I'm kinda curious right now whether people don't actually know what Shojo is, or you guys haven't seen enough to be able to tell whether something is shojo or not? "Has girls in it" is not the definition.
The only shojo serieses I've seen had extensive melodrama in it, so that's usually my barometer (Myself; Yourself and Say 'I love you' being those two series).
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not even sure those are shojo. Everything I knew is a lie.
This is one of those cases where just reading wikipedia should help.
Wikipedia: shojo mangaWestern fans classify a wide variety of titles as shōjo, even though their Japanese creators label them differently. Anything non-offensive and featuring female characters may classify as shōjo manga; including the shōnen comedy Azumanga Daioh. Similarly, as romance has become a common element of many shōjo works, any title with romance, such as the shōnen Love Hina or the seinen Oh My Goddess! tend to get mislabeled.
This confusion also extends beyond the fan community; articles aimed at the mainstream also widely misrepresent the terms. In an introduction to anime and manga, British writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood writes: "Maison Ikkoku comes from Rumiko Takahashi, one of the best-known of all 'shôjo' writers. Imagine a very Japanese equivalent of Sweet Valley High or Melrose Place. It has Takahashi's usual and highly successful mix of teenagers and romance, with darker clouds of adolescence hovering." Takahashi is a famous shōnen manga artist, but Maison Ikkoku, one of her few seinen titles and serialised in Big Comic Spirits, is aimed at males in their 20s.
Matt Thorn, who has made a career out of studying girls' comics, attempts to clarify the matter by explaining that "shôjo manga are manga published in shôjo magazines (as defined by their publishers)".
"Say I Love You" was published in a shojo magazine. And that's the
entire criteria for
being Shojo according to the Japanese.
Myself;Yourself was a visual novel / dating sim for the Playstation 2. You could play one of two guys and date any of six girls. It was then published as a novel, serialized in a magazine aimed at male video game players.
So, one is shojo, one is not according to the specific criteria used in Japan. We can break
how one series is targeted at girls and how the other is targeted at guys, but those are secondary to how the Japanese actual define the classification system. i.e. if you wrote a series called "Demon Skullfuckers of Hades" about demons who literally kill you and fuck your skull while Iron Maiden music blasts in the background,
it would be shojo if you somehow convinced a shojo magazine to run that.