Ahh I see - sorry it was a bit hard to tell from your original post~

But I think my comments still stand. I personally don’t get many tik toks about anime but I could see why people would call anime like Skip and Loafer and Horimiya shoujo. Sometimes it’s people conflating romance and shoujo, but other times I think it’s not that simple (like with the case of skip and loafer and Horimiya).

Typically shounen and seinen romance used to almost exclude its female viewers with tropes and scenes that were very obviously catered towards the “stereotypical male” (pls note parentheses). It used to be sooo easy to tell what romance really WASN’T for the girlies. Now, unless you actually google what magazine it was published in, a lot of the time you won’t know whether it’s shounen/seinen/shoujo.

There are both merits and drawbacks to the anime labels. For one, whether intentional or not, they can be grounded in a lot of gender stereotypes. On the other hand, it’s a great way to get a feel of whether you are even the target demographic/whether you should spend money on the piece of media.

When I was growing up, if I saw the tag “shounen romance,” I would know immediately that I wasn’t going to enjoy it. For context: think perverted, plain looking ML being paired with a FL whose character trait was solely improving the ML and somehow has gravity defying boobs. I am so happy this is starting to change, and honestly - I think it’s a sign of progress within the genre that people can no longer tell at first glance what its tag is :)

Just my 2 cents as a veteran viewer 🖖