I certainly hope there isn’t any romance here.
*because I can’t get [blockquote] to do anything in this theme, I’ll rely on list instead for quotes in the rest of this post.
JPMeyer thinks defining genres in anime and manga by their characteristics is silly:
I admit, those definitions are fucking stupid, but the problem here is not so much that the syntactic approach is wrong, but that people are using the wrong goddamn things to define their shou-nen/jo-sei-nen. There ARE genre defining characteristics, but those aren’t it.
There are features common to each genre in general. Just to name a few, shounen’s major relationships are always friendship, with romance taking a back seat and never looked deeply into; growth and change through effort is encouraged; and there is rarely any moral ambiguity. Shoujo’s relationship emphasis is almost always on romance, and even if it is not you can expect to see it lurking around every second corner, and character development is the main driving force of the plot, as opposed to shounen’s structured ‘journeys’.
Seinen and josei are more murky – seinen is often just shounen with blood and tits, but things like Genshiken show that that’s not its only trick. In fact, Genshiken, especially in the ending arcs with Ogiue, approach josei territory, which is distinct from shoujo by more mature views on romance as well as exploring more adult aspects of life and society(compare Nana to Fruits Basket). It is in these cases where the distinction is unnecessary, as it becomes as blurry as the morality of the characters, and an exercise in classification can become laughably silly.
There’s a whole post in these characteristics, but I’m not someone fit to write it.
Another way to distinguish them is, of course, to see what magazine they run in. From the same JPMeyer post:
The editorial departments of the magazines have a set of standards that end up specifying some of the common features or themes, meaning that anything ran in a shounen magazine is probably going to end up becoming very shounen-y. But this isn’t a be-all-and-end-all rule for classification either, especially since things like Death Note and Gintama started running in Shounen Jump. Neither are particularly shounen-y titles, but that may just be a reflection of Shounen Jump’s incredibly broad range of audiences instead of being representative of shounen magazines as a whole.
Why are the distinctions necessary in the first place? Omo seem to think that the terms are nothing more than ‘marketing babble’, but I hope I have shown that there are substantive differences, and I think they have their practical uses. They help you find what you’re looking for, for a start – if you’re looking for some friends going on a fun adventure, you probably shouldn’t go looking in La-La or Hana to Yume (both shoujo magazines). Secondly, it helps adjust your expectations – in a conversation with Mike on IRC, he expressed the desire to see more romantic development between Nemu and Ishida of Bleach. I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen. As Darkshaunz so deliciously puts it:
If you go in without the correct expectations, you will only end up with a broken jar or mummy spanking your naughty behind.
P.S. I’m very sorry about the lack of Impz comics. My tablet is broken, and as such there will be no Impz Comic until I find an alternative.
11 Comments
Well, said, Lupus. It’s something that has been on my mind for quite some time, thank you for officially writing this down for the record.
Speaking of which, my only 2 cents’ worth of commentary is: to each his/her own. I prefer this variety because, biologically speaking, variety inhibits the dangers of homogenity.
The title was intriguing, so I clicked the link on AnimeNano. Then I realized you wrote it, Lupus. Thence, I needed to read the article.
Expectations have often destroyed my perceptions regarding anime. I finished Kimikiss a few weeks ago, and while it was a great anime series chronicling the tragedies and triumphs of high school romances (directed no less by Kasai Kenichi), its ending was weak. Because I expected the series to up the ante until it exploded in an orgiastic victory, I was very disappointed. Not only did mummy spank my ass, she also made me kneel on salt and fed me hot sauce. It was such a disappointment.
However, where else can you look? You can look no further than what is presented, and even if deep down one knows these shippings and these hopes are doomed to failure (as you’ve very saliently pointed out – they’re not meant to be seen in shounen), one cannot avoid looking and putting meaning. ‘Perhaps’ is a very powerful word, and it is this ‘perhaps’ that drives impossibilities into possibilities.
Nemu will probably die. She hasn’t received any development in the last two hundred chapters or so (I think), and she’s not central to the plot at all. But since she’s there, and because there is a possibility: there is a perhaps, I’ll hope.
And ‘hope’ is infinitely more powerful than the more sober ‘perhaps’.
The thing is, in a discussion, you try not to make the defined genre the issue itself. Just say it’s shoujo or shounen and be done with it, discuss the anime instead of the genre that you defined it as, or people define it as, or it is defined as.
