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So, I like both Shójo and Shounen. I want to subscribe to both Shounen Jump and Shójo Beat, but I only have enough money to subscribe to one magazine. I like a lot of Shounen, but I also know that Shójo Beat released Vampire Knight, one of my favorites. Before I subscribe to Shounen Jump, does Shójo Beat have anything else good?

Then I suppose there is no subscribing to Shojo Beat, then, is there? xD

You could put the subscription money towards collected volumes of SB series, but otherwise no. xd




Shounen and shoujo both have a lot of cookie-cutter stories. There are a million 'I like [Male Character] and will spend X volumes avoiding mentioning this' shoujo series, but there are also a million 'I want to be the best at [Activity], so I will have lots of battles to reach this goal' shounen stories.



I think these posts explain the problems with women in Bleach pretty well. The rest of the series you mentioned are all over the place; FMA has some great female characters, but I don't remember any of the girls in Yu-Gi-Oh! doing all that much.

And getting off of that, shounen has stuff like Bakuman. At least try to hide your sexism, jeez.



I'd agree with you on several of these, but Ouran and Sailor Moon have great female characters. Even if you don't like Usagi, it's about a group of girls that fight to protect the earth; there has to be someone in the cast that you consider a strong heroine.

actually I sorta think that jump puts out better stuff over all as well, I mean naruto has been running for well over ten years and they have death note too... In my personal collection own way more stuff from them then I do from beat. As far as female characters go, I think that the ones in boy manga are usually more intresting and sometimes stonger... girl manga hero's are sometimes flat or the stories center around romance which I don't like so well, but that is a personal preferance.... on the other hand, you are right, a lot of the stories are really simmilar. for example, how long will it be until Ash becomes a pokemon master? or take FMA and Black cat both have "red water substances"... however, a lot of the girl stories are simmilar too. Kitchen Princess and Furits Basket seem really simmilar to me (IDK if who put out Kitchen princess, i am not sure if it was beat but those stories reminded me of one another two boys....), and there are some things the same about Ouran High and Furits basket. The main charecter is a girl who get thrown into a group of boys....kyuu reminds me of a cross between shigure and hatori.

I will agree that way too many shoujo stories are basically the same thing. I burned out on shoujo several years back because of it, and I only ended up reading it again after finding several series that weren't simply boring romances where nothing happens (although most of them aren't published by Viz and don't run in SB).

I'll argue shounen having more diversity, though. You mentioned romance as an example, but I can't think of many shounen series that actually resolve the love interest subplot. The ones that do usually take a million volumes to actually deal with it (taking a leaf from generic shoujo?) and they still don't stray outside of two or three "safe" options. The closest I can think of a shounen having the romance end in complete disaster was Death Note, and there it wasn't disaster so much as establishing that Light didn't care about Misa and Misa would kill herself if anything happened to Light.

The action itself gets pretty cliché as well, though. Most shounen end up falling into several arcs where we either get the hero entering a tournament to show off their strength, or a new bad guy gets introduced and the hero has to go through training until they can get a new power-up and defeat the villain. Repeat ad nauseum until we the number of volumes is higher than the manga-ka's age.

Both genres have problems with a lack of variation in most stories. Seinen and josei seem to be better about this, but I'm pretty sure that if more of both genres came out here you'd find a bunch of tropes that get overused in them, as well.



Honestly, I stopped reading Bleach around the end of Soul Society. I know Yoruichi was a good character when I stopped, but I remember hearing that she ended up spending a chunk of at least one arc recuperating and off-screen. If this changed and she got back to being awesome, then Bleach is slightly less terrible about it's treatment of female characters.

I can't comment on Mana. I'm not sure if she was a manga-only character or if I'm just blanking right now, but I honestly don't remember her. Mai, however, is established as being good at Duel Monsters and then never wins an on-screen game. I'm completely in support of girls that are good at games, but it's hard to appreciate Mai when she never does anything to show this.
I don't generally pull clothing into this unless it's really extreme or an ongoing trend, so I'm not factoring it in here.

Misandrist, not feminist. mad
I disagree about Sailor Moon being misandrist, though. Yeah, Mamoru gets brainwashed by the bad guys, but some of the Senshi also get brainwashed and it's never used as a reason for the Senshi or Mamoru to be seen as weak and useless. There are a lot of male villains, but there are also a lot of female villains. In addition, the villains do sometimes overpower the Senshi, generally resulting in them having to find more Senshi or gain some power-up or another. Mamoru isn't as powerful as Usagi, but none of the Senshi match her either. The characters balance each other out in different ways (like Ami being a strategist to counter Usagi being an idiot); Mamoru also has a role in the group and covers that very well (even if it generally is distracting the bad guys for a while). And don't go ignoring male characters just because they're gay/bi! gonk



While I agree that I like FMA more than Ouran, I'd argue that comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges. I like both series, but they have very little in common; you aren't going to watch/read Ouran if you're in the mood for FMA (or vice versa).

I never got that vibe from Sailor Moon, personally. Usagi was the strongest of the girls from a pure power perspective, but the rest of the team made up for it in other ways. Usagi herself also viewed the rest of the Senshi as friends and allies; she didn't see the rest of the team as being "beneath her" and the series itself didn't seem to take that view of the girls either. FMA does something similar. In terms of fighting skills, Winry is completely overshadowed by characters like Hawkeye or Izumi. However, Winry is very good with mechanics and still has an important role in the story; it just doesn't involve killing the homunculi.*


* Disclaimer: I haven't finished the FMA manga. If I'm wrong and Winry actually does kill one or more of the homunculi, don't spoil it for me.