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Shoujo manga magazines typically feature stories with female leads: the character whose perspective and inner thoughts primarily narrate the story to the audience.

The manga collected in this stack are original works serialized in these same shoujo magazines, but instead feature a male leading character. Story plots can fall into any genre and vary widely, including Romance, Adventure, Horror, or Comedy.

Please note Boys Love (BL) stories and male casts with heavy BL subtext are excluded from this stack. Manga serialized in josei magazines are also excluded as there are specific publications which have a higher tendency to feature only male characters.

When some people hear the phrase "shoujo manga", the first image that comes to their mind is high school romance with cookie-cutter characters and the same melodrama recycled over and over again. Frequently they say to me, "I don't like shoujo"—as if an entire demographic of manga magazines that have been publishing for decades are only capable of writing one type of story.

This stack exists to dispel the stereotypical image of shoujo manga.

Long before the current isekai boom directed towards the male demographic, shoujo magazines in the 1990s were serializing grand adventures where female leading characters were transported to other worlds and faced adversity. At approximately the same time (late 1980s), shoujo manga titles were at the forefront of the reincarnation boom, where main characters living in the modern day discovered they had memories from the past.

Epic tales and past lives aside, manga written for the female demographic tend to emphasize character development before plot. This means good series excel at making the characters' emotions transparent to the reader and their progression or growth feel natural. When the leading character is male instead of female, this can also be very refreshing.

This list is curated from manga I've read and will not include every available title. It will be updated over time. If there is a manga you think that should be added, please feel free to leave a comment on my profile and I'll check it out~

This stack is full and soon will be split, for better readability.

The Meiji and Taisho eras spanned from 1868 to 1926, a period of modernization for Japan. When after 250+ years of self-imposed isolation (Sakoku), Japan came into contact with Western culture and got inspired by it. This period combines Japanese traditional culture with 19th century and early 20th century Western culture.