What caused the fall of Shoujo anime
| I recently watched several videos about the decline in the number/quality of Shoujo anime adaptations. Lots of blame are thrown around, with fingers pointing at the male audience, licensors, anime producers, shoujo fans themselves, etc. These videos, being made by Shoujo fans, are unsurprisingly defensive about the medium. There are several repeating talking points such as the sales numbers unproportional to the adaptation rate, how the industry or the audience has failed Shoujo, and how diverse Shoujo actually is. The last point struck me as odd because it contrasted with how I always perceived the Shoujo demographic. So I did some digging on Mal and put the data on an Excel sheet. Here is what I found by counting the genre of each demographic's top 100 manga.  (*Boys love also includes in the Romance genre)And here is a graph accompanying it:  It is easy to conclude that Shoujo is overwhelmingly Romance focused compared to all the other demographics. And no other Demographic is as skewed toward 1 particular genre as Shoujo. This is clearly a sign of genre saturation. I see people defend it by bringing up the abundance of the isekai anime. Though it is important to note that: 1. "Demographic" is not the same as genre and theme. 2. Many Isekai anime are LN adaptations, so this comparison is basically apple to orange. Having diverse genres within a demographic could mean attracting a wider audience base and increasing marketability. Just like how Seinen constantly reinvents itself and becomes more gender natural, with titles such as: •Houseki no Kuni •Insomniacs After School •Skip and Loafer •The Apothecary Diaries Shoujo lacks this trait, and suffered because of it. ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ And there is a graph showing the Top 100 romance anime and their respective demographics.  (*Other being LN adaptations or Original anime) So despite there being way fewer Shounen romance manga, the number/quality of their adaptations is comparable to Shoujo's. So I want to know what the average Mal users think about the fall of Shoujo, and who is to blame. Meanwhile, you are also welcome to recommend some good/underrated shoujo titles here as well. -Thank you- |
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| This topic again? Every once in a while this pops up, and then people just start arguing whether shoujo is just school romance or not. |
| i don't understand how shoujo has fallen or has it? it's the greatest thing ever. romance from the pov of a female lead is the best thing ever, it's more exciting and cuter, one can't ask for anything better. idk why people don't like it. |
 The end of an era. Thank you Wit, Mappa and Isayama. Feeling half happy, half sad. Kawaii waifus and precious best girls <3333 |
| I believe shoujo anime are less diverse than they used to be. I have seen many older anime and I tend to prefer other genres over romance. They Were 11 Vampire Miyu Unico Sally the Witch Princess Comet Himitsu no Akko-chan Sabagebu Sukeban Deka Pygmalio Magic Knight Rayearth X I'm aware almost all my examples are fantasy. I would love to watch more anime like these, but they have been replaced largely by Precure and otome villainess isekai. |
| その目だれの目？ |
| I think there just isn't enough of a market for it. There's not as many girls into anime in general, especially shoujo (lots of girls prefer shounen works). There's more shoujo titles out there, but they receive lower sales than shounen manga, and with the audience distributed more thinly that also makes selecting a shoujo manga to get an adaptation to be more of a challenge. Shoujo manga are also more likely to get live action adaptation than anime adaptations. |
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| Male Audience has been around since the end of time, lot of us watching and enjoying stuff like Sailor Moon, Princess Tutu, etc., i think its mostly just shrinking demand. |
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Ri-KoRin said: The Fall of Shoujo If you ask me the fall of Shoujo Romance Anime is largely due to the Japanese Audience that use to consume this type of specific Anime all moved on to watch things like Korean Dramas. Just my opinion and won't even bother to do any research on something I don't care that much about. |
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| Why? Simply because practically every shojo work is very cliche and boring doesn't mean that that is fall and bad for them. |
