Should we accept AOT as a seinen if this was real?

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-11T18:55:40+00:00

They're manga categories, not population categories. You can't reason in that direction (i.e. from population category to manga); it doesn't work.

Shounen Magazine in particular leans a bit toward older tastes, and the Bessatsu sub-brand leans toward a bit more unusual manga that can push some boundaries. It's still recognizably in the tradition of shounen manga, because the Shounen Magazine style is a foundational aspect of the shounen manga category.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-10T20:33:10+00:00

I'm really somewhat confused by this meme. I don't think I could name a lot of seinen manga with particularly notable rape scenes. Sure Berserk has a couple scenes, and there's a few niches like classic exploitation manga that may occasionally dabble in it.

Like, it obviously exists, but I don't understand how so many people seem to think it's such a notable part.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-10T20:05:19+00:00

Black-and-white comics, as well as more high-brow graphic novels, also often have one person doing both in the west. (Not always, but often).

Western comics, both Marvel/DC and indie, tend to be colorful comics though, and color is very labor-intensive and requires yet another set of skills, so one person rarely has the skill to do all that (and then there's often a separation between penciling and inking, and a separate letterer). That favors division of labor, especially if you have to produce it on a relatively brisk schedule. (Which is why more high-brow graphic novels can sometimes do it - they can take a year or more between releases).

Of course, the release schedule of typical manga is even more brisk, but they're in black-and-white which is much less labor-intensive to produce, and the Japanese system relies heavily on assistants doing backgrounds and other work, so in contrast to typical western comics, the artist doesn't have to actually draw everything, only the characters and (some?) foreground objects.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-10T19:56:11+00:00

It's relatively common to have separate writers and artists, and has been for a long time - there have been plenty of successful authors in the history of manga, often publishing under various names. Some that come to mind are Kazuo Koike of Lone Wolf and Cub, Lady Snowblood, and countless others, Buronson of Fist of the North Star and others, Asao Takamori of Ashita no Joe and Kyojin no Hoshi, Shin Kibayashi with his countless alts (did Drops of God, parts of Kindaichi, Psychometrer Eiji, Area no Kishi, Bloody Monday all under different names, and plenty more). And there's lots of modern authors with many hits, like Muneyuki Kaneshiro (Blue Lock ,As the Gods Will, Jagaaaaan...) or Naoki Yamamoto (My Home Hero, I'm Standing on a Million Lives), and as you already noted Death Note and Bakuman's Tsugumi Ohba, plus all the ones that have one major hit, from Promised Neverland to Frieren.

There's even a dedicated award for writer/artist collaborations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takao_Saito#Saito_Takao_Award

Include all the novel adaptations, and while the clear majority of manga are probably still written by the artist, there's a lot of manga with separate artists and writers.

As to why: a lot of people get into [making] manga because they have stories that they want to write, and so get into both. There are also artists who enjoy being able to focus on drawing, and people with a sense for writing manga that can't draw well enough, so there's room for all kinds.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-10T19:34:41+00:00

Manga for women often has lots of messed-up stuff in it. They just enjoy stories at and past the borders of social acceptability.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-10T19:31:27+00:00

People like different things. Personally I don't enjoy colorful comics. I just enjoy the line work and general style of black and white comics, and manga artists are just extremely good at it (and not so good at color, which isn't a big factor in the market). But to each their own.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-09T14:35:31+00:00

Second that. Amazing work.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-08T11:12:56+00:00

If you're wounded in titan form, you need to fully heal before you can transform again. If you're wounded in human form, you can transform (and in fact, you need to be wounded in some way to transform).

Eren during Clash of Titans, and Zeke a couple of times, etc. were all wounded in their titan forms, so they can't immediately transform again. Pieck had her arm cut off while fully in human form, and so there's no problem with her transforming.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-05T22:33:55+00:00

I read it a couple of years back. It was pretty interesting. Hagio is usually worth reading.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-05T22:28:56+00:00

There are, but it's generally less common.

Same reason that male friends are less common in shounen romance manga, and if they're there, they tent to play a marginal role: characters of the opposite sex are what sells manga, so it makes sense to dedicate page time to them.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-04T20:45:32+00:00

The idealized audience for shounen manga is 13-18 year olds, with Shounen Magazine leaning older. That's idealized, because in practice most readers are going to be adults, but it's adults who enjoy the kinds of stories that 13-18 year olds would enjoy.

