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Literature & Language
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Ranma ½: A Shonen Manga About Masculine Qualities

Essay Instructions:

Is Ranma ½ a shojo manga or a shonen manga?
Explain why to those who are not knowledgeable about anime or manga. Please demonstrate in your answer your understanding of the genres and the work.

The original target audience of shonen manga is boys in upper elementary to middle school grades. However, many older boys, girls and adults enjoy shonen manga, and many shonen manga pieces now cater to those readers who are not their original target. It is by far the most popular and widely read type of manga.

Typical shonen manga stories include battles and power quests, and the main character’s growth through them, be it in sports, SF or fantasy.
Shojo manga is the counterpart of shonen in the age group, but created primarily for girls instead of boys. Shojo manga are also read by teens and adults.
There are notable differences between shonen and shojo, which we will consider later in the chapter for shojo manga. But the two genres have influenced each other so much so that the boundary between the two is now hard to define. The creator's gender has nothing to do with it. There are male creators of shojo manga, and female creators of shonen manga. The protagonist's gender nor the themes do not provide a definitive distinction between the two, even though the tendencies may exist. The most definitive way to clearly distinguish the two is to find which magazine published the work. If a shonen magazine published it, then it is a shonen manga. If a shojo magazine published it, then it is a shojo manga.
Aside from these two major categories of manga, there are seinen (adult men), josei (adult women), and kodomo (younger children).
The term seinen is established. It is originally targeted for men over 18, primarily in their 20s and 30s. Just like with shonen, seinen manga appeals to broader audience including younger (as well as older) males and females.
Josei manga may include rediisu komikku ("ladies' comics") for women in their twenties and up. This may include yangu rediisu (“young ladies”), which is for women in their twenties or thereabout.
Kodomo manga may be called jido manga or yonen manga. They are primarily for younger children than shonen and shojo, but there are some overlaps between them in the age groups they target.
Other methos of categorizing manga can follow any other categorization of common genres, sub-genres and themes anybody uses for literature or movies. There are some genres and themes specific or more prominent for manga,

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Japanese Manga Midterm Essay
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The shonen genre mainly targeted young boys and tweens, and deals with the themes of power play, dominance and fights while the genre shojo is aimed at girls and mostly deals with romantic themes, relationship and feelings. The main character in “Ranma ½” is Ranma Saotome who changes from a boy to girl when he touches cold water. In the martial arts and romantic manga comedy, Ranma was training as a martial artist, but after dipping in cursed spring while in China this caused gender swapping, and his father Genma changes into a panda. The director Rumiko Takahashi uses gender flipping to show Ranma’s fear of being considered feminine. Ranma ½ was published in the Weekly Shōnen Sunday from 1986 to 1997 and Ranma struggles to forge and maintain his influence.
Gender ambiguous characters are increasingly common in anime and manga, and in the shonen manga there is emphasis on asserting or reclaiming dominance as reflected by masculine traits Even with focus on alternating gender in the series, Ranma is keen to regain his masculinity. Male readership is exposed to diverse manga genres targeted at them even as shonen now targets a wide spectrum of readers. Ranma ½ was first serialized in a shonen magazine, which is segmented by age and gender, and in this gendered medium shonen has been associated with boys’ manga unlike shojo manga (Orbaugh, 2018). However ,the gendered magazines are read by different readers beyond the primary target.
Manga is not only a boys-only medium and shojo manga emphasizes less on action a...
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