alt title(s): Shoujo
Anime (and manga) aimed mainly at girls. It tends to have female leads, romantic subplots and resolutions involving personal growth. This doesn't mean
Shojo is devoid of action, though. In addition to more traditional romance stories,
Shojo can include tales of
heroines who kick righteous butt — while pursuing romantic subplots and personal growth.
Alternately,
Shojo stories can focus on implied or explicit homosexual relationships between men (see
Boys Love for the genre,
Yaoi Guys for characters outside of the genre), or the romantic emphasis could also stem from
relationships between women. Some feature all of the above, and usually feature a
Relationship Ceiling.
Although series with explicit sexuality are more likely to be
Josei (aimed at young women), some
Shojo may have considerable sexual content; a subgenre called
Teens Love (by analogy to
Boys Love) features erotic romance between heterosexual couples, with much the same narrative conventions (
abusive boyfriends,
sexual coercion, and
Angst; or, alternately,
shmoopy romance,
ecstatic lovemaking, and
Happily Ever After). This stuff tends to snuggle up as close to the "Restricted" (18+) category as it can, and so isn't often licensed for translation.
Not all romance series are
shojo.
Shonen romances take the boy's perspective (
Magical Girlfriends and
Unwanted Harems are both common), and focus on the boy pursuing the girl, or trying to resolve the
Love Dodecahedron.
Shojo romances, by contrast, frequently involve the heroine finding love early in the series, then stick around to watch the couple work through trouble in their relationship.
Shojo manga is typically drawn with thinner lines than
shonen manga, with sparser backgrounds and little (if any) shading — but, contrariwise, it frequently uses screentone patterns to set the emotional tone of a scene, and frames are rarely solely rectangular and borders are often absent. Character-designs with eyes that are even larger than those usually used in manga and anime (the infamous dinner plate size) are also usually a giveaway that the work in question is shojo—especially when the characters are not children.
Shojo is technically a demographic (usually identified by the time slot or magazine a story runs in) and shows so classified can fit into any "standard" genre, up to and including martial arts and science fiction. And even this is variable; popular female leads sometimes gain a male fan following, to the degree of the infamous
older men fanbase.
Should not be confused with
bishoujo.
Note that the word is correctly romanized as "shōjo" or "shoujo".
Examples:
- Almost anything produced by the creative manga-ka team that goes by the name CLAMP. Highlights:
Series sometimes mistaken for shojo