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| It's quite an odd assumption to think shoujo is "dying" when we generally have as many or more shoujo anime titles released each season than we did say 20 years ago. Shounen has always dominated the anime market. That is nothing new. Seriously go back and look at the seasonal offerings from twenty years ago. Another problem with your assumptions is that you are only basing them on the top 100 which is an incredibly small and inherently biased subsection of the various demographics. It doesn't even cover more than a few percentage points of all the manga out there and it's incredibly biased in that it only includes the top works. This makes it impossible to draw the sort of conclusions you have from it. All it really proves is that within a demographic watched and rated primarily by females, titles with a romance tag dominate their favorite and top-rated works, go figure. It's hardly surprising that many popular shoujo works contain romantic elements. You claim this means there is a lack of diversity in shoujo compared to shounen but your limited data actually directly contradicts that conclusion. If you add up all the genre numbers you have listed for top 100 shoujo and shounen then shoujo clearly covers a larger number of genres than shounen. The top 100 shoujo include 233 genre tags whereas the shounen only include 206. This means shounen is the demographic with the narrower genre selection. Also, depending on what genre tags you include in your data set, you will get very different numbers for this. For instance you could remove the action genre tag from your selection and add BL and it would radically further skew the numbers favoring shoujo as the more diverse demographic or you could accomplish the opposite by removing romance and adding horror. It's also a bit odd you are looking at manga numbers. Try doing this with anime and you will get different results. |
MeltingSkyJun 3, 2023 3:03 PM
gintokisbicep said: omg colleen's manga recs i ADORE her!!! prepare for probably undiagnosed autism rant: i think a lot of it has to do with other genres of shoujo not being allowed to thrive because surprise surprise, money. about the diversity, i would take mal's genre choices with a grain of salt. there are loads of manga's that on different sites have different genres. esp with shoujo, mangas that are tagged with for example mystery will also have romance. take ghost hunt for example, on mal they put the romance genre despite on anime planet the romance tag is NOT there. there are loads of other example but i can't think on the top of my head. in all kinds of entertainment, even outside of anime, it's non negotiable that romance is perhaps one of if not the most marketable genres. it's also not negotiable that women are some of the biggest consumers for the romance genre. but many popular romance animes/manga are really not women friendly , especially the older i get -and this is definitely the same with other girls my age- the more i cant stand shounen romances. so shoujo was great for women because not only did it offer romances designed for women..... they also just had way better female characters. 100% im not saying that all shounen mangas write bad women and that all shoujos have the best written women but imo..... girls in shounen ROMANCE especially are fucking ridiculous. also a lot of the guys in shounen romance's are very very boring. back to consumerism, they are boring because the guys are supposed to be faceless so that the male readers can insert themselves to be with these gorgeous manic pixie female characters. i mean same with shoujosei like ichika from too sick to call this love but you get the point. and even though there are tons of shoujo manga and BIG shoujo manga that are defo not romance centred (like basara and red river), their not as popular in the west because newer licensors are just NOT choosing to translate and buy these mangas. for some reason i cant post the links but there's an interest stack of all the 2022 printed shoujo and josei manga and majority are romance. and the more romance focused ones have the most members. why? because romance comes with drama, even shitty fucking characters with shitty romances like no longer heroine will be more popular than the space ones and supernatural ones because it generates online attention and arguments, which get people buying it. bad publicity is still publicity in the end of the day. that's all ill say for now but yeeah. shout out to biggering from the lorax soundtrack in the background on repeat. As a man I totally agree with you on women being more fleshed out and realistic in shoujo anime, I also like that the men are also significantly less likely to be unlikable useless dweebs. I don't mind a useless dweeb MC, I loved the comic relief winning in Haruiro Astronaut! But he has to have some upside that would feasibly make him lovable, whether he is sweet as a cinnamon roll, a master of top banter liek Jo from Kimi ni Todoke or a character growth extraordinaire like Godai from Maison Ikkoku. He started of as a bit of an immature horndog, but he grew as a person. He had to, because Kyoko was written more like a real person with agency than a love interest, and wouldn't go out with him until he made himself likeable . In most shonen anime, Kyoko would have just accepted him for the dickbag that he used to be becuase true love knows no standards in anime! |
