I can't speak for captain Tsubasa, but Jojo was always a borderline seinen manga for me.
Also you are missing the point of my post, which is probably my mistake due to my poor phrasing. This topic wasn't meant to be talking about shounen manga becoming more seinen.
I was asking the topicstarter what "shounen manga's" actually have become a manga targetted a female audience. Because that was the point of this topic.

Ah right. ;)
Many people who are into old-school shounens are alienated by "shounen-aiish" shounen, as Fuyuno pointed out. Even though shounen is a demographic instead of a genre as Vexx mentionned, there's some titles that really caters to female audience, especially the GFantasy titles.

By the way, on the flipside, we have shounen-like shoujo manga, like some of the works of Arina Tanemura, which she admits to have the elements of shounen manga like fantasy and magic and, in the case of her style, the strong lines that contrast her works to the softer lines of traditional shoujo manga art.

(I managed to watch imagine-nation this morning and she, by chance, becomes the main theme for the day.)

I don't get why the demographic of a particular story has to be so clearcut.

Incorporating shoujo elements into a shounen series does not mean that it's shifting its demographic to young girls. The same goes for shoujo stories making use of shounen elements. If anything, it only means that it's broadening its reach to become more inclusive of other kinds of readers. A little pandering to another audience is not the same as abandoning one's original audience.

Whatever the case, the classic conventions associated with the shounen demographic will always be there, albeit with the occasional stray elements for variety.

What about advertisment, timeslot of airing, merchandising etc.
I am pretty sure that it's quite important to know who your primairy audience is from a production standpoint.

I get that, but I don't see why it can't attempt to appeal to its other audiences in addition to the main one.

Have you ever taken Marketing classes? If not, then you probably don't know what the disadvantages are when targeting a too broad audience.
The main problem lies with the promotion. To reach a wider audience, the promotion needs to appeal to more people so it needs to be wider and thus more expensive. Even if you have invested more money to reach them, that doesn't even guarantee that you will reach them. By having a more clear target, your advertisments are more focused and more efficient.

Let's take the prince of tennis as an example. It was easily noticed that it also a fairly big female audience, so the producers took advantage of that by making several otome games with the characters from PoT instead of going for something what appealed to both the male and female audiences. For the males there were several "regular tennis games" (which had most of the special powers and special shots from the manga/anime in it) that appealed more to them than to females at that time.

Whether it is more financially efficient or not doesn't matter.

What I was saying is that incorporating a few shoujo elements into a shounen work does not mean the death of the "shounen genre". Having lots of bishounen characters in PoT does not take away its value as a "battle" sports manga.

I never denied that, i was only answering these questions that you brought up.

-I don't get why the demographic of a particular story has to be so clearcut.
-I get that, but I don't see why it can't attempt to appeal to its other audiences in addition to the main one.

My answer (short version) to those questions was: focused promotion and risk aversion.

The other things that you have said about increasing your audience either intentionally or nonintentionally, has been already said by other people. So i never bothered with that.
In fact i am still waiting for the topic starter to answer me what manga's that he has read "inspired" him to create this topic.

Huh. I guess I didn't express myself clearly enough. Sorry 'bout that.

I made those statements regarding how people interpret a particular series, rather than from an industry perspective. To clarify, I was having trouble accepting the purist perspective on shounen manga (i.e. shounen should only have shounen elements). From a practical standpoint, I know the importance of specializing on a particular demographic, but I meant that it was wrong to make sweeping generalizations just because an author chooses to pander to another audience.

Yep. The lack of follow-up from the thread starter makes it seem like we're grasping at straws.

I call it "rant and run" and interpret it that thread starters who do this don't actually want to discuss or defend their talking points. Especially in this case when the first page of responses is basically "I'm not sure he's got a clear notion of what "shounen" means in terms of the industry".

