ec2-44-197-251-102.compute-1.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic Japanese for "boy". Used as an adjective when describing anime/manga, anime/manga intended for a male audience. Usually characterised by well-proportioned females and being mostly made up of long-drawn-out fights. Not usually characterised by plot and engaging characters, but there are honourable exceptions - HikaruNoGo, GreatTeacherOnizuka and HellSing, for example.
Some series can be very difficult to define as Shounen or Shoujo, such as XTheMovie, which is based on a very Shoujo manga but consists of lots of blood and gore. It is usually helpful to look where the original manga was published (HikaruNoGo in ShounenJump, for example) but not always. The classification is a bit arbitrary anyway, but provides a good debating point for NewsGroup readers to argue over once a month or so.
The presence of blood and gore does not necessarily indicate that the series is Shounen (although I guess it is a fairly good indicator). AngelsSanctuary? is very shoujo (in my opinion anyway), but it is also, in places, one of the most violent and bloody manga I have come across. -- Kazuhiko
A group researching preference predictors have found that people's movie preferences are mostly predictable from just [five factors].
Unsurprisingly, Shounen