| Old is Gold "Look, look, we can do spinning shots without wasting our entire budget" "Did you see? Look, it's all smooth and everything !" "You're not looking, please, it's SO AWESOME LOOK AT HOW SPINNY IT IS!!!!" - All anime animators since the invention of CGI. |
| The fault is that they only adapt school romance shoujo works normally, the female fujoshi fandom doesn't have a very big interest in shoujo and shoujo works manage to be more generic than battle shounen sometimes. |
| Not as humiliating as the fall of penaldo and pessi |
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MyLightNovelList said: Good ridance to this trashy demographic filled with damsel'd female leads, rapey tropes, hideous artstyle and repetitive storylines. Good fuckin' bye. These are some of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of shoujo, the protagonists are very clumsy and fragile and it irritates not that I hate fragile girls but almost all shoujo works have a protagonist like that. |
MyLightNovelList said: Good ridance to this trashy demographic filled with damsel'd female leads, rapey tropes, hideous artstyle and repetitive storylines. Good fuckin' bye. I found myself reading this and nodding my head. It basically summed up my thoughts on why I could see a decline in Shoujo. |
Absurdo_N said: These are some of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of shoujo, the protagonists are very clumsy and fragile and it irritates not that I hate fragile girls but almost all shoujo works have a protagonist like that. Sounds better than them all being yasss queen girlbosses to me. Imagine if shoujo was that. Lol |
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| Sorry @JaniSIr, I'd rather have this than the 6th "which girl makes you peapea hard" thread that gets made literally every week. Having been engrossed with this topic for a very long while, I think my honest opinion for "what caused the fall of shoujo anime" is... probably all of the above. Like OP has already stated in their original post, the shoujo demographic is most commonly associated with the romance genre. I really do want to convince people that there is more to shoujo anime/manga than just high school romance, but... well, all some of you saw OP's post, I hope, you can clearly see that the amount of shoujo series marked as "romance" is not helping my argument. This is especially sad as there are shoujo that aren't really about (or even have such in the first place) romance, and because of this rigid correlation so many people end up avoiding something that actually have something they might like, whether they have romance or not. Speaking of people avoiding a whole demographic just because, it seems that a good amount of the male audience is actively avoiding all of the shoujo demographic and might not even give one series a chance that might be up their alley had it not been for the marketing tag. I know there are people who are not fond of shoujo who are on these very forums and/or even identify as female (a.k.a. the target audience for this demographic), but it's all too often that I will see posts on either forums or YouTube comments from those who identify as male disliking shoujo only to find out that they haven't seemed to have even read/seen any to make a real judgement out of. There's also the fact that shounen and seinen romance anime that have been coming out lately are getting all this praise, while some seem to completely balk on shoujo with similar or the same concept... I realize there is such thing as preferences, and hey, I get it bros, you could easily say I have a shoujo bias since I literally grew up with shoujo anime and manga from a very young age, but look, no seriously, go see my profile right now, you can clearly see more and more non-shoujo in my Recent List Updates. I dunno about you, I usually think it's a lot more reasonable to build your preference on something when you've at least had just one bite of it, Squidward. But I suppose it's not really all shoujo-dislikers' fault for associating one very specific idea of "high school romance with ditsy female MC" to a whole wide arrange of stories that appear towards one specific demographic. I'm part of the Western audience, so I'll obviously speak on behalf of that here, but I agree with @Lucifrost that publishing companies that license shoujo for English-speaking audiences usually do not help things. Sure, VIZ Media's "Shojo Beat" imprint may have once been considered the largest source of shoujo in 2000s' America, but really, if you think about it, it's more like because they were the only company marketing thing that actively featured shoujo and that most other manga companies