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Yes, Marik, but are you girlier than these guys?
"There are no women in Yu-Gi-Oh! There are only extremely girly men! And I am the girliest of them all!"
"Keep telling yourself that, hon."
An array of pretty characters as eye candy isn't just for the guys. Girls get their Blue Bishonen Ghetto to ogle too in the name of fanservice. This gender-based "ghetto" is less noticeable than its female counterpart because exclusively (or near-exclusively) male casts are already common and expected in shonen, albeit not with the intentional appeal to females, and the fanservice tends to be tamer, unless there are Yaoi Guys involved. The writers sometimes leave it to their audience to retrofit the standard group of friends into the Unwanted Harem if they wish.
How to distinguish a Blue Bishonen Ghetto from a simple shonen cast: if all the main male characters, including the Plucky Comic Relief, are bishonen with easily removable or unbuttonable shirts, it's a Blue Bishonen Ghetto. However, as an increasing number of clearly shonen titles prettify their males, the line between "all males to relate to the male audience" and "all males because the female audience likes it" is becoming blurred, which is all the better for artists seeking to attract readers of both genders. A series can scream "shonen" in action and plot and still garner an intense female following for bishonen characters alone.
Some series of this flavor go the reverse harem route and have an ordinary female lead among the bishonen as an audience surrogate, although the girly keet type can be used this way too.
Sometimes these stories have their own version of Those Two Guys. One will be a 'normal' audience surrogate and thus a young (but non-threatening) girl. Another will be a more 'ideal' woman, often a clever, sexy, and mature lady who barely fits into her dress.
Despite the name, it isn't a counterpart of Pink Bishoujo Ghetto, which is about unrealistic hiring in heroic and/or villainous organizations to conform to bishoujo series standards. That being said, many of the below series do gender-reverse that trope too.
Examples:
- Pick a CLAMP series. Any CLAMP series.
- Gravitation, Gakuen Heaven, and just about any other Boys Love series.
- Taken to an extreme in Sukisho, where there was not a single woman to be found, even in the background of towns. (Those couples? They were all guys.)
- It's very easy to confuse Prince Of Tennis for a Boys Love series due to its largely male cast and mostly Yaoi Fangirl following. Actually it's a shonen manga and anime, however, it's a very fine example of the increasingly prevalent shounen manga for girls phenomenon that occurs especially in Shounen Jump series (and what a surprise, Prince of Tennis happens to be serialized in Shounen Jump).
- Fruits Basket, while having several plot-worthy female characters other than the lead in the manga, spends a disproportionate amount of its time on Yuki and Kyo. Of course, the rest of the cast is also heavily bishonen.
- The Wallflower: Each member of the unwanted harem is a liberal user of Bishie Sparkle.
- Arguably the biggest draw for Weiss Kreuz: despite its poor animation quality and plot holes large enough to drive a tank through, its four angsty, sexually ambiguous bishonen have garnered a wide fandom.
- Gundam Wing, is considered a Blue Bishonen Ghetto among its female audience, despite the fact that it is not only a shounen series, but has a deliberate 1:1 ratio of male to female main characters and more or less assigns one female to each male.
- Ouran High School Host Club plays with this, along with Haruhi's crossdressing letting girls gush over her too.
- The entire Angelique series.
- The Final Fantasy franchise have always catered to this trope on some level, though only by including one or two "token" bishonen rather than a whole harem. However, Kingdom Hearts relishes coming up with more and more bishonen to throw into the fray, the biggest example being 'Kingdom Hearts II'', in which the villains are a sprawling organization of super-bishonen with one token female on the team.
- Make that two now..
- The all-star fighting game Dissidia: Final Fantasy includes the main hero and villain out of the first ten games in the franchise. This leads to 21 out of 24 male leads. The heroes only have one girl on their side. By default, the game qualifies for this trope just for including Cecil and Kuja in the same cast.
- That's 20 out of 24. The heroes also have a midget with a Noblewomans Laugh that will make your skin crawl.
- Kyou Kara Maou, complete with Those Two Girls: the flirty curvy ex-Maou Cheri and the younger inventor, who sometimes tag along with a trio of servants who are essentially fangirls themselves.
- Also in the "shounen manga for girls" category, Get Backers dishes up plenty of Fanservice in the form of scantily clad women with impossibly huge boobs, the series still appeals to some girls who are attracted by the predominantly bishounen cast.
- Likewise Black Blood Brothers.
- Nearly every male character in Dynasty Warriors is, if not a downright Bishonen, rather good-looking, although all of the bishonens are from one of the Three Kingdoms (when they're not moonlighting due to game circumstances); in all incarnations after Dynasty Warriors 2, Wu has the highest bishonen concentration in the whole game.
- Saiyuki: The basic series premise is not 'A loose retelling of Journey to the West.' It's 'Throw
four hot guys three hot guys and their cute surrogate little brother in a small jeep and watch the fireworks.'
- And every male that shows up as well.
- Meine Liebe follows this trope with unabashed faithfulness, adding plenty of Ho Yay thrown in for good measure.
