May 28, 2016 5:46 PM
The Fine Line Between Shoujo and Seinen - Mature Men are Grown-up Little Girls
Anime Relations:
Orange
I’ve been hearing about the upcoming Orange anime from time to time. It looks like it will be a rather great anime. Because of the anime, I looked up the original Orange manga and saw that it is rather highly rated on MAL. Late last night I noticed that the entire series was out and available to Crunchyroll subscribers. I started reading it and couldn’t put it down. I stayed up until nearly 5am to read the entire manga and just loved it. Another “Masterpiece” for me; a new series that I’m going to have to find room for on my Top 100 List. Extremely touching and hits very close to home.
But I’m not writing today just to gush about how great the Orange manga was; if I was going to do that, I’d consider finally writing my first review. What I’m writing about today is the genres that Orange falls under. While I was reading the series, I was wondering what Japanese gender/age genre it fell under: shounen, shoujo, seinen, or josei. It kind of felt like shoujo, but it also dealt with very mature subject matter and had a very different storytelling structure than most shoujo manga that I’ve read. MAL simply categorized it as shoujo, but when I looked up more information on the series, both Wikipedia and Baka Updates Manga described it as both shoujo and seinen.
Most people know what shoujo anime and manga is (material targeted towards young girls), but if you’re not familiar with seinen, this is a gender/age genre that designates the series as primarily targeted towards adult males. The most common/well known type of seinen tends to be hard and gritty fantasy and sci-fi stories such as Berserk, Akira, Blame, and Hellsing. But one of the things that Orange has brought to light for me is that it seems with many stories, especially those that have romance as a central theme, the difference between if they are either shoujo or seinen is very slim. For example, with a quick genre search MAL, Chobits, Rozen Maiden, Girl Friends, and A Bride’s Story are all classified as seinen.
Now, at least in my own experience, explicitly classifying entertainment based on gender and age demographics seems like a somewhat exclusively-Japanese thing. Yes, the US and people in other Western nations have terms like chick flick, guy movie, and boy’s/girl’s shows, but you typically won’t see those as labels on store shelves or on the back of DVDs to describe what genre it is. We’d probably have people complaining that such things are sexist here, but in Japan it’s pretty normal. Now, as the above genre search results show, it can be a little rough at times to know what a series is technically meant to be. However, there is a somewhat easy and usually definite way to final out what category a series falls into: Marketing. It’s all about who the intended target market for the series is. Sometimes using this rule is very simple: is/was the manga serialized in a shounen, shoujo, seinen, or josei magazine? That will probably give you your answer 9 times out of 10 and if you dig a little bit deeper you should be able to find more-or-less who the other 10% of series were going after.
But back on topic, why do some series straddle the shoujo/seinen line? You’d expect some series to blur the line between shoujo and josei (adult females) such as with Nana, or between shounen (young boy) and seinen like with Blood Lad. But why the similarities between shoujo and seinen? As I said, it seems that romantic themes tend to be a common factor for many shoujo/seinen mixed series and I think that’s a pretty key part of this. It is said that girls mature faster than boys and I would say that many men never reach a particularly high level of social/emotional maturity. For some men, this means that they still enjoy a good fart joke well into their 40s. For others, and I think this is particularly more common with introverted geeks, they tend to (on some level) still have the emotional maturity of a 14 year old girl. That might sound weirder or creepier than I intend for it to, but I can put myself up as a case for this type personally. I’m a 32 year old man and I tend to find shoujo series to be the most relatable to me. It also reminds me of when I used to regularly read Megatokyo. The main character Piro was a very introverted geek and he would actually go read through shoujo manga when he needed help with relationships. There was even a T-shirt based on this which I actually still have (although it was in light blue instead of black when I bought it). Even dating sims and their corresponding anime adaptations like Air, Kanon, and Clannad deal with very emotional shoujo-like themes even though the original material was explicitly marketed towards men (evident by the sexual nature of most of these games).
So yes, as the title of this post says, many men (especially those in geek culture) are just little girls all grown up. But again, as someone who’s first real anime that he got into was Sailor Moon and went on to like things such as Cardcaptor Sakura, Powerpuff Girls, and Fruits Basket, this isn’t really news to me. This established knowledge is also why I wasn’t at all surprised by the adult male fan base that developed for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (and yes, I am a Brony). But I was still very interested by the fact that at least two sources actually labeled Orange as both a shoujo and seinen series. The gender/age descriptors are usually pretty rigid in Japan and MAL seems to take that to heart as I couldn’t find any example of a series that used more than one of the four descriptors. But I don’t really like these descriptors all that much anyway. I mean, they can be helpful at times by using typical stereotypes of what these labels usually mean to determine if you might be interested in a series or not, but they can also automatically turn people off from something before they even give it a chance. I think everyone just needs to be smart about things and not let a target demographic determine your enjoyment of a piece of entertainment. There is always the possibility to find something great in the most unlikely of places.
