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Tamer Sakura
Joined: 16 Jul 2025
Posts: 41
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 Posted: Wed May 20, 2026 11:00 pm |
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I can't say I'm surprised. Shonen Jump is notoriously cutthroat where even its top creators have to eternally justifying their continuation, and one of its early hit was Harenchi Gakuen which practically invented ecchi manga. If you want to try to deviate from the target audience you gotta justify it or try to work it back in... best way to get boys to be interested in female MCs is to make them cute or sexy, something western creatives seem to have trouble understanding lately.
| Quote: | | He added that when he worked on Lady Justice, he had no intention of challenging My Hero Academia. “The one-shot version [of Lady Justice] ran before My Hero Academia began serialization. I was in the middle of drawing the drafts for my serialization when My Hero Academia started, and my editor and I scratched our heads like, 'Why now…?” Ogino recalled. “So, it wasn't like I was trying to compete with [My Hero Academia]; it was just a coincidence.” |
Sounds like awful timing for him in the end with how big MHA ended up being... can't say I blame them for being bummed.
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Egan Loo
Joined: 25 Feb 2005
Posts: 1469
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 1:34 am |
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| Tamer Sakura wrote: | | I can't say I'm surprised. Shonen Jump is notoriously cutthroat where even its top creators have to eternally justifying their continuation, and one of its early hit was Harenchi Gakuen which practically invented ecchi manga. If you want to try to deviate from the target audience you gotta justify it or try to work it back in... best way to get boys to be interested in female MCs is to make them cute or sexy, something western creatives seem to have trouble understanding lately. |
One of Ken Ogino's points is that is no longer the case in Shonen Jump now, with at least one prominent recent example.
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whiskeyii
Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 2457
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 2:03 am |
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| Tamer Sakura wrote: | | I can't say I'm surprised. Shonen Jump is notoriously cutthroat where even its top creators have to eternally justifying their continuation, and one of its early hit was Harenchi Gakuen which practically invented ecchi manga. If you want to try to deviate from the target audience you gotta justify it or try to work it back in... best way to get boys to be interested in female MCs is to make them cute or sexy, something western creatives seem to have trouble understanding lately. |
| Quote: | | Ogino followed up his post by saying he is "envious" that manga creators now can draw a female protagonist in Jump even without erotic content. |
Highlighted the relevant section for you, but I suspect a large contributor to this is how much more “democratized” Jump’s readership feels nowadays compared to when MHA was first starting out. Ideas like the ones expressed in Bakuman about needing fanservice and the like to keep audiences hooked felt antiquated and out-of-touch even by then, and it was only a gap of about five years or less from the anime iirc.
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Hellsoldier
Joined: 21 Jun 2013
Posts: 1147
Location: Porto,Portugal,Europe,Earth,Sol
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 2:59 am |
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| Tamer Sakura wrote: | | I can't say I'm surprised. Shonen Jump is notoriously cutthroat where even its top creators have to eternally justifying their continuation, and one of its early hit was Harenchi Gakuen which practically invented ecchi manga. If you want to try to deviate from the target audience you gotta justify it or try to work it back in... best way to get boys to be interested in female MCs is to make them cute or sexy, something western creatives seem to have trouble understanding lately. |
Here comes the broad generalizations. Also, there is a difference between a cute or sexy protagonist (or conventionally attractive, if that's the term one prefers), and a "focus on eroticism": Not that I'm against eroticism in media. I don't want puriranism to win. But it's pretty damning to say that you can only have a female lead is she's overtly there for fanservice.