usually didn't bring as many shoujo over as they did once upon a time. Think about it, think about all the companies over here that localize manga into English: VIZ Media, Udon Entertainment, Seven Seas, Yen Press, Kodansha USA, Vertical, Dark Horse, One Peace Books, you get the idea... now which of these actually picked up shoujo titles regularly, how many did they pick up, how often do you hear a new license for a shoujo manga (regardless if currently serializing or finished ages ago), AND, probably most interestingly, how many of these licenses are series that fall into the stereotypical shoujo romance category? DO NOT EVEN GET ME STARTED WITH ROMANTIC KILLER PLEASE! Really think about that, as well with possible other questions I didn't even come up with. There is a whole ton of shoujo manga out there, and compared to shounen titles or even seinen, there is so much more we all could be reading officially. And of course, speaking of all the untranslated shoujo manga out there, guess who else is neglecting to bring these shoujo to the masses? That's right, the anime industry today! Just look at any recent seasonal anime listing and filter your views for anything tagged as "shoujo"—just look at how few there are! Sure, shounen anime has always been popular, and sure, shoujo anime has always been produced in small number, even in the 80s and 90s, but just look at what happens when you actually go out of your way to track down just how many shoujo anime actually exist throughout the decades. tl;dr: As MAL's favorite Psyduck @Elitist-chan has said, there is more anime being made than ever before, inflating the number of anime productions and studios to the extent where there isn't enough time to produce anything higher than 2 cours/24 episodes if they're not frickin from Shonen Jump and where there isn't enough money that the animators working on these tireless projects can actually live on. Therefore, by this logic, in order to make statements such as the post made by @MeltingSky on here earlier to be true, the number of shoujo anime being made just therefore also be inflated to roughly the same percentage of shoujo productions back then—as in if we had 9 shoujo anime out of 45 in the 90s, then we should theoretically have, say, 46 shoujo anime out of 230 airing anime in a season kinda like today's climate... okay, I'm not saying we should have that much, but both scenarios indicate a consistent 20% shoujo in seasonals over time here. Theoretically, of course. But, as you can see if you bothered to have a look, the stats that I tried to compile here in the collapsible spoiler tag doesn't seem to indicate that we are getting as many or more shoujo anime than we did even 20 years ago. Sure, maybe 11 shoujo anime airing in one season of 240 anime might sound like a lot, but it is nowhere near the same as 11+ shoujo anime out of 97 airing anime. Shoujo anime's become a small drop in a large ocean at this point, regardless if the drop of water is the same "volume" as it always was. The point I'm trying to make here is there's always been less shoujo anime being made, but it's even more so than ever. You can argue that I didn't make the best stats here or anything, and sure, MAL is always pretty weird when it comes to tagging... I mean hell, MAL is the ONLY place (or person really, if it counted as such) that actually considers Shakugan no Shana as a MAGICAL GIRL ANIME (?????), so hey, you can doubt the info I tried to put together here if you want. You certainly wouldn't be the first nor the last, that's for sure. But nobody could actually argue against what I wrote up here, and I am interested to see if anyone can compile these stats better than me and on a much larger sample/scale. Seriously, feel free to share some more "better" stats of how many shoujo anime existed in each season over time if you have the mental capacity and time for it. I'd love to read whatever you have together as well as your sources. Genuinely :) Anyway anyway anyway, that all aside... yeah continuing on, sorry everyone but even I don't know if shoujo fans are helping the situation with shoujo all that much at the moment. There is certainly effort out there with people like Colleen's Manga Recs, The Anime Tea, and their followers (to shout-out a few), but it seems our voices aren't loud enough. We shoujo fans are still getting responses of stuff like "meh mid" or "not interested in your recommendation sorry" or whatever, and we still don't seem to be getting enough, whether it's from the anime industry or many of the English publishing companies. But I'll probably put the blame on them the least because a good amount of these fans really are trying, with things like recommending shoujo series in appropriate contexts and even some positivity sharing here and there. I guess it just feels like we're probably too quiet compared to the rest of a very vocal