In Support of Shoujo Manga
By Kate Kohn
The popularity of anime has exploded in recent years, thanks to streaming giants like Netflix, and pop culture powerhouses like rapper Megan Thee Stallion endorsing their favorite shows. This popularity, however, is concentrated in action, sports, and sword-based fantasies that are primarily developed for young men.
That is not speculation: the most popular anime are almost exclusively shounen, meaning they are marketed towards teen boys. Similarly, the best-selling manga of all time are directed towards the same demographic, with notable exceptions for classic series like Sailor Moon or the globally embraced Boys Over Flowers. Those exceptions, however, still trail far behind the most popular series for boys.
Stories for young women, or shoujo, are treated less seriously in the West — aside from the aforementioned titles, which are considered exceptional in spite of being shoujo. Like many things targeted towards young women, it is demeaned for being cliche, unrealistic, or too romantic. Female protagonists are demeaned for being insecure, but also for being perfect, beautiful and the target of all male attention. Male leads are demeaned for being pretty boys.
In the Clear Moonlit Dusk by Yamamori Mika
But, hear me out: that’s the point. Where shounen manga teaches young people to believe in themselves and defeat evil with the power of friendship, shoujo teaches young people self-assurance in a different way. Regardless of whether a shoujo story takes place in a fantasy world (like the popular Yona of the Dawn), or in our own reality (like many of my favorites do: A Sign of Affection, A Condition Called Love, and From Me to You to name a few), the focus on relationships is a tool to impart emotional intelligence upon impressional youths. Internal monologues and slow pacing give space for readers to interpret the formation of relationships and character change through interior conflicts, rather than forces of evil.
Like stories of superheroes and demon slayers, these stories are full of tropes that make Western audiences cringe, no matter how impervious you are to tacky manga tropes. While newer series have started to abandon the weak-willed, nervous-wreck female protagonist, there will always be stories of forbidden romance between teachers and students, precocious 22-year-old billionaires and 17-year-old high school students, young office women and the CEOs who proposed marriage to them when they were young and won’t take no for an answer (despite said young office woman not remembering it or being interested in said CEO). And, boy, do I eat these up.
We know that these kinds of forbidden relationships are forbidden for a reason. As often as they are illegal, they are icky to our sensibilities. Many of us have been hot-for-teacher in high school or college, but we knew better than to pursue it. However, it can be satisfying to see our childish fantasies played out. In manga like Faster than a Kiss and Daytime Shooting Star, both stories where a high school girl develops romantic feelings and explores romantic relationships with a male teacher, there are no moments that would leave deep psychological scars like their IRL counterpoints might.
Instead, there is an emphasis on “readiness” — not in the creepy, celebrity 18th-birthday-countdown way, but in allowing the protagonist to grow into a consent that is entirely their own. Love interests may try to persuade the heroine to kiss them or sleep with them early on in comedic scenes, but there is no consummation until the author has fully convinced the reader that the heroine, the character that readers project onto, is making an adult choice as a capstone on her journey into emotional maturity.
Compare them to romances aimed at young men: with over 123,000 bookmarks on one aggregate manga-reading site, My Dress-Up Darling closes its first chapter with the lead female love interest flashing her panties twice while talking about her favorite pornographic video game, after a chapter full of drawings of her cleavage. It is crucial to note these characters are 16-year-old high school students. This isn’t to say there is no place for sexiness in comics, but this manga is praised by Western manga readers for “breaking traditional gender roles” while objectifying its teenage female lead. With over 1.4 million bookmarks on My Anime List, the high school romance Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai opens with its female high school student love interest walking around in a playboy bunny outfit emphasizing her chest. Later in the chapter, the protagonist’s younger sister is sleeping in bed with him and joking about arousing him.
It’s easy to fall into a trap of picking and choosing the worst of the worst to try to explain my personal beef with male-centered romances, but these aren’t obscure series. Popular series’ treatment of women usually falls into one of two categories: token busty vixen (think Orihime from Bleach, Nami from One Piece) or avoiding women as much as possible (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure parts 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7, anything about sports). While boys should get the opportunity to explore their own personalities through fiction, it should probably also emulate treating women like people.
Plenty of young women enjoy shounen and find themselves drawn to female characters who kick butt; they should! I know I’m drawn to, and identify with, physically strong and emotionally lively female characters — like Mitsuri Kanroji from Demon Slayer (It’s also no coincidence that Demon Slayer is very much not written by a man) — but I was drawn to the feminine and delicate heroines of shoujo manga more.
Reading school romances filled a void in my heart I didn’t understand I had. Like many high school students, I was more like a newborn foal than an adult human, and I certainly had no luck in love. I didn’t go to prom; I was no one’s crush. But I was constantly feeling the pangs of love, despite all that. I appear to most outsiders as an upstanding citizen now, but it’s in spite of my youthful obsession with shoujo.
I learned that boys get flustered too, and that they do, indeed, have the biological ability to blush. I learned that crushes hurt — like, physically — but keeping it inside hurts more. I learned that love is just a series of increasingly embarrassing things you notice about a person that you find endearing. But most of all, from my little girlie comics for girls, I learned that love is patience. There is a lot of waiting and wondering and hoping and pining. You won’t know when you’re ready until you’re ready.
Like many such unlucky teen girls who didn’t have a high school sweetheart, I could’ve been thrown into the world of adult dating and even sex without knowing what my boundaries were. But I wasn’t. I had an idea of what makes my heart flutter, of what I can’t stand, and what can grow on me thanks to thousands of pages of romance stories.
As much as I love stories of kicking butt, taking names, and believing in yourself, my schedule doesn’t consist of much butt-kicking. But as a person who loves and wants to be loved, nothing is quite as good as love stories. ♦