But I’m not writing today just to gush about how great the Orange manga was; if I was going to do that, I’d consider finally writing my first review. What I’m writing about today is the genres that Orange falls under. While I was reading the series, I was wondering what Japanese gender/age genre it fell under: shounen, shoujo, seinen, or josei. It kind of felt like shoujo, but it also dealt with very mature subject matter and had a very different storytelling structure than most shoujo manga that I’ve read. MAL simply categorized it as shoujo, but when I looked up more information on the series, both Wikipedia and Baka Updates Manga described it as both shoujo and seinen.
Most people know what shoujo anime and manga is (material targeted towards young girls), but if you’re not familiar with seinen, this is a gender/age genre that designates the series as primarily targeted towards adult males. The most common/well known type of seinen tends to be hard and gritty fantasy and sci-fi stories such as Berserk, Akira, Blame, and Hellsing. But one of the things that Orange has brought to light for me is that it seems with many stories, especially those that have romance as a central theme, the difference between if they are either shoujo or seinen is very slim. For example, with a quick genre search MAL, Chobits, Rozen Maiden, Girl Friends, and A Bride’s Story are all classified as seinen.
Now, at least in my own experience, explicitly classifying entertainment based on gender and age demographics seems like a somewhat exclusively-Japanese thing. Yes, the US and people in other Western nations have terms like chick flick, guy movie, and boy’s/girl’s shows, but you typically won’t see those as labels on store shelves or on the back of DVDs to describe what genre it is. We’d probably have people complaining that such things are sexist here, but in Japan it’s pretty normal. Now, as the above genre search results show, it can be a little rough at times to know what a series is technically meant to be. However, there is a somewhat easy and usually definite way to final out what category a series falls into: Marketing. It’s all about who the intended target market for the series is. Sometimes using this rule is very simple: is/was the manga serialized in a shounen, shoujo, seinen, or josei magazine? That will probably give you your answer 9 times out of 10 and if you dig a little bit deeper you should be able to find more-or-less who the other 10% of series were going after.
But back on topic, why do some series straddle the shoujo/seinen line? You’d expect some series to blur the line between shoujo and josei (adult females) such as with Nana, or between shounen (young boy) and seinen like with Blood Lad. But why the similarities between shoujo and seinen? As I said, it seems that romantic themes tend to be a common factor for many shoujo/seinen mixed series and I think that’s a pretty key part of this. It is said that girls mature faster than boys and I would say that many men never reach a particularly high level of social/emotional maturity. For some men, this means that they still enjoy a good fart joke well into their 40s. For others, and I think this is particularly more common with introverted geeks, they tend to (on some level) still have the emotional maturity of a 14 year old girl. That might sound weirder or creepier than I intend for it to, but I can put myself up as a case for this type personally. I’m a 32 year old man and I tend to find shoujo series to be the most relatable to me. It also reminds me of when I used to regularly read Megatokyo. The main character Piro was a very introverted geek and he would actually go read through shoujo manga when he needed help with relationships. There was even a T-shirt based on this which I actually still have (although it was in light blue instead of black when I bought it). Even dating sims and their corresponding anime adaptations like Air, Kanon, and Clannad deal with very emotional shoujo-like themes even though the original material was explicitly marketed towards men (evident by the sexual nature of most of these games).
So yes, as the title of this post says, many men (especially those in geek culture) are just little girls all grown up. But again, as someone who’s first real anime that he got into was Sailor Moon and went on to like things such as Cardcaptor Sakura, Powerpuff Girls, and Fruits Basket, this isn’t really news to me. This established knowledge is also why I wasn’t at all surprised by the adult male fan base that developed for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (and yes, I am a Brony). But I was still very interested by the fact that at least two sources actually labeled Orange as both a shoujo and seinen series. The gender/age descriptors are usually pretty rigid in Japan and MAL seems to take that to heart as I couldn’t find any example of a series that used more than one of the four descriptors. But I don’t really like these descriptors all that much anyway. I mean, they can be helpful at times by using typical stereotypes of what these labels usually mean to determine if you might be interested in a series or not, but they can also automatically turn people off from something before they even give it a chance. I think everyone just needs to be smart about things and not let a target demographic determine your enjoyment of a piece of entertainment. There is always the possibility to find something great in the most unlikely of places.
Posted by
pluvia33
| May 28, 2016 5:46 PM |
Add a comment