Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Happened to Shoujo Anime?
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MFrontier
Posts: 13718 |
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As a big Shojo manga fan, I'd love to see more Shojo anime adaptions.
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ickybott555
Posts: 41 |
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I grew to enjoy and cherish shojo and even josei manga. I heard that part of the reason that studios do not take on shojo/josei anime these days is because of advertisement. So far the only shojo series that have upcoming adaptions are My Happy Marriage and A Girl and Her Guard Dog.
One thing that makes me happy is the love shojo manga gets on the r/manga subreddit on Reddit. A current shojo series people are hyped about are Kaoru Hana wa Rin to Saku and My Happy Marriage. I think a lot of folks enjoy shojo/josei manga if done correctly, but most of the time the scanlations have not picked up a lot of them. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15550 |
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Hate to bring up fake fangirls again, but the pre-order ranking for the Marmalade Boy manga on Amazon alone is terrible. And yeah, if you don't support shows and movies like Ms. Marvel, Last Night in Soho, and She Said, then the market for shoujo anime is gonna be even worse.
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MagicPolly
 Posts: 1623 |
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I find it crazy that a series like Honey Lemon Soda can have 20 volumes out and 10 million sales and yet shounen series with not even a million sales will be adapted two years after their debut.
I wish this was the case still. While there was a (relative) boom in 2020 through early 2022, it's all but stopped dead in it's tracks now. The only two upcoming anime are the Sasaki and Miyano movie and the Ten Count movie. God knows if the Saezuru movies are still in production, same for Tokyo Babylon 2021 (but I personally don't consider it BL, it just gets tagged a lot as such because gay people = BL) BL has sorta just fallen into the same thing as shoujo where it's much more common for them to get live actions rather than anime. It still feels really disappointing that so few anime are being made though. |
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JustMonika
Posts: 1145 |
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Yeah, I'm surprised that Honey Lemon Soda hasn't been adapted yet but I'm sure it will eventually. We have Bibliophile Princess right now at least. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1009 |
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That's always been the case to some extent, but it does seem particularly popular now. At least partially it's because a greater percentage of the female oriented works are in genres that are fairly easy to do in live action (lots of realism, few special effects). Titles like Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen would either be extremely expensive live action or pretty terrible compared to what can be achieved in anime, and Japanese productions don't have Hollywood money. An exception that proves the rule is Kaguya-sama getting a live action adaptation as well. Romance is always going to be easier to do live action than extreme action shows. |
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Kenfra
Posts: 127 |
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I'd say shoujo is making a comeback.
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mewpudding101
Industry Insider
 Posts: 2210 Location: Tokyo, Japan |
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This seems to be missing a huge chunk on 1) how shojo home media sales are bad (with examples from recent years) and 2) difficult to make into merch (that sells)
It’s a good topic, but it feels like you stopped answering before you got to the actual answer. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2301 |
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This one runs in Magazine Pocket, an online Weekly Shonen Magazine spinoff (like Shonen Jump+ to WSJ) that also houses Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro; Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie; What I Love About You; Oh, Those Hanazono Twins; and an assortment of spinoffs of WSM manga like Fairy Tail and Rent-A-Girlfriend. I'd classify it solidly as a shonen manga. /r/manga, honestly, is a lot of why I'm skeptical of the theory I've seen that Kaguya-sama's success is driven largely by female viewers starving for shojo anime. Reddit is famously male-dominated, but Kaguya was one of the most popular series on that subreddit. A lot of other romance manga have a strong audience there (including lots of oneshots), but those lean toward the shonen/seinen end too. Nagatoro, My Dress-Up Darling, Medaka Kuroiwa Is Impervious to My Charms, Komi Can't Communicate, etc. Shojo/josei romance seems to have a much weaker presence. (Charts for Nov 14 - Nov 20, Nov 7 - Nov 13, Oct 31 - Nov 6, and Oct 24 - Oct 30.) |
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Triltaison
 Posts: 792 |