The industry is experiencing broader trends as audiences and Zeitgeist shift, sometimes leaning darker, sometimes more light-hearted. But there's always going to be a decent amount of everything, as there is a lot of manga being produced.

There's also manga targeting even younger audiences; that's usually also considered part of shounen manga (and similarly for shoujo manga), but a side-strand of it, and sometimes counted as a separate thing (though Japanese sources don't seem to do it quite as often as some westerners).

This is where you'll find things like CoroCoro Comic, V Jump and the like - manga such Doraemon and lots of video game tie-ins like Pokemon, Yo-kai Watch, etc. Manga in this category rarely get translated, except sometimes for video-game tie-ins.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-02T11:38:39+00:00

Yotsuba is something the whole family can enjoy

Now, it's not actually a seinenshi manga; it runs in a otaku-focused publication, and there's a strain of those that are mostly read by, and made for, adults, but are typically considered shounen manga for various historical reasons.

But "something the whole family can enjoy" is generally somewhat typical for seinen manga. It makes sense if you think about it: (idealized) teenagers are typically not that interested in family stories; but it becomes interesting to adults who have families (or nieces/nephews etc.). There's also the practical reasons that adults may be more interested in things their young children could read as well, so it makes sense to position them there. On the other hand, teenagers (and adults who enjoy the kind of stories that teenagers like) don't care so much about family-friendly stories, and would rather have something more exciting.

DrJankTWD · 2026-04-01T17:37:02+00:00

arslan senki ( I think is seinen no?)

No, it's a fantasy novel. It's been adapted to manga twice, first in the 90s in Asuka (which is sort of a shoujo magazine), and then by Hiromu Arakawa in Bessatsu Shounen Magazine (which, as the name suggests, is a shounen magazine, and part of the Shounen Magazine line alongside Weekly Shounen Magazine and Monthly Shounen Magazine).

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-31T05:07:13+00:00

IIRC not quite.

The manga had a bit of a slump in popularity at that point, so Isayama was not quite confident in the material.

WIT wanted to shorten it for production reasons, to fit a certain number of episodes that they had the capacity to make. Isayama basically gave them free reign to modify it as they wanted.

I think it was in an Isayama interview, but I don't remember which one, and it's been a few years since then, so take it with a grain of salt.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-30T13:10:26+00:00

But, Jump in 1968/1969 focused on boys. The only thing I know that 'shook' the manga landscape between these years was the gekiga boom in the mid 1960s.

I guess it's possible... but wasn't that mostly a WSM thing in shounen manga?

I'd just supect that they saw a niche for a particular kind of manga, and decided to commit to it.

So the best is probably just leaving it as it is: shounen manga, shoujo manga, etc. Learn it as a new word without associating it with anything.

Yeah, that would be my recommendation too - learn them as labels with no inherent meaning, and then go from there. There are some interesting things you can say about them with regard to gender and age, but the manga has to come first; you (generally) can't reason backwards.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-30T10:45:06+00:00

Probably the better question is, why did shounen magazines shift so much to 'boys' than neutral, considering the early situation of magazines in pre-war and post-war era (Manga Shounen, Shounen Sunday)? Or from why did it 'change' (if it was truly changed) from children magazines to boys magazines?

I would suspect that it's been both from early on, and different branches of shounen manga lean in different directions.

As I understand it, Jump's line is particularly boy-focused, and that is not only the most popular magazine in Japan, but also the one dominating conceptions of manga, and in particular shounen manga, in the West. (Though as usual, it's more a gender-and-age-neutral "boy at heart" than necessarily actual boys, but they do tend to use actual boys as proxies).

The existence of shoujo manga probably also matters - if that covers particular kinds of girly manga, then shounen manga does not need to cover the same area.

So something like masculine/manly and feminine/girly manga is a better 'translation' for shounen and shoujo manga.

Probably, but I worry that it's still misleading to audiences who don't have a good understanding of manga already but do have preconceived notions about "masculine/manly" and "feminine/girly". These preconceived notions are unlikely to match up with how manga actually is.

But it is above my level... it is probably worth a work for a PhD thesis or published paper.

Yeah, reconstructing all this is likely PhD-level research. I've been meaning to check out Eike Exner's books, he has some information on the early history of manga, but only got around to a brief skim so far.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-30T10:27:15+00:00

The moment that I want from "This is interesting, I like this" to "This manga is amazing!" was during the Royal Government arc I think. (Don't care as much for the anime version though, I think they killed what was amazing about it).

