iknight: True, true. It certainly feels like there are a lot of girls getting into shonen genres now, just gauging off the fanbase for shows like Death Note and Naruto / Bleach / etc. But I’ve never really studied it hard.

Like you said though, I can only say so much, being a guy myself. (as hard as I try to watch otherwise XD)

cameron: Most romances I’ve seen have conclusion; they just take a long time to get there (i.e. the main couple doesn’t get together until the very end…and then they turn the lights off and go home). Not that I enjoy that much more, to be honest.

Good point as well that characters can be played as stereotypes to great effect; like fanservice, I think it’s one of those things that works well if it’s integrated coherently, but just so often seems the result of lazy planning.

Harry: Hmm, a division of gender / audience across the manga / anime divide. I wouldn’t cite “Yaoi Land” alone as a sign that there’s a lot of girl-orientated manga out there, but I understand your point.

The ‘battle’, so to speak, between manga and anime on both sides of the ocean is another issue that could use some looking into. Certainly the consumption of the two is far different, and as such can appeal to different lifestyles.

Owen: I thought there were still a few new shonens out there that were decent in terms of viewership; Death Note is highly popular (except it ended), my friends talk about D. Gray Man a lot, and Kaiji appears to be getting good ratings in Japan as well link.

But again, I’m not that well-versed in shonen, and you’re right in that a lot shows now blend genres and genders. The same goes with CLAMP - I stopped after Cardcaptor Sakura, but it does look like they are shifting styles; I checked out Tsubasa briefly and it seems a mix of action and romance.

And I agree that a lot of eroge shows are particularly high-quality, or at least entertaining to me.

Let’s look at it for a moment. What we have here is the death of contemporary shoujo by their lack of adaptations. The last “real” shoujo I remember watching was Ouran.

In other words, shoujo as we knew it barely delivered any presence in three seasons of anime this year. What gives? Well, the same could be said of shounen, surely.

Shounen as we know it is dead. Long gone and buried with the meteoric rise of Naruto, One Piece and Bleach. Any new shounen coming out is immediately dwarfed. The last time I remember seeing something close to a real shounen anime (that I haven’t personally watched myself) would be Busou Renkin.

Hardly any shows out there nowadays resemble conventional ideas of “shoujo” or “shounen”, in other words. Times are changing, and the older viewers have seen it all. They don’t want to be stuck back in the days of DBZ, as fun as it was watching Goku kick ass (and it was).

We’re seeing the death of shoujo first only because the demographic that shoujo caters to is less lucrative, one would assume, compared to shounen. Shounen has the big three, shoujo has none (but also because a long-running shoujo series that goes on for 5 years is unheard of), bar Nana, which I heard ended recently or something.

This is why I like the “post-” label, among other things, due to its usefulness in pointing out something that’s went far beyond what was traditionally possible. There is a marked shift as of late to eroge adaptations, and I’m not sure what the future will hold, but shoujo as we know it is unlikely to make such an impact on anime anytime soon. I mean, CLAMP’s an excellent barometer of it — you don’t see them doing traditional bishounen-filled girly-girl love stories anymore, do you? They move with the market, and with times. If they had stuck to what they did when they first made their debut, they would have faded from popularity a long long time ago.

For the record, I personally welcome our eroge overlords, if only they can keep up the standards that School Days ef Clannad et al have been producing. Old-school can kiss my ass.

But think of American TV, with its big crush on reality TV and modern dramas. Where are the old family sitcoms of Full House and Family Matters. Or even The Wonder Years?! All of primetime Nickelodeon is nothing like that. It’s all live-action stuff that didn’t exist in 1990.

All is not lost for girls since every anime convention out there never fails to have a “Yaoi Land” in the dealer’s room. Maybe no new anime is for girls, but there’s still plenty of manga for them. And maybe that says something about males vs. females, too. Where manga has greater potential for art and is slower-paced, while anime is big and colorful and quick and direct.

Second, I think you bring up an interesting point. I wonder though if it isn’t a factor of a shifting in genres. There was a point where you couldn’t sneeze without hitting a Fushigi Yugi or a Orange Road. Now granted, I tend not to watch most romances, primarily because anime doesn’t seem to like actual conclusions. And I want the hero and the herione to get together at the end. (Although I haven’t watched it, where would a title like Paradise Kiss fit into that argument?)

Third, it’s more that I find that taking the character out of context of the story and pointing a finger, just seems pointless. The character may well be a doormat or a cipher within the context of the story, but if there’s a reason why, and if it serves the story then it doesn’t annoy me as much. Especially if the series is trying to make a point. Notably a character like Chi in Chobits is probably the worst case, but on some level the series is trying to say that love on some level is about self-sacrifice and wanting to help the other person. But that’s just my point of view.

On your closing thought: it’s possible, I suppose, that girls’ tastes are changing, but ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (in other words: I am not a girl).