Methinks the OP was referring to Action Shonen and citing Bleach and Naruto would seem to affirm my guess. Even within the category of Action Shonen itself though, there's things like Negima!, A Certain Scientific Railgun, Claymore, and Tsubasa RESERvoir CHRoNiCLE which I have to admit would have definitely passed my Action Shonen detector had I not looked up which magazines they were serialized in.
Aha! I knew there was some kind of cross-demographic appeal in her works but I could never quite figure it out. Actually that explains why some of her female characters can become, well, hot. Oh yes.:heh::uhoh:

Because of the statistical Law of Large Numbers ;)

As for the main topic, publishers of magazines that are targeting teenage boys will do everything to follow their audience's desire, be it appeal to high school lesbians (who are becoming more numerous and are effectively boys for concerns publishers) or bi-curious boys for the same reason (though they are not as prevalent). Expecting a certain sub-genre that dominated an age group's publications a decade ago is just an exercise in futility. That age group is older now and by definition belongs to a different demographic with everything that this implies.

You know, I wonder if we'd be having this discussion if it was the other way around.

IE "Oh noes, Shoujo is being diluted in order to better appeal to boys!". There's a latent argument that because it's at all aimed at girls, it's somehow "worse".


I don't see anything wrong with inserting a few elements to appeal to girls, so long as the central premise and appeal isn't derailed. Also, by inserting such elements, you can often get something superior.

That said, if it's done in a purely pandering manner, it's not going to really add anything. For instance, making every pilot in a mecha show a Bishonen, or adding in loads of revealing outfits to a Mahou Shoujo.

The right way is, say, to add interesting romantic drama to the Mecha, with a few appealing male characters, or interesting action/adventure to the Mahou Shoujo, with a few appealing (but not overtly revealing) character designs.

In that way, you make the story as a whole more interesting, and likely in a way that will also appeal to the original core audience as well.

At least 15 years ago I saw Slam Dunk, a classic shounen show for "shounen" audiences. Several years later Dear Boys hit the scene. While I have nothing against it but for me it just Slam Dunk with bishies and less on heroism and other things that made SD good. Today we have Kuroko no Basket, another basketball anime with bishies and this time some hints of shounen-ai. I think this is what Fuyuno is afraid of.

I partially blamed on the rise of bishounen action shows like Gensomaden Saiyuki and such. GS was good it came out for the first time since the characters are not just "pretty" for the ladies but also awesome enough for male viewers(of that time). Not to mention the market for GS is pretty small as it is the first show of its genre. Today that genre had grown and we had shoujo shows that disguised as shounen like 07-Ghost for example.

Smartest reply to a thread I've seen in a while. ;)

And yet, it doesn't seem to be getting through to some posters... :)

Today we also have [Rou-Kyu-Bu!], what's your point?

And why is this a problem? You don't think people who like these genre wouldn't want more of it to replace the older ones that ended?

All you're saying is that there's new titles of this genre... So?

Whether "shounen" is a demographic or not doesn't really change the fact that there are a lot of trends and story elements that are strongly associated with the demographic, possibly to the point of it warranting its own genre. In addition, "story elements strongly associated with the shounen demographic" doesn't really roll off the the tongue the way "shounen" does.

I think it's just a matter of being nitpicky with words.

Yet another example of "shounen" shounen in Jump compared to a non-"shounen" shounen series in a magazine that doesn't focus on "shounen" shounen.

I have yet to see an example of a major "shounen" shounen magazine start running non "shounen" shounen stuff. That would be a good example of what the OP was claiming was happening. Just saying shounen series A is more "shounen" than shounen series B doesn't cut it. Shounen is a demographic and not all shounens like "shounen" shounen manga, thus there are a wide variety of shounen manga to cater to all the shounens. And this should be the norm, not the exception. If your example was valid evidence, I might as well say the the manga version of Ef started in 2005 while the manlier Toriko started in 2008, draw a line between them that doesn't exist and claim that shounen manga is in danger of becoming too macho or something like that.

Considering the older counterpart of shounen, seinen includes a lot of series that are referred to as "shoujo" by some in the west, and are still read by a predominantly male audience (K-On!'s 30% female fanbase is miraculously high), not all Japanese teenage boys are interested in macho fighting with manly man characters and it has been that way for quite a long time.