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Originally Posted by babbito2k
I consider mahou shoujo anime to be a subset of shoujo anime. It's clear that this show doesn't make any effort to connect with a young female audience. Nanoha may be more "serious," less "formulaic" etc. and more attractive to people who don't necessarily like mahou shoujo, but it's also missing stuff. I don't begrudge anyone's liking the show, but it's not the same thing.
I have no interest in "getting over" my "prejudices." Shounen or seinen anime never lack an audience, and have been absorbing and reconstructing various elements of shoujo anime for a few years now (as in the present case). But shoujo anime offers something unique and I don't want to see it disappear.
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I wasn't neccessarily refering to you by that statement (though it came across that way, sorry), I was thinking more of how folks on both sides of the fence often miss good stories due to prejudices as I describe, and I am just cautioning against dismissing a show out of hand because its first episode crosses some lines.
It's been more than just a few years... let alone when mangaka or their assistants who have worked on shoujo make the switch to shounen works. There was a lot of heavy influence on shounen manga back in the eighties as well...and probably earlier, but I'm less familiar with cases of it prior to then.
Anyway, what you say is fair enough, but then should we discount shoujo anime that absorb shounen genres? Sailor Moon absorbed a fair amount of Cutey Honey and sentai elements, and is one of the first "fight the baddies" magical girl series. Rayearth borrows from the shounen fantasy-RPG and Mecha genres heavily. Cutey Honey F was a mahou shoujo series based upon the classic formulative shounen original. Manga and anime constantly cross-pollinate ideas, it's all part of how the entire medium grows and evolves. It gets even more complex when we account for the fact that production staffs on a series can be people with experience mostly in one genre or the other. There certainly was a stir when it came out that Anno Hideaki, after Evangelion was over, had come on board to direct the shoujo anime KareKano...
Heck, even some series like Magical Emi and Creamy Mami had some fairly creepy voyeur moments inserted in them by the directors back then, and those WERE shoujo series. I mean, wtf...!?
Anyway it is true that there is a solid niche of shoujo anime (and manga) that is mahou shoujo and makes, oh, probably over 90% of the core of all series in the genre. But on the other hand, there are some mahou shoujo stories from shounen magazines that are entirely done in the shoujo style, are non-H, and often by female mangaka even...admittedly not many such manga get made into anime, but what would you call Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto for one example, then? The original manga was published in a shounen manga magazine and drawn by Kaishaku. But the anime is totally done within the confines of the shoujo-style mahou shoujo genre, as far as I can tell...in fact much of it seems a tribute to the shoujo manga/anime classic, Wata no Kunihoshi. I often see people mistake this series for a shoujo one as a result...
Then again, I also see people make similar shoujo identification errors about other non-mahou shoujo series, such as Kokoro Toshoukan, which comes from Dengeki Daioh, for one example among many, so perhaps that's not so much an argument as just a demonstration of how blurry the lines can become in general.
I'm just saying that if a show is about a magical girl, has "magical girl" in the title, and follows most of the conventions of the general genre (episode 4 practically could have been a CCS episode for the most part, for that matter), then there's no reason to say it isn't technically a mahou shoujo series due to a gender-orientation bias. If it is neccessary to differentiate it, then label it a "shounen mahou shoujo anime", or "not a shoujo series", but I think it's a slight bit incorrect to flat out say it's a "fake mahou shoujo series", that's all. I could see calling something like Komugi or Puni Puni Poemi that, though, as both really pretty much are self-conscious deliberate phonies, as it were.
Anyway, that's all just IMHO. It's a topic that interests me a lot as I like most mahou shoujo stories in general and their history in anime and manga, for either gender (hence some of my examples), and I think overall it has a positive influence in the long run on shounen stuff to adopt more of the conventions of shoujo manga and anime.
