How would you explain "Romance for a male audience" to a western (Mostly American) audience?

I'd frankly avoid those conversations unless you want your friends to start avoiding you. They're gonna think you're one of those people.

...what people?
This isn't a rhetorical question, I genuinely have zero idea of who you're referring to.

Wiru.....I literally in the past have given you examples of romance novels aimed at men.....This isn't a foreign concept lol. Rom coms existed for men in the West in both novel form, and in films. Not as common today, though that has more to do with how the film industry has changed, and again it's flourishing in other formats like novels. The MCs also aren't "chad thundercock" (more likely to find that in female targeted romance fiction).

Like seriously.....I am honestly thinking you are baiting at this point. These threads seem intentionally ignorant. For goodness sake, probably one of the most popular people from my country, in Jim Carrey, basically did rom coms that could be enjoyed by anyone (Yes Man and I would argue Liar Liar is one too), and were focused on the male perspective. In short they were male targeted rom coms. This is an old genre, and rom coms used to be for "universal" audiences, not targeted to one specific sex in the West. My favourite Christmas film is a rom com from the 1940s, that focuses on the male perspective, in Holiday Inn. The same actors would go on to make another Christmas rom com, that made the song White Christmas....this shit ain't new dude.

Do you want to come off as an ignorant weeb? Are you just trolling? Are we going to see "how do you explain an action series to a Western audience" next?

Congrats, you have unraveled thewiru

@thewiru Gooners. People so addicted to porn they mistake it for romance.

@giantpudding
Huh? Why would people have sex if they didn't love one another?

Wiru.....I literally in the past have given you examples of romance novels aimed at men.....This isn't a foreign concept lol. Rom coms existed for men in the West in both novel form, and in films. Not as common today, though that has more to do with how the film industry has changed, and again it's flourishing in other formats like novels. The MCs also aren't "chad thundercock" (more likely to find that in female targeted romance fiction).

Like seriously.....I am honestly thinking you are baiting at this point. These threads seem intentionally ignorant. For goodness sake, probably one of the most popular people from my country, in Jim Carrey, basically did rom coms that could be enjoyed by anyone (Yes Man and I would argue Liar Liar is one too), and were focused on the male perspective. In short they were male targeted rom coms. This is an old genre, and rom coms used to be for "universal" audiences, not targeted to one specific sex in the West. My favourite Christmas film is a rom com from the 1940s, that focuses on the male perspective, in Holiday Inn. The same actors would go on to make another Christmas rom com, that made the song White Christmas....this shit ain't new dude.

Do you want to come off as an ignorant weeb? Are you just trolling? Are we going to see "how do you explain an action series to a Western audience" next?

I'm never "trolling", I have no reason to.
If by "ignorant" you mean "You lack information", then yes, I do lack information about a lot of things.
Such threads are inviting people who have that information to come here and add their two cents, I'm not here to "publish new dogma".

In Do you like the "lack of movement" in anime? I argued that there's no way to argue for the superiority of the animation in TV anime compared to the animation of a renaissance Disney movie, but people in that threads brought arguments on how it could.

If the average film goer doesn’t know about romance films targeting men, then I would question their credentials because it was a common form of film. The Jim Carrey ones I named are pretty well known.

The novels are pretty niche, the films though aren’t. People understand that romance coms can be aimed at men, I don’t know what Wiru is talking about.

Then don't make threads that require information you don't have? You are making a false assumption about media you don't consume, and wonder why some of these threads are kinda dumb? It would be like me asking "hey why doesn't anime make adult media?" in a film subreddit/forum. You are being willfully ignorant, about information you can easily find with a quick google search. IDMB has a whole list of male targeted rom com films.

@BilboBaggins365 I feel like Dawnson's Creek, Ruby Sparks, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The catcher in the Rye, Career Opportunities, Can't Buy Me Love, 40 year old Virgin are not very famous. And people are not admitting being into jack black or adam sandler for some others.

It's pretty easy to tell shoujo/josei romance and shounen/seinen romance apart in anime. And it has nothing to do with the magazine of the manga.
Tried hundreds of shoujo/josei romance anime, but I didn't particularly like any of them. The genre isn't for everyone.
The one I liked "best" is probably Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso and that was a 4/10. Looks like it got published in a shounen magazine, but it's definitely a shoujo romance story.

On the other hand, I also tried hundreds of shounen/seinen romance anime and found a few I really liked. For example Toradora and School Rumble.