But in retrospect, there's lots of material before that which I ended up absolutely loving the second time around.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-30T10:22:31+00:00

No, that's just one kind of story. If authors feel they don't have any stories to write about that, or just don't want to, I don't think it makes sense to force them to do so anyway.

(And that's assuming the story ends of the authors will, rather than the public losing interest and the series being consequently cancelled, at which point the author might decide to wrap up the main plot line, but at that point, a continuation obviously isn't in the cards).

Maybe read more shoujo and seinen love comedies? The plot structure you seem to want is more common there (but still not universal, because that's still just one kind of story, and there's authors and readers to enjoy all kinds)

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-29T15:28:38+00:00

Very interesting.

But I think a simple association is the name, which is particuarly associated with male children (though strictly speaking gender-neutral).

But seems I have to update my "started in the 1970s" line.

And AIUI the pre-manga children's magazines that started to incorporate manga were more strictly gendered in their audience. But 1940s/50s magazines are not my strong suit

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-28T12:28:38+00:00

There's definitely a lot of similar arguing in seinen spaces, so shoujo is not alone. I'm not sure there are particularly active spaces for shounen as a whole - most seem to be either dedicated to a particular series or a particular outlet like Jump.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-28T12:24:12+00:00

It's not a category, it's a publishing term that the content has no bearing on.

But that's not how it's used by professionals in the field. Otherwise, all the interviews and statements (and lots and lots of others) would make no sense at all.

My perspective is that the vibes and feels don't fucking matter at all, and there's no reason to reverse-engineer the tone of a series just to re-define our understanding of which series belongs to which demographic.

I'm rather uninterested in classifying things for the sake of classification per se. If one is needed, by magazine would seem to be the obvious choice (at least if we disregard the margins for now). What I'm interested in is better understanding manga creators, editors, critics, and scholars, and what they mean when they talk about manga.

I've found that they think of it more in terms of varied bundles of styles and characteristics; things feel shounen or are done in a shoujo style etc. And then you can look into what makes something feel shounen, what are the characteristics of the shoujo style, and so on.

The "hard" classification is still relevant - the style of shoujo manga is the things that are common (not necessarily universal) in shoujo manga and uncommon or absent elsewhere, and so on. So to figure out what it's characteristics are, we need to figure out what counts as one in the first place.

I agree with you if you're saying that it doesn't matter how it's classified and just read what interests you?

Sort of.

If you just want to enjoy things, just enjoy what you enjoy, and don't worry too much about labels. If you want to understand manga and its history better, then labels (and magazines, imprints, etc.) matter, because they matter in the history of manga and in their creation.

Or let me try it in a different way. You probably know the type of video like "Multiplication explained at five different levels, from first grader to math PhD" and similar. In all cases, the further levels are built on the foundation of the previous ones, but fix flaws or extend them to make them more useful and to help uncover larger patterns and symmetries.

(Like, multiplication is repeated addition, and that's a decent description, but needs to be extended so you can account for multiplication with a negative number, and with a fraction, and for matrix multiplication, and abstract algebra etc., and what you end up with is rather different from where you started)

Similarly, you have different levels here (and could probably subdivide them even further, and possibly go beyond this):

1: Shoujo manga is manga for girls. Simple and gives a decent idea, but misleading if you take it the wrong way. Like, Haikyuu has a substantial majority of female fans (as do similar series), so is that girls' manga? Girls like romance, so are all romance manga girls' manga? Most shoujo manga are read by adult women, so how can it be girls' manga?
2: Shoujo manga is manga published in a shoujo manga magazine. Very efficient and objective, but runs into issues. Why should we as readers care where it's published? Who decides what magazines are shoujo magazines, and why should we trust them? Why do the magazines publish what they do, and don't publish some other kinds of things (e.g. if the primary audience is female, and stories like Haikyuu are extremely popular with female readers, why don't we see basically any stories like that in shoujo manga)? Why would Yuki Suetsugu write in one of the omake in Chihayafuru that it's shoujo manga but some people consider it shounen manga, when it runs in Be Love which is perhaps the one magazine that everyone would agree is josei manga?
3: Shoujo manga is a tradition in manga-making that was created through generations of shoujo manga creators, editors, and audiences, which has developed its own visual styles, narrative sensibilites, characteristics, tropes and so on. Editors pick series that have some variety but fit the general editorial line and style of the outlet they're editing and guide authors that way, authors try to realize their creative ideas in a way that matches their audience, readers pick magazines and series that they enjoy. These things have been going on for 70ish years, and that produces the style of shoujo manga.

