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Old 2012-02-14, 16:16   Link #212
DonQuigleone
Knight Errant
 
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
@90% of Shoujo being school based: I did a quick search on entries on Bakaupdates, unfortunately a lot of entries there are stubs, with only their demographic listed, so I only included releases with at least one released scanlation. Whether this is representative of Shojo manga as a whole is up for debate.

I had 7- pages (of 50 entries each) of Shojo. If we exclude "school life" that goes down to 40. If we exclude "Romance" instead, that goes down to 12.

So actually, going by this, only 43% shojo are heavily set in school, but 83% are romantic.

Interestingly, if we compare that to Shonen, there are 42 pages of shonen manga, of which 28 do not include romance, and 31 do not include school life. 22 do not include action, and 32 do not include adventure.

From what can be gathered there, it's wrong to say that Shojo is all school romances, though shojo is still dominated by romance, and there are plenty of interesting unusual shojo titles (Natsume Yuujinchou, for instance), but Shonen does have a wider variety of genres. That said, there are less shonen manga overall (at least being scanlated...), and it's possible that there are biases there, those are just number of titles, and they're not taking into account length of the title.

What I will say, is that both Shonen and Shojo are often formulaic. Shojo might have formulaic male leads and romance, but don't forget that a lot of shonen can be summed up by "I want to be the best ninja/pirate/footballer/cook/janitor".

And let's also remember, 90% of everything is crap anyway, regardless of whether it's shonen or shojo.
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