Donten ni Warau
Laughing Under the Clouds

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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.

Series with a prison setting/theme, either institutional jails or informal, DIY prisons.

thanks to tzippurah and alpacaqn for suggestions

Shoujo and josei manga that have victorian/gothic or historical themes, aristocrats or other noble characters.

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

These are all shoujo manga (manga targeted towards girls and young women) featuring male protagonists/main characters
[The following list includes series of VARIOUS genres]

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[Not on MAL]

-She’s My Knight
-Hunting Summer
-Ai wo Kataru nara Hisoyaka ni

A guide for anyone looking to explore more modern shoujo and not knowing where to start and optimized for variety.

This stack includes shoujo that began in 2010-2019 categorized by genre in order to cover a multitude of subjects and feature diverse stories. I tried to feature many popular and influential series that might be useful for exploring the demographic, with a few lesser known ones to add to the genre diversity.

The genres are sorted as follows:

High School Romance
Fantasy and Supernatural
Queer Series
Historical
Romcoms and Comedy
Trashy Series of Ill Repute
Isekai
Heavy Drama and Darker Themes
Episodic Slice of Life and Career Oriented stories

- Just because it has sex and/or drugs doesn't mean it's good. I might be willing to consider rock'n'roll though.

- Characters having a bit more personality than just "designated love interest" might be revolutionary for shoujo, but I'm looking for slightly higher standard than that.

Whatever MAL marks as "shoujo" goes. Suggestions are welcomed.

A shoujo manga means a comic published in a magazine targeted towards the young female demographic (under 18) in Japan.

Josei manga with a Male Protagonist: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/42856

A shoujo manga means a comic published in a magazine targeted towards the young female demographic (under 18) in Japan.

Josei means a comic published in a magazine targeted towards the adult female demographic in Japan.

Includes titles officially published in Ukraine.

Part 1 - https://myanimelist.net/stacks/22056

best rated shoujo according to mal
all series are labelled from the original
all have to be readily available to read in English
they are in order of rating
I have not read them all so this is unbiased
i do plan to read all of them though
as of 6.10.24
this is 51-100
attack on titan is not a mistake look it up as to why

This list is specifically for the Shojo and Josei licenses Tokyopop has come out with in English AFTER their major implosion in the 2000s, so it focuses on what they've published after re-entering the english market.

I haven't included their disney manga or OEL comics since that's its own separate thing and has its own section on their website. Additionally, a large chunk of their catalog nowadays is BL and GL, and there are lists that have done that work already and listed those out under "LGBTQ+ Tokyopop manga", so I didn't bother to check every single BL or GL to see if they were published in a Shojo or Josei magazine or magazine equivalent. Check out that list if you want to search the variety of GL and BL and LGBTQ+ manga they have published.

*note that Aqua is the first few volumes of Aria that were originally published in a Shojo magazine before the manga moved to a Shonen magazine and changed names.

*Kusuri no Mamono no Kaiko Riyuu/My Contract with the Apothecary Monster doesn't have a MAL page

A list of the shojo and josei with some amount of volumes available through Kindle Unlimited. The number of volumes ranges between 1, the first 3, half, or all of a series.

part 2: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/56698

A List of the Shojo and Josei Manga available on the MangaMo app (excluding the Kodansha licenses, since they typically land on most of the digital-only platforms and make this list too long). Several titles (listed below) don't have MAL listings but are in the MangaUpdates database.

- 29-year-old in the Service Industry
- A Transparent Fever
- A Wish
- All Hallow's Even
- Chika's Forest
- Control Love
- Dreams Take Flight
- Ekikoi: The Young Miss Falls for the Station Attendant
- Fevered Nights
- I Picked Up a Homeless Handsome Guy
- Inherited by Her Enemy
- Injured Innocent
- Leave it to Sero
- Love Portrait
- Maison Q
- Matching our Answers
- Maternity Bride
- Mistress, Mother...Wife?
- My Little, Stray Cat
- Natalie and Mysterious Takumi
- Patricia
- ring a bell
- Seize the Flowers of Love
- Sweet Pain (by Tsunami Minatsuki)
- Sweet Seduction: Under the Same Roof with The Guy I Hate
- Take Me
- The Bridesmaid's Secret
- The Merciless Travis Wilde
- Too Rotten for Romance
- You Haven't Seen the Best of Me!

I tried to compile an extensive list of the English Licensed Shojo and Josei manga titles where romance is a sub-plot at best, if present at all (many of these don't have any romance present).

Part 1-dark/horror/thriller: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/my
Part 3-Sci-fi/Historical/Mystery: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/57098
Part 4-Cute Stories: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/57096
Part 5-Character dramas/Modern Real-life Japan: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/57100

I enjoy manga with complex characters. There is a mixture of romantic and Platonic relationships in this list. Here are a few I enjoyed that you may enjoy to.

The Meiji era spanned from 1868 to 1912, 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.