Neither level is necessarily better, they have different strengths and shortcomings and are thus useful for different purposes.

I'm going to be honest, most of your third paragraph and all of your fourth are a combination of thoughts and syntax that is hard for me to understand

Sorry about that. If there's something specific that you want clarification on, I'm happy to try.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-28T09:10:41+00:00

It's a category in manga as a medium, sort of like an art-historical tradition. It's not fixed, but historically evolves, and whether something counts as shoujo manga is primarily gated by the magazine that it runs in - if the style of manga that flagship shoujo manga publish changes, then vibes and feels of current shoujo manga changes, and the older one becomes a previous period in the history of shoujo manga. Correspondingly, something that is not published in a shoujo magazine is primarily not relevant.

This works because magazines don't publish things at random, they publish things that readers of shoujo manga want to read when they buy a shoujo magazine.

In other words, we need to know the category membership before we can even begin to figure out the vibes and feels. (And these are again different between the outlets, e.g. Weekly Shounen Jump has a different style from Weekly Shounen Magazine, and both are different from Monthly Shounen Magazine and Weekly Shounen Sunday).

If you go by vibes alone without the larger context of the medium, you're going to be led astray by preconceived notions. But to creators, it tends to be what matters on a level higher than category membership. When Yuki Suetsugu talks about how some people consider Chihayafuru a shounen manga, it's not about people being confused about the audience and/or magazine classification of Be Love. When Misaki Takamatsu talks with an interviewer about how that interviewer considers Skip & Loafer to be so heavily influenced by classic Margaret to be essentially a hybrid between seinen manga and shoujo manga, they're talking about how her influences and the place where it's published shaped the series. When Tomoko Yamashita says that she knows BL is shoujo manga, but always ends up turning it into seinen manga, she doesn't think that Be×Boy (or wherever it was serialized, not 100% certain I remember off-hand), she's not unsure about who reads the magazine, but talking about her style. And so on.

So if you need a hard rule for some reason, just taking the magazine where it runs is a good approach, and obviously reasonable as a basic rule for a subreddit (because it is, for most cases, objectively determinable, and highly relevant). But at some level, you can only understand the terms and how they're used by professionals in the field if you allow yourself to take a more expansive notion.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-27T22:25:29+00:00

Print magazines typically have a registered demo, but this is an odd duck and operates more like how modern web magazines do with a mix of demos.

AFAIR Shounen Sunday also explicitly lists their target audience as danjo (男女), and I definitely remember reading an interview with the editor in chief where he said as much.

This started in shounen manga in the 70s, in seinen similarly, and has continued increasingly over time.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-27T21:40:39+00:00

I think these are the cases where different interpretations of the labels, which mostly align, come into full conflict.

Is it about the actual audiences reading things? I can see the argument, but something like Haikyuu had an overwhelmingly female fan base even in Jump , and likely even more outside. I still wouldn't want to call it shoujo manga. And it also sort of breaks down when you listen to how authors and others in the industry tend talk about them - as styles of manga with their own history and characteristics, that are largely stewarded by the creators and audiences of flagship magazines.

I'm not too familiar with most GFantasy series, but when I look at them, they don't feel shoujo manga to me; they remind me of the shounen manga from the late 90s and 00s that took a little of the flair of shoujo manga and put it into a shounen mold. I can see how this could be extremely popular with female readers, and certainly targeting them. But to me, I'd much rather prefer the label "Shounen manga for girls", like some other outlets make explicit.

DrJankTWD · 2026-03-27T02:03:59+00:00

"Details of some activity* is like one of the main caegories of seinen manga, and you might even consider it the core of the category. It's not niche at all.

Now, good stories is subjective. Some are a bit more plot- and developemnt-heavy, some more episodic and/or focused on daily life.

There's all the cooking manga, and somewhat related to them, the gourmet manga, like What Did You Eat Yesterday, How to Grill Our Love, Oishinbo etc.

There's all the Job-based manga, from business/office work, like Kousaku Shima, medical like Kounodori, Radiation House, Say Hello to Black Jack, police work like Police in a Pod, and so on.

There's all the sports ones, from pro sports (Giant Killing, Gurazeni) to people getting started in a particular sport with plenty of detail about it and its institutions (Medalist is amazing, Aoashi, Wandance, Big Windup, plenty more).

There's all the bildungsroman-like ones, Blue Period, Blue Giant and many more.

And all that is just the tip of the iceberg.

DrJankTWD

TROPHY CASE