@Sasori56483 .....What is your point? I am just saying rom coms aimed at men aren't a foreign concept, not that they aren't widely popular. People may not like or care about Adam Sandler rom coms, they know they exist though.

Read the title of your own thread dude, and deduce why I brought this up.

Eyeroll lol. Yeah I am pretty sure that is what people are discussing in cinephile spaces. Anyway I have seen comments like this and it's just as willfully ignorant as you are.

All three of them are shoujo, if you ask me.

Narrative structure, style and tropes.

Josee to Tora to Sakana-tachi is a Seinen romantic drama. Though, hilariously that one was published in a Josei magazine. The magazine is really useless when it comes to categorizing this stuff. Though, judging by some pictures of the manga it seems the anime just changed it from Josei into Seinen.

Changing style is pretty easy:

@BilboBaggins365
If someone who reads as much as me can't name any English language romance novels for men, the average person probably doesn't know of any either.

You really only see romances directed just at females when it is a pure romance or clearly directed toward teenage girls but even the later brings in a fair number of males into it. RomComs often are directed at males as much as females with exception of Hallmark and Lifetime made for TV movies. RomComs are too easy so what about something like The Fountain? That movie while not specifically targeting males im sure drew in plenty, written by a male and centred an a male lead. There also are some movies not well liked I think can appeal to some males such as Waiting for Forever, a male focused lead who is cute-stalking a girl he likes from afar and gets shit for it at one point in the film straight up accused of murdering someone because they think he's weird. Also I think Wristcutters: A Love Story drew in males. It was directed by a male based on a short story written by a male with a male lead.

@Lucifrost Couldn't you technically just go back to when all literature in the West was written exclusively for male consumption? Shakespeare? Greek tragedy? In response to OP's point, Shakespeare's male protagonists are nothing if not "sensitive young men" for the most part. 😂

@traed
I remember my mom amd some coworkers really liked hallmark while every guy in my family thought it was watching paint dry. It is funny noticing the common patterns in those movies, and it reminded me of this vid.

OK, so literally what I wrote in my first two paragraphs?

@thewiru Gooners. People so addicted to porn they mistake it for romance.

There are a few indicators. And let's keep this to only shoujo and shounen to make it less complicated.

If there are more bishounen than bishoujo, it is likely shoujo. If it is the other way around it is most likely shounen.
Similarly, if the female protagonist has to choose among more than one male love interest the point goes to shoujo and to shounen if it is reversed. (Whoever has more love interests gets the point.)
If the protagonist is female, that's a point for shoujo. If the protagonist is male, a point for shounen.
If the female lead has basically no personality and is thus easy to self-insert it's a point for shoujo. If the male lead is like that it's a point for shounen.
If the female protagonist has a at least one female friend, but the male love interest is alone, that's a point for shoujo. If it's the other way around a point for shounen. (Whoever has the larger social circle gets the point, including relatives, if they actually interact.)
...and so on..

But that's only structure. Karin (2005) has a bunch of points for shoujo in its structure, but still ends up being a shounen romance due to style and tropes. Also because Karin is a bishoujo, but her love interest is not a bishounen. That alone is pretty huge. If you can't tell what makes a character a bishoujo/bishounen, the easiest way to gauge it is to look how much the fandom drew porn of that character for bishoujo and wrote fanfics or BL about the character for bishounen.

If you are wondering about style, here's an example:

@TransferUser One thing that's not just a gender swap issue is that shoujo will write men way more emotionally expressive than shounen, emotional turmoil is just not that big of a thing for real men, as if is for shoujo love interest fictional men.

@giantpudding Just say that you read if for the plot, it's a bullet proof excuse.

@JaniSIr Just had someone tell me this is historically accurate:



Guys this is ridiculous.

Yes yes, you can basically throw the whole historically accurate argument out the window when you add the fetish porn in


It's the same underlying argument

@JaniSIr That's true. On the other side shounen romance will have the female love interest be dependent on the male protagonist in some way. For example, in Karin the female protagonist is a reverse vampire and needs the male love interest to bite and inject her blood regularly.

@giantpudding The whole point of that show is that the author mixed historical events with magic bullshit, whereas Vinland Saga is more down to Earth in the sense that it didn't include literally magic, but it's clear that the first author did his homework about medieval Europe.

Also that comment was supposed to be a half joke...