animation community. I won't psych out of being judged here or do the "rules for thee but not for me" bullshit either... even I am to blame, really. Most of y'all on the forums are probably already aware of all the shoujo threads I've been making on Anime Discussion for the past year or so, and those who are personal friends have already seen just how much of my irl manga collection is clearly old-school shoujo magical girl series and/or listed as being from VIZ's Shojo Beat imprint. It's literally a huge IKEA shelf with 5 shelves where only one of them has mostly shounen/seinen... don't even get me started on my anime and art books lmao. And I've recently tried to send suggestions to One Peace Books of more shoujo they could localize after seeing that they licensed Usotoki Rhetoric recently... but alas, I admit I still have much to learn and do. Most of my collection is shoujo, but they were also old series that were bought secondhand, meaning the actual publisher of these old books do not get the profits and therefore have no idea just how much money they could be making if they simply picked up more shoujo or even renewed/reprinted their old licenses. I suppose all I can do is just preach on here, and also practice what I preach... anyway thank you for reading my 2 am seminar i am still sad and bored おやすみ~ ★ |
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traed said: It would be fun to have female leads like that, at least it wouldn't be a fragile girl.Absurdo_N said: These are some of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of shoujo, the protagonists are very clumsy and fragile and it irritates not that I hate fragile girls but almost all shoujo works have a protagonist like that. Sounds better than them all being yasss queen girlbosses to me. Imagine if shoujo was that. Lol |
Fario-P said: No, I can't agree with that. It makes no sense to blame the current situation on boys who never watched shoujo even when it was popular. And licensors only translate manga; there's no way they can be responsible for a perceived downfall in Japan. The only believable answers to the prompt are "shoujo itself," and possibly anime producers who put out stuff like 7 Seeds.Having been engrossed with this topic for a very long while, I think my honest opinion for "what caused the fall of shoujo anime" is... probably all of the above. Fario-P said: Not if it all goes to your thighs.I dunno about you, I usually think it's a lot more reasonable to build your preference on something when you've at least had just one bite of it, Squidward. I hope you had a good sleep. |
LucifrostJun 4, 2023 12:10 PM
| その目だれの目？ |
Absurdo_N said: traed said: It would be fun to have female leads like that, at least it wouldn't be a fragile girl.Sounds better than them all being yasss queen girlbosses to me. Imagine if shoujo was that. Lol A character can be strong without acting unnecessarily aggressive though so I don't think they have to fall into that goofy current year Hollywood archetype. More variety is always good though. |
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Lucifrost said: It definitely makes more sense to put the blame on people making more of the shoujo that people are tired of instead of the shoujo that we personally want more of (you want the fantasy types, I like those too but I also miss the magical girl ones people used to make back in the day), and on anime producers that overproduce shit that people complain about every single season; but the thing is, the reason why people like OP put "male audience" as an option/possible reason is because the anime industry clearly caters to its large male audience the most. This audience loves shounen and seinen, and the lack of shoujo productions and merchandise you can buy compared to shounen merchandise can lead to the assumption that there just isn't much interest in shoujo anime from boys and girls in producer's eyes. I mean, that has to be why there are so many stupid overdone unoriginal isekai light novels that top these sales charts and make up a ton of anime adaptations nowadays, right? If the industry saw that guys will actually watch shoujo too, then maybe things could change, but...Fario-P said: No, I can't agree with that. It makes no sense to blame the current situation on boys who never watched shoujo even when it was popular. And Licensors only translate manga; there's no way they can be responsible for a perceived downfall in Japan. The only believable answers to the prompt are "shoujo itself," and possibly anime producers who put out stuff like 7 Seeds.Having been engrossed with this topic for a very long while, I think my honest opinion for "what caused the fall of shoujo anime" is... probably all of the above. Lucifrost said: I'd think the guy who made that "characters with biggest butts" thread would want that though.Fario-P said: Not if it all goes to your thighs.I dunno about you, I usually think it's a lot more reasonable to build your preference on something when you've at least had just one bite of it, Squidward. I hope you had a good sleep.  Thanks, hope you had a good nap too. |