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Totally agree with this. The lack of modern shoujo titles in anime form lately is just so frustrating to me. I have a niece that entered the anime fandom as a young teen a few years back (post-Ancient Magus Bride, but pre-Fruits Basket reboot) and I wanted to try and get her some new stuff as gifts that she could feel nostalgic about in a few years' time for her generation. All of the "new" shoujo for her has been reboots of stuff for my generation and I felt like a dinosaur hawking my wares. It's nice to give her good old stuff, but I always try to give cool new stuff too. The pickings were too slim and I had to settle for manga instead, hoping they'd get continuing animated adaptations. Well. Yona of the Dawn is popular enough to have 39 manga volumes currently, the anime was 2014, the 2015 OVA still hasn't come out in English, and there's still no sequel to it. If Yona can't get one, I don't see how anything else can get greenlit. It's not one of my faves, but at least Magus is getting a sequel finally (technically shonen, but kinda overlaps in themes). It's just so painful that the few that do happen get the opening part animated and then you never get to see the ending animated as even a follow up movie. That's been happening since the dawn of anime and isn't anything new, though. ...and can someone PLEASE put Pretty Cure on disc in the US already. Any of them. Let me give you money. T-T |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1009 |
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Also that there's a lot fewer anime series on during normal people hours. Late night anime depends on selling merchandise, whether home media, associated works in other media like the manga or computer games. Shows during normal people hours can survive on ratings and commercials. Even twenty years ago, they tried to stuff merch into Hana Yori Dango or Kodomo no Omocha or old school pre Sailor Moon mahou shoujo. But live action Hana Yori Dango adaptations, which are legion across Asia, have never needed blipping blooping toys. |
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Saeryen
 Posts: 986 |
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Yes, please!!! Pretty Cure is still very popular in Japan so that gives me some hope for shoujo content, as well as the fact that four new shoujosei are airing this season (Bibliophile Princess, I’m the Villainess, so I’m Taming the Final Boss, Play it Cool, Guys and Raven of the Inner Palace). It also tickled me pink that Geoff Thew mentioned all of them but Play it Cool, Guys on his Fall Ones to Watch (especially Bibliophile Princess, my favorite of the season). I really do think shoujo content is making a comeback, also based on what we’ve seen for Winter 2023 and beyond, and I thank the villainess subgenre partially for that. |
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AsleepBySunset
Posts: 243 |
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I mean.... no. Is this some kind of strange ultimatum? How will live action american movies like Ms Marvel succeeding at the box office have any impact on anime productions? All the western animated musicals succeeding at the box office have never resulted in a big trend of anime musical feature films for children. You're viewing this through the lens of a Marvel executive. You can't just add female superheros to a superhero movie and make it appeal to every woman, no matter how many times it passes the bechdel test. Superheros are one of those genres like Isekai, Magical Girl, or Mecha, they have a very specific fanbase, people outside of those fanbases may watch one or two works in that genre, but generally those works will be at the "edges" of the genre, something actually exceptional in the sense it does not fit into the standard genre codification, for example, Tenkuu no Escaflowne is exceptional because it has a fantasy and tarot element. Simply adding female characters is not enough to make it exceptional. In the same token, an average male likely won't watch a magical girl anime by toei with pastel colours just because you make all the characters male. But they will watch a magical girl anime if you "bend the genre" and make it, say, edgy or gory (admittedly, its been done so much that its not as effective). See what I mean? You have to change the genre to appeal to a new demographic, you can't just change the sex of the characters. Another example would be those weird "trapped in a visual novel" isekai which are apparently popular with women, they've changed the genre radically (including adding a reverse harem aspect), and have apparently appealed to a demographic of women who otherwise do not love the isekai genre. Something like Ms Marvel may be a raving hit with female superhero fans, but it won't capture female cinema lovers who don't already watch marvel movies. Ms Marvel isn't an exceptional example of the superhero genre, its been through the corporate wringer, its a prototypical example of a superhero movie, the same way gundam installments are the type of anime which will only appeal to hardcore mecha fans. |
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flammie
Posts: 42 |
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Speaking of shojo overperforming, if you look at Hidive’s most popular section and remove everything that has aired this year, the most popular shows would be
1. Gate 2. The ‘Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon’ franchise 3. Real Girl I can’t think of a more obvious example of over performance than that. |
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SilentSurvivor
Posts: 10 |
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Manga demographics do not apply to anime.
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