How is it possible that a small spin-off of Muv Luv is better than 99% of all drama romance anime?

Isn't it the other way around? Muv Luv being a spin-off of it.

Most drama romance series are shoujo. Muv Luv is a seinen.

@rohan121
*shounen
It was published on Dengeki Daioh, a shounen magazine.

@thewiru MuvLuv is a videogame so from the beginning the manga demographics do not apply.
It's also R18 so it cannot possibly be shounen even if they did apply.

Both MuvLuv and Kimi ga Nozomu Eien are stories aimed for adult men. That would make them "seinen" and a Japanese person would say they're 青年向け, but it doesn't really make sense to use those terms in English because it's just plain language and not specific terminology.

By that logic we wouldn't be able to call any anime ever as being shounen/shoujo/etc.
There exists a Muv Luv manga and it is a shounen, so I see no reason to not call it such.

By that logic we wouldn't be able to call any anime ever as being shounen/shoujo/etc.
There exists a Muv Luv manga and it is a shounen, so I see no reason to not call it such.

@thewiru Yes, you're following that logic correctly to a very sensible conclusion.

It's incorrect to refer to anime as "shounen" or "shoujo". Manga were usually clearly defined by the magazines they were published on out of necessity so that each demographic knew which magazine to pay attention to, and even that is not always true nowadays due to web releases. But there's no "shounen block" or "shoujo channel". There's some specific blocks aimed for different demographics but they don't usually use this specific terminology. It makes more sense to call an anime that aired in Noitamina a "Noitamina anime" than to call if a "josei anime" even if they were usually aimed towards older women and plenty of them adapted josei manga. But more importantly you wouldn't do that because it's way more helpful to use actual descriptions of the anime.

And it's rather bizarre to use the MuvLuv manga to categorize the whole series when it's not the original work. The manga could be considered shounen due to having been published in a shounen magazine (which by the way means nothing at the end of the day), but that doesn't mean the anime or the original work should.

Except the source material features pornography, as the other user pointed out. A shounen is not allowed to buy it.

@Lucifrost
Counterpoint: Is common for this type of VN to also be published without adult scenes (See Steam).

@thewiru
Yes, but that doesn't change the target audience of the original. Which in the case of both Rumbling Hearts and Muv-Luv, is adults.
Adaptations and ports that feature different content can be aimed at a different audience than the original, which is shounen in the case of that Muv-Luv manga you mentioned.