Sometimes I don’t like people who nitpick to me, for example, in an online forum, when I talk about “bishoujo game”, someone would reply and say blah blah about how it’s not a bishoujo game. They would say terms to me like dating sim/visual novel/eroge/galge/ADV/RPG, etc. and I say “WTF, I’m trying to talk about the game here, not what thing it -specifically- is”.
That’s why I also avoid terms like seinen and josei because they are too specific, it’s better to leave it be as shounen and shoujo, then talk whatever you want about the anime or manga.
But here’s the problem: Boys Be IS about romance rather than friendship. Seinen isn’t shounen plus tits and blood. You know what manga ran in a seinen magazine? Chi’s Sweet Home, Rozen Maiden, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and You’re Under Arrest.
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Sorta off-topic, but blockquote doesn’t work in the comments either. It must need to be defined properly in the CSS stylesheet.
Hahahaha! I love the cookie jar analogy there. It’s so true. And if I may add to it, we have a similar situation in shoujo, but unlike shonen where all we get is a stool in the average shoujo we get a step-ladder, but a rather rickety one that often wobbles and destroys our confidence to get to the cookie jar. And sometimes we’ll GET the cookie jar, only to have it cruelly snatched out of our hands, then given it back, then snatched away again, etc. And, often as not, there’s an equally tempting jar of candy next to the cookie jar that will vy for our attention.
Just because Bleach isn’t romance-central doesn’t mean that a shonen action/adventure can’t have romance and do it right, however. Look at Rurouni Kenshin. We got all the action and blood one could ask for, and we still got a warm and fuzzy romantic ending!
Mike: You can start by looking at shows/manga that isn’t shounen. Rather then hope, there is only despair in shounen. Now maybe if you were shipping one of the main characters, then there could be a tiny sliver of hope.
If you knew that Kimikiss was based on a bishoujo dating visual novel, then maybe your expectations would have been tempered to not expect so much out of it. Or maybe it’s just J.C. Staff fucking up… how many anime REALLY ends satisfactorily?
Bluemist: You shouldn’t make it the focus of a discussion. You don’t have to use it in a discussion at all. They’re probably best left for personal use – in helping you narrow down your choices, and in helping you shape your expectations. When used in a discussion, a debate about whether the classification is right or not could arise, but people who focus on that instead of on the subject itself are just pricks.
JP: The keyword is ‘often’, which is why I then cited Genshiken as an example that isn’t just shounen with tits and blood. There are probably about equal parts tits-and-blood (e.g. Claymore, Beserk, Tenjou Tenge) and not-tits-and-blood (e.g. REAL, Mushishi, Team Medical Dragon) seinen out there. One can write a whole post on how to finely divvy up the genres or sub-genres, but I just wanted to say that you can’t outright dismiss trying to compartmentalize the genres altogether, because the authors/magazines intend it to happen and it can be done.
Actually now that I think about it, what I said was wrong. Yeah, there are shounen with a romantic focus, and a lot more with overt romantic elements. Maybe I should go kill myself now.
Kaibitzin: Yeah, Zaitcev had a look when I was whinging about it in IRC this afternoon, and he said the whole blockquote definition thing just wasn’t there in the stylesheet.
L-chan: go to the link that says Darkshaunz and post your comment there. He’s the one that came up with the analogy, and I’m sure he’ll really like your comment.
Disabling the blockquote was the only way I could get the comments to style properly with the base structure of the theme. It was the biggest, most aggravating thing about the entire deal, and I haven’t had the motivation nor patience to go back and fix it.
It basically came down to a choice between proper comments or proper blockquotes. I chose comments.
There are several little “bugs” in the theme that I know of and plan on fixing. I had been waiting until we upgraded to 2.5 (in case the theme went haywire or something) and now I will begin to, little by little, tweak things.
Like I HATE the way that this theme does lists…it’s freaking horrible. Just go look at the ones above…ugh.
Yeah, it sounds like there is either a nesting or a spacing issue with lists and blockquotes. I would have made the comments work first too, in Riex’s situation.
If there was a periodical which ran many variety of stories, would the branding be as solid. SJ, we know SJ and La-La, since the series “feel” similar, though could be entirely different. ^^ branding
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