- Arguably, Masami Kurumada as the author of Saint Seiya popularized this. After all, who else would have the guts to name a man Aphrodite?
- His next big work, B't X is even more into this trope. Because as vaguely homoerotic as it was when Shun revived Hyoga by cuddling up to him, nothing surpasses the bishieness of Demon Knight Sapphire. Because really, he himself says he's really into "what's hot and what's not" and goes so far as to kiss Teppei.
- Trigun borders on this, as almost all of the major male characters are attractive bishonen, including Vash, Knives, Wolfwood, Legato, etc.
- Pretear, created entirely on the premise of coming up with a Magical Girl anime with a cast of pretty boys to fill up an Unwanted Harem. Even if a few of them are far too young to be bishonen yet, they are clearly meant to be bishonen in training and before the series started, they *were* bishonen until they were killed by the villain.
- Although Chrono Crusade has quite a bit of fanservice based around its mostly female nakama, it's not hard to notice that every single important male character is very good looking, and these characters probably have as many Shirtless Scenes as the girls have Clothing Damage scenes, if not more. Obviously, the manga-ka knew how to widen his demographic.
- While few Harvest Moon games have the option of playing a female and thus providing a list of eligible bachelors, some of the more recent ones have started slipping in greater amounts of this into the bachelor selection. Tree of Tranquility even includes a guy so feminine you can woo him with flowers. Not surprising, as one of the chief complaints of female players was that the roster of wives were significantly better looking and interesting than the grooms.
- Arguably, it gets worse in the spinoff Rune Factory and its sequels. Even the main character, who is male, can be considered cuter than one or two of the bachelorettes.
- As the page quote states, almost all the characters on Yugioh are men, and most are either feminine or American, sometimes both. The best evidence of this is the Marik's Evil Council videos, where all the villains appear in succession, and aside from Zorc and possibly
Akun Akuna Hakuna Matata Bob, ALL of them are incredibly bishonen.
- All of them? Even
Bonz Zombie Boy?
- Even
Beavis anime Milhouse Weevil?
- Axis Powers Hetalia. Hungary is the only prominent female character. The other confirmed girls (Belarus, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Seychelles, Taiwan, etc.) are either peripheral or have yet to make their comic debut. At least Belarus, Ukraine, Belgium and Liechtenstein either will or have appeared in the anime, the aforementioned Liechtenstein, Ukraine and Belarus had some strips dedicated to them and Seychelles was the star of Gakuen Hetalia, but still.
- Shonen Jump title Katekyo Hitman Reborn has Tsuna and his
unwanted harem guardians. Plus the side characters. Plus 99% of the villains. In fact, the number of times there is fanservice for guys can be counted on one hand.
- A rare Western example, and possibly unintentional on the part of its creators, Metalocalypse fits this trope. Dethklok and their manager are all attractive (even Murderface has his offbeat charm) males, the only female characters are extras or, in one case, a recurring villain, and the show is liberally peppered with Ho Yay.
- Except for a few deliberately ugly characters, every part of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure after midway through part 4 is full of very feminine male characters. Well except Part 6, which takes place in a women's prison.
- Many rock bands undoubtedly fit this trope.
- Yu Yu Hakusho might be the best here: while the central Nakama's gender ratio is almost 50/50, the focus is overwhelmingly on guys, many of whom are quite Bishounen. The big exception is Kuwabara, but damn if he doesn't make up for that with his great physique!
- The 2009 Star Trek movie has its cast invoking youth and sex appeal more than other Star Treks while keeping the cast mostly male.
- Ronin Warriors, wherein maybe two of the main characters are women, and basically every male is prettier than you or your girlfriend
- 07Ghost main cast has only males, with only a few women on the side. Not only that, but every male character who isn't a geezer is *fabulous*, and good looks are apparently required to be a bish-op. Then there's all the rampant ho-yay...
- Fushigi Yuugi has them littered everywhere. Miaka, the main character, has a personal harem of them. Yui gets Nakago.
- Hana-Kimi is about a girl disguising herself as a man so she can get into an all-boys school. Obviously, most of the cast are bishounen.
- Saiunkoku Monogatari has the heroine making friends with dozens of gorgeous, long-haired bishounen. All of them are insanely girly. If there's one thing to be said about the series, it's that it's very, very pretty.
- Not even Vision Of Escaflowne escapes this treatment. Though Van isn't super girly, Allen, on the other hand....
- Vampire Knight. While it has its female characters, the cast is predominantly made up of very pretty boys. Even the headmaster could be considered bishonen.
- Sengoku Basara is full of this, as most of the cast is a) male b) far more attractive than they were in real life and c) very very gay.
- Papuwa has only one human female character, and she's... Let's just say she is six feet tall, over muscled, and has a beard. The rest of the cast are animals and attractive men.
- Monstrous Regiment subverts the hell out of this trope with the Borogravian army. The regiment itself turns out to be more of a Pink Bishoujo Ghetto.
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