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egozi14
Joined: 26 Nov 2009
Posts: 144
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 3:14 am |
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| Tamer Sakura wrote: | I can't say I'm surprised. Shonen Jump is notoriously cutthroat where even its top creators have to eternally justifying their continuation, and one of its early hit was Harenchi Gakuen which practically invented ecchi manga. If you want to try to deviate from the target audience you gotta justify it or try to work it back in... best way to get boys to be interested in female MCs is to make them cute or sexy, something western creatives seem to have trouble understanding lately.
| Quote: | | He added that when he worked on Lady Justice, he had no intention of challenging My Hero Academia. “The one-shot version [of Lady Justice] ran before My Hero Academia began serialization. I was in the middle of drawing the drafts for my serialization when My Hero Academia started, and my editor and I scratched our heads like, 'Why now…?” Ogino recalled. “So, it wasn't like I was trying to compete with [My Hero Academia]; it was just a coincidence.” |
Sounds like awful timing for him in the end with how big MHA ended up being... can't say I blame them for being bummed. |
Completely agree with both of these~
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enurtsol
Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 15199
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 3:32 am |
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So essentially the counterpart to censorship - fanservice being shoehorned by editors where the creators don't want it
If we're going by the concept of "creator's intent" - this goes against "creator's intent" and thus should be taken out in any remake version
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Nekbone
Joined: 28 Dec 2023
Posts: 207
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 5:25 am |
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| whiskeyii wrote: | | Ideas like the ones expressed in Bakuman about needing fanservice and the like to keep audiences hooked felt antiquated and out-of-touch even by then, and it was only a gap of about five years or less from the anime iirc. |
I wouldn't say it's antiquated or out-of-touch. The biggest manga in Jump are the likes of One Piece which is brimming with fanservice. You can certainly find success without fanservice but it clearly doesn't hurt like some people insists it does. I know certain sections of the western fandom really want it gone for all forms of anime and manga but it clearly has a market and a place and isn't some relic of the past people seem to make it out to be.
I don't know what constitutes a "focus on eroticism" rather than just simply having fanservice. That seems like something that would vary from person to person like how people debate if certain elements like nudity or swimsuits count as fanservice or not. All I can say is given what Lady Justice was about I think pushing for eroticism made sense. American comics are known for, or at least used to be known for their bombshell heroines designs so it fit very well with that subject matter and it's something My Hero Academia also emphasizes with its female heroes. I wonder if his editor pushed for it specifically because it was a superhero series and that's what superheroes are supposed to be like in the public's eye. Marvel Rivals certain found it's success by being unapologetically sexy with it's designs for the female heroes much to the objection of some groups. I see some discussions under the original post that talking about Power Girl which does sort of remind me of the manga in question. And the artists pinned post and feed is full of sexy pin-ups and swimsuit photos so I don't think he's actually against fanservice or anything himself. He even claims he was going to include it anyway as "a bit of spice" but his editor just asked for more.
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R. Kasahara
Joined: 19 Feb 2013
Posts: 759
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 8:59 am |
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This just reminds me of how after World Trigger moved from Weekly Shonen Jump to Monthly Shonen Jump, the cup sizes for the women characters disappeared from the omake sections in the back of each collected volume. The manga itself remained as fanservice-free as it had been before.
There does seem to be a bit of "fanservice sells" at work in WSJ for sure, but I think that there's also editors' personal preferences at work. I do like the current-day WSJ a bit more, that would give series like Akane-banashi a fair shake, and it's a shame Ogino had to go through that experience back then.
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MikeCaz02
Joined: 03 Jul 2025
Posts: 15
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 10:49 am |
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From what I gather from Ogino's comments, he wasn't even opposed to fanservice and was actually planning to include some spicy elements, but his editor forced him to focus on eroticism (I still don't understand what he meant by that).
I also want to point out that we can’t generalize about this, since the fact that a manga contains fanservice doesn’t necessarily mean it was imposed on the mangaka by their editor or does the absence of fanservice necessarily mean that the author is against it
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Kadmos1
Joined: 08 May 2014
Posts: 13758
Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 12:12 pm |
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| MikeCaz02 wrote: | | From what I gather from Ogino's comments, he wasn't even opposed to fanservice and was actually planning to include some spicy elements, but his editor forced him to focus on eroticism (I still don't understand what he meant by that).
