| These categories or demographic-target readership are quite fluid. You would have thought this would be targetted at girls mostly, but no it was the other way round. Is it because of the sex-change? I don't know if yuri and ecchi are typically shonen and seinen in Japan but it is my understanding, on the other hand, that a lot of shoujo animes have shonen-ai themes and is also full of bishounen characters. The way the materials are classified in Japan seems to elude me here. Sailor Moon on the other hand which ran along side Dragon Ball Z and Saint Seiya, and was seen as shoujo in Japan at the time and in France too when it was available well back in the 1990s but then, for some reason grew out of its niche and got a massive male audience when it hits America! There's clearly a gender revolution taking place. Today we see a high demand for female characters in video games especially and in animes too. However they are not female characters in the conventional sense though; female characters like Nana (in the manga Nana) who go around having sex with multiple men and then fall pregnant, which was a more than realistic scenario in real life, are not very well cherished. The female heroines that are cherished are masculanised women - girls whose breasts and curves serve as the female muscle power and who takes on the phallic role (e.g. girls with guns/sword) instead of just sitting around like the princess in Mario or Zelda and waiting to be rescued! She's some kind of hybrid between man and woman, one who takes the phallic role but at the same time has to be some kind of virgin princess warrior because otherwise the male viewers can no longer identify with her and will instead objectify her and identify with the object of her pleasure instead - as the case is in hentai and porn I suppose. Just a quick look around MAL itself and you will notice the amount of self-declared males using female imageries as avatars. My speculation is that as video games and animes grew to become geeky niches and no longer the domain of kids only, the males would spend hours on end playing them and watching them or reading them, and as a consequence of which, I suspect they probably, thus, created the demand for more attractive female characters in lead roles, especially the hybrid kind of masculanised virgin-women I described above, the Lara Croft or April Ryan type to whom the male gamer or otaku can identify with, since they are going to spend hours in these characters' company! |
meneopeFeb 16, 2012 4:02 PM
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| I don't think those genres matter so much, I'm a girl and I liked this series even if it was supposed to be Shounen. I don't really think the genres are accurate these days since there is so much cross-over genres in anime now. Like if you watch anime from the 80s-90s they often only really have one theme, whiereas since 2000s+ most have multiply themes and attract a more diverse fanbase. |
| "If you love someone Follow your heart Cause love comes once If you’re lucky enough" |
NicoleB said: I don't think those genres matter so much, I'm a girl and I liked this series even if it was supposed to be Shounen. I don't really think the genres are accurate these days since there is so much cross-over genres in anime now. Like if you watch anime from the 80s-90s they often only really have one theme, whiereas since 2000s+ most have multiply themes and attract a more diverse fanbase. No the genres aren't accurate. However I think a great part of shoujo which I call Neo-Shoujo [my favourite being the works of Wataru Yoshizumi] has remained faithful to its true essence, although the genre as a whole has now been heavily tarnished with materials which should have otherwise been classified as Josei. Pondering on what I have written previously I have to say that in my knowledge 80s-90s animes present virtually no female characters the type I described above. Even female fighting characters back then had a very feminine touch e.g. Wedding Peach, Sailor Moon. Contemporary female characters tend to have mostly sex appeal on the other hand. Yeah I did like this anime too. I thought it was shojo however lol but it was really nice watching. |
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| I know this story - both anime and manga - appealed to me because I'm a transwoman who is polyamorous as well. Oddly enough at the time I ran into Kashimashi, I happened living in a house with both of the women I was dating at the time. You could say that it connected quite oddly with my real life. Although the more that I am reading here on the forums and am connecting more with the anime/manga fan community, the more I realize that we tend to categorize things so we know what other titles we may be interested in, I do feel that the labels are only a guideline. One of my other favorite titles has some similar gender confusion felt in early Kashimashi, but also has a bit of science fiction, a dollop of ecchi and some slice-of-life as well. While the label of "gender-bender" is the one most likely to get put onto that series, there is so much more to any anime/manga than just one label. |
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