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Fario-P said: Yeah, but that has always been the case. If we're going to talk about a "fall" of shoujo anime, we have to discuss something that has changed.This audience loves shounen and seinen, and the lack of shoujo productions and merchandise you can buy compared to shounen merchandise can lead to the assumption that there just isn't much interest in shoujo anime from boys and girls in producer's eyes. |
| その目だれの目？ |
Absurdo_N said: The fault is that they only adapt school romance shoujo works normally, the female fujoshi fandom doesn't have a very big interest in shoujo and shoujo works manage to be more generic than battle shounen sometimes. The majority of recent shoujo anime are not school romances. Those are predominantly shounen. The majority of shoujo have recently been various sub-genre of fantasy. |
MeltingSky said: Absurdo_N said: The fault is that they only adapt school romance shoujo works normally, the female fujoshi fandom doesn't have a very big interest in shoujo and shoujo works manage to be more generic than battle shounen sometimes. The majority of recent shoujo anime are not school romances. Those are predominantly shounen. The majority of shoujo have recently been various sub-genre of fantasy. I know that, the latest shoujo shows lately aren't school but there are still a lot of shoujo like that with fragile protagonists. |
| I would say male audience because it seems to me that the most poplar anime series are shonen type anime so the anime studios may tend to produce less shoujo series because they are not as popular. |
| As a male, I would actually like some more shoujo anime. I thought they were freaking hilarious. The dorkiness and cringe is what I like. |
Felori said: I think shoujo barely developed in the last decade, especially the anime adaptations and while there some memorable and uhm... spunky heroines in shoujos, most of them are not. Most fans no matter what gender, flock towards shounen or more gender neutral stories. I think lot of women and female assigned people like characters like Nobara and Maki and it's kinda ironic these are written by a man and women often write rather uncompelling female characters in shoujo. No, its not because they are "less feminine", especially Nobara IS very feminine and she has soft and weak moments as well, she just feels much more realistic to me. Also there are these villainess isekais, which aren't officially shoujo or josei, but they are going into that direction and are made to meet that taste, right? Watched three of them and they are alright, but I don't think I need to watch a dozen more of the upcoming ones. I also thought at first Skip and Loafer is a shoujo, which it apparantly is not. That's another issue, the old demographic labels used by Japanese have become a gradually disintegrating relic of the past with the advent of self-publishing and web manga etc. We have several shows that are pretty much textbook shoujos that are labeled shounen or have no demographic label at all this season. Skip and Loafer is a good example of one of them. My Clueless First Friend is another, and Ancient Magus Bride. All three are romances told from the female perspective that are even female wish fulfillment on some level and all of them focus on character depth and their respective arcs over more plot-driven narratives. Unless I am mistaken, most if not all of them are written by women as well. |
| A bit of everything. Shonen is mostly dominating the planet due to nostalgia, and has led to the revival/continuation of IPs like Trigun, Shaman King, and of course Dragonball. There's no nostalgia for any shoujo series. Beyond Fruits Basket, it's been dry. Ouran High School Host Club left a mild impact to usher in a new deconstruction of the shoujo medium, but few authors beyond Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun followed suit. Yuri on Ice ended up being incredibly divisive, and the strong opnions surrounding it overshadows the story itself. To keep it brief, shoujo doesn't know how to market itself anymore, and its audience is inert and more likely to fight among themselves, and the publishers underestimate the size of the female/shoujo audience. Lastly, the decline of physical tankobon may be a death knell for it. |
[/url] | Something I didnt point out before. A ton of YouTubers just like focusing on negative things because it gets them more clicks from their bait and thus more money so I tend to ignore these people unless they are smaller following then you know they more likely are being sincere. |
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