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[Reelya]

eww, got further in this episode, found another thing they fucked up. The original Komugi had an idol friend/rival who turned into an evil magical girl, and was secretly behind the monsters. but in the new version she turns into a good magical girl and her and Komugi team up to fight the monsters. That's just lame, the old way at least has comedic value.

(Also amusingly, Nichijou is classed as Shonen.)

That's because strictly speaking "shonen" means "boy" not "battle". As it, it was published in a boy's magazine. The Japanese classes all manga series by target demographic of the magazine it was in. the four core demographics are shonen, seinen, shoujo, josei. The style is irrelevant, everything is packed into one of those four boxes based on who published the manga.

For example, just take a look through the "seinen" stuff:
http://myanimelist.net/anime/genre/42
Non Non Biyori, Chobits, Golden Time, My Little Sister ..., Hanasaku Iroha, Acchi Kocchi, Non Non Biyori, Oh My Goddess

And Shonen stuff:
http://myanimelist.net/anime/genre/27
Nisekoi, Rosario to Vampire, Your Lie in April, Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, Inu x Boku SS, Love Hina

Yeah, get that: One Punch Man and Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun are both considered shonen series.

"Love Hina" is shonen (boys) whereas "Oh My Goddess" is seinen (mens), even though Love Hina has way more boobage.

[Tack]

Yeah. The amusement was aimed at Japanese as a language.

[Orange Wizard]

That's because strictly speaking "shonen" means "boy" not "battle". As it, it was published in a boy's magazine. The Japanese classes all manga series by target demographic of the magazine it was in. the four core demographics are shonen, seinen, shoujo, josei.

This always struck me as one of the weirder things. IMO it makes more sense to describe something by the content rather than the target.

[Reelya]

I think the issue comes because people confuse the general with the specific.

I was talking to a Japanese dude here in Melbourne the other day about One Punch Man and other shows, and he was completely surprised by some of the ways western anime fans use Japanese terminology. We're borrowing terms and applying them in a way that we've evolved within the English-speaking fandom, we can't turn around and go "lol Japanese" on that basis alone.

When we say "shonen" we're using a loan-word, and we know that it has a specific meaning to us, of combat-oriented anime and manga from Japan. But of course in Japanese, that word just means "boy" and has no specific connotations other than that.

When a Japanese person uses "shonen" they absolutely have to specify the context for that to be a meaningful statement. if they specify that as "shonen manga" then perhaps they understand that as referring to the entire magazine that the comics are published in.

[Tack]

That's because our language is built on specificity and Japanese is built on generality.
I'm usually pretty stringent on how I use it, but I'm also pretty openly derisive of the language.
People say:
"I've heard it's hard to learn because the sentences are backwards",
to which I usually reply:
"'I'm going to the shops' translates to 'Me-shop-go'. It's a child's language."
My friend has called me the Malal of Weebs.

However, it still means that if you want to get a Manga serialised, you have to aim at one of those demographics. You can't blanket your market.

[Reelya]

I don't think it limits it to four types. There's plenty of crossover. I can find examples of basically identical anime series out of 3 of those four categories, except Josei for the sole reason that not many things from josei magazines get anime adaptations.

Nobody is stopping girls from picking up shonen jump.

In practice it just means you buy a shonen magazine if you prefer action, a shoujo magazine if you want romance, and josei/seinen if you want the same but with more mature and complex plots.

And of course, there are speciality mangas as well as the general ones. e.g. there are many yuri magazines which feature girl-on-girl romance, all day all the time, if you want to read that stuff.

[Orange Wizard]

But that would mean publishing the same thing in multiple magazines to target multiple audiences.

...

specificity

how do you even pronounce that

[Reelya]

Spe'ci...fi'city

[Tack]

Speh-sih-fih-sih-tee _^Ninj'

Nobody is stopping girls from picking up shonen jump.

STIGMA

[Reelya]

Ok, I've thought about it, and here's the best point I can make:

The question is whether the Japanese system inherently limits the types of comics that you can get, by their separation of the market into four "buckets": two genders x two age groups (male/female x young/old). But rigid demographic boundaries also protects a concept that "there's a manga for everyone out there".

America doesn't do that at all. Comics are just "comics". But the issue is that comics evolve into a genre, which leads to stagnation, and the idea that there's a type of person who "likes comic books" like you'd say you "like sci-fi".

I don't want to read about superheroes, and I don't read shonen manga either. That pretty much excludes all US comics from my reading list. I don't care how edgy they make the superheroes, I'm not interested. "He's like Batman, but he's a drug addict. It's opened up a whole new world in comic books". Sorry, but it actually hasn't.

[Tack]

But... It is a superhero comic. At the end of the day. It's just a grimdark one.

In Japan they still have a stereotype towards manga and people who read them. But then they subdivide inefficiently after that.

[Reelya]

... the "stereotype" in Japan of the "type" people who read manga is children, adults, boys, girls, sports fans, romance fans, businessmen, science-fiction nuts, and a bunch of other groups I've omitted.

Manga sales are more mainstream than books. And manga are far more tasteful than the best-selling teen novels in Japan. Ever wonder where they get the ideas for the trashiest animes? From books, not manga.

The point was that by not having categories, the US comic market collapsed into superhero comics and almost nothing else. The concept of comics themselves became inexorably linked to a single demographic designation of young men.

Whereas the Japanese market is much more diverse. Part of that diversity is maintained by the division of shonen/shoujo and different age-group oriented publications. In Japan, girls and boys buy and read comics in roughly equal numbers. The top 10 mangas often include tasteful romantic comedies, sports, adult-oriented historical drama and the like.

Remember, One Piece is looking at an average sales of 4 million copies per volume. At it's peak it was selling 40 million copies/year. Compare to the US comic market which sells about 70 million copies of all series combined per year. You can see manga is far more popular in Japan than comics are in the USA.

[Neonivek]

That is because as a whole Super Hero Comics suck...

It is kind of a serious problem in the industry.

Gems mixed in with garbage... and even the gems sometimes turn into garbage.

[MrRoboto75]

Actually a lot of the reasons American comic books are almost wholly superheroes was due to the Comic Code back in the 50's, which heavy limited what content you could put in comics.  Superhero comics lived on as they were the easiest to get past all the censoring.  This code wasn't eased all that much until the 80's, and was totally gone around the 2000's.

Much like how some video games sparked the creation of a rating system, but in this case it was more "you can't do that".

[Orange Wizard]

Gems mixed in with garbage... and even the gems sometimes turn into garbage.

That applies to basically any entertainment though. Sturgeon's law and all that.