[warainagara]

Originally Posted by philip72

Bishounen and Bishoujo take their prefex from bijin, which is a word used to describe femine, not masculine beauty.
Bishounen by definition are drawn as females but have male components. Some are actually referred to as female; Lady Oscar is a good example of a female bishounen and the leads of Takarazuka shows are usually refered to as bishounen by their primarily female fans.

Well, "bi" is also used for men, not only for women.
The reason bishounen has a common feature of feminine beauty is related to "shounen", rather than "bi."
You know shounen does not have equal masculine beauty since they are not mature as males and still neutral in their bodily development.
I don't think I have ever seen someone who is actually female being called bishounen.
She can look like one in male clothing and sometimes is mistaken for bishounen, but that's it.

My initial criticism was about the inclusion of actual bishounen in the anime, and I think a good many people understood what I was referring to.
I was not saying the show shouldn't have attractive men in it, I was stating my distaste for a certain type of excessively feminized male character in what is a primarily shounen show.

The strict categorization of male and female animes or mangas I find in this site quite often puzzles me, since that kind of distinction is going away in Japan although it has been predominant so far.
It is true that most manga magazines are officially designated for a specific sex, but in reality marketing teams of such magazines do care about the opposite sex, which tends to be inherited by the animation teams.

For example, Red Garden is serialized in a seinen (young man) mag, but its animation is marketed in affiliation with a female fashion brand for the purpose of approaching female audience.

Peach Pot (the mangaka group of Rozen-Maiden) has been serializing a fantasy manga titled Zombie-Loan in a shounen mag and the series is notorious for the mix of boys' love and yuri. It apparently proves that it is aimed at both sexes and thus was criticized by male readership of the mag.

Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destinty is a mecha anime and that makes male fans tempted to think they are for them.
But the series were blatantly conscious of Gundam Wing which was famous as Yaoi Gundam.
Code Geass, a recent hit by Sun Rise, is a similar case in that it is a mecha but is actually aimed at both sexes.

Shounen Jump, a representative shounen manga mag in Japan, has serialized Naruto, Bleach, Death Note and One Piece and all of the titles are externally shounen but are known as actually trying to feed their shoujo fans by deliberately downplaying female characters and providing attractive male characters continuously.
You know, this is not my opinion but is a well-known strategy among Japanese manga and anime people.

If you wanna talk about Kaishaku, the mangaka of Kyoshiro and KnM,
the group is one of the mangakas who keep a neutral position in most of their titles even though their mangas are serialized in shounen or seinen mags.
That's why KnM has a typical shoujo romance meme, yaoi tint and a group of bishounen.
That's why Kyoshiro features a bunch of bishounen, a bro-con bishounen protagonist, a heroine with loose Cinderella complex, and her narrative from a typical shoujo viewpoint.
If any of you don't like its shoujo-ishness, I'm sorry that's not your cup of tea.
You had better find more conservative shounen or seinen shows with unattractive male protagonists in any girl's opinion.
The truth is the traditional designation of shounen, seinen, shoujo and joushi is becoming less and less helpful in deciding the actual genre of a show, if you agree to my definition of such a genre that it refers to the marketing target of its producing group.