I also want to point out that we can’t generalize about this, since the fact that a manga contains fanservice doesn’t necessarily mean it was imposed on the mangaka by their editor or does the absence of fanservice necessarily mean that the author is against it |
This is just me, but "eroticism" outside of the smut-leaning/oorno manga would be the more adult "Shounen Jump" titles like "To Love-Ru: Darkness". I am thinking that is perhaps but Ogino-san's editors wanted but I could be wrong.
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Zimmer
Joined: 08 Jul 2015
Posts: 259
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 8:00 pm |
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| enurtsol wrote: | | So essentially the counterpart to censorship - fanservice being shoehorned by editors where the creators don't want it
If we're going by the concept of "creator's intent" - this goes against "creator's intent" and thus should be taken out in any remake version |
If you're going that far then why not revert every editor decision in every other series?
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whiskeyii
Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 2457
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 8:10 pm |
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| Nekbone wrote: | |
I wouldn't say it's antiquated or out-of-touch. The biggest manga in Jump are the likes of One Piece which is brimming with fanservice. You can certainly find success without fanservice but it clearly doesn't hurt like some people insists it does. I know certain sections of the western fandom really want it gone for all forms of anime and manga but it clearly has a market and a place and isn't some relic of the past people seem to make it out to be.
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I was thinking of the more insipid ideas like when one of the mangakas' wife broaches the idea of the heroine being more involved and he replies that "it's enough so long as she's cute" or something to that effect, the stuff that really emphasized the "boy's club" feeling of that series. But One Piece was actually something I thought of as a solid example of fanservice done well, because even in its early chapters, it treated its female characters with a lot more substance than its peers--I remember reading Nami's backstory in my English copy of WSJ and thinking how those chapters felt like a breath of fresh air. I feel like nowadays there's a lot more substance bundled with your cheesecake (unless we're looking at light novels, which might just be a sign of how inexperienced that industry really is and how in dire need of editing it is) and I can better get behind that (no pun intended.)
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Top Gun
Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 5289
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 9:59 pm |
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| Tamer Sakura wrote: | | I can't say I'm surprised. Shonen Jump is notoriously cutthroat where even its top creators have to eternally justifying their continuation, and one of its early hit was Harenchi Gakuen which practically invented ecchi manga. If you want to try to deviate from the target audience you gotta justify it or try to work it back in... best way to get boys to be interested in female MCs is to make them cute or sexy, something western creatives seem to have trouble understanding lately. |
For decades American execs have been insisting that male-targeted animated series can't have female main characters, because "boys won't watch shows with girls as the lead, and they won't buy toys of them either." Of course this has always been absolute bullshit, but try telling that to the hoary old fossils who run Hollywood. This smacks of the same level of nonsense, only even grosser somehow, because sure let's throw more erotic content into stories targeted at middle-school boys. Brilliant!
| Nekbone wrote: | | I wouldn't say it's antiquated or out-of-touch. The biggest manga in Jump are the likes of One Piece which is brimming with fanservice. You can certainly find success without fanservice but it clearly doesn't hurt like some people insists it does. I know certain sections of the western fandom really want it gone for all forms of anime and manga but it clearly has a market and a place and isn't some relic of the past people seem to make it out to be. |
I've been watching One Piece for over 20 years, and there's no universe in which it is "brimming with fanservice." Yes, there are plenty of attractive female (and male!) characters, and yes, there's the occasional risque joke or situation, but these are not remotely the core appeal of the series, and if these aspects were excised from it the actual core appeal would not be affected at all. If there's any poor soul out there who's primarily reading/watching One Piece to get their rocks off, then lord help them.
Last edited by Top Gun on Thu May 21, 2026 11:25 pm; edited 1 time in total
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ninjamitsuki
Joined: 15 Sep 2007
Posts: 751
Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology)
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 10:44 pm |
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Did they forget that one of Jump's earliest cash cow characters was a goofy, cartoony little robot girl in overalls?
Said goofy robot girl became the main character at the insistence of an editor, even.
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TheSeventhSense
Joined: 09 Mar 2013
Posts: 174
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| Posted: Thu May 21, 2026 11:13 pm |
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Why did Viz never bring this over? There's worse Jump write-offs that made it to print.
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