting then with adults.I am 31 years old and I am here for the good story and animation.

The age of the characters is my less of my concern.

No one here is in particular talking about the western market. We're talking about trends in Japan.

I did not use the phrase "only watched by women". I said TARGETED at women. For instance I'm a male and watched and enjoyed both seasons of Free!. Free! as a show was very definitely targeted at women and I am not the target audience. That does not mean I cannot enjoy watching the show.

It's pretty clear looking at sales over the last few years that the female okaku and fujoshi has been growing while the male audience has been static. The recent smash hit Osomatsu-san has been largely driven by female otaku. Like I mentioned before the best way to follow this is to look at the DVD to BluRay sales split on a show. Shows with a larger female fandom will have a higher percentage of DVD's in total sales.

From the looks of it, gender demographics are starting to become an outdated measure. For instance, despite being intended for girls, Sailor Moon attracted quite a noticeable following from the male demographic throughout much of its airing.

Bleach is a show with a LARGE female fanbase, as is One Piece, they are still TARGETED to boys, but go to Japan and you will see that Prince of Tennis is clearly TARGETED to women. NONE of the merchandise goes in the "male" sections of stores, none of it highlights features appealing to (hetero) boys. Just because something runs in WSJ (the single most read manga magazine in all of Japan if not the entire world) doesn't mean it is "targeted" to boys. With other magazines, that's likely true a large percentage of the time, but not with that one.

(Also, regarding demographics, I believe WSJ (and probably most others) actually DOES capture a fair bit of data with their polls (since they give away prizes and all and do a fair bit of data parsing according to Bakuman, so I imagine they have a pretty good idea who is reading their magazine at any given time)

An opposite example, Magical Girls are clearly for little girls, and have gained a Bonus Demographic of older males. However there are obviously Magical Girl Shows made for the pure purpose of being marketed first to Men.

Public? You understand that majority of manga Magazine don't have the "shonen", "shoujo", ... Name on them right? For example "Afternoon", "Corocoro", "Cookie" magazines. None of them have any explicit indication that they are Seinen, Kodomo and Shoujo magazines, respectively.

I don't know how many times I heard "It's classified as a shoujo, why would I watch that" ...

I strongly disagree with this. I hang around a lot of anime sites that have mostly male posters and shoujo stuff gets talked about a lot. I think the way a lot of anime romance shows (ie VN and LN adaptations) are male-focused has opened up a lot of male viewers to all romance shows, and they don't seem to know or care whether its a shoujo or seinen romance. And Jousei stuff, while not mainstream, always gets recommended when people talk about "anime for adults about adults".

And even then I've seen a lot of anime fans open to surprising stuff. When I was in college and Netflix was adding their first Funimation anime, I had so many guy friends embarrassingly admit to me they loved Fruits Basket and Ouran. And I refuse to read too far into why so many guys seem to like Card Captor Sakura and PreCure...

Also demographics are kinda BS. I can understand something like REAL to be seinen, but Wondering Son? Doesn't make any sense to me.
Categorizing by genre is sooo much more helpful. IMO

Fujoshi have been around forever but they're pretty new in Western audiences. Most shows with the heavy fujoshi audience were never released in America until around Hetalia. Now thanks to streaming sites when stuff like Kuroko or Omatsusan pop up it's more noticeable compared to the 90s and 00s where Rintama Nantaro, Prince of Tennis, and a bunch of other anime were unheard of by American audiences. It might also be why people mistakenly think the series are aimed at women exclusively.

-Stuart Smith

From the looks of it, gender demographics are starting to become an outdated measure. For instance, despite being intended for girls, Sailor Moon attracted quite a noticeable following from the male demographic throughout much of its airing.

It's funny that you said this because I can't help but think of Young Justice which CN cancelled because it was appealing to girls more than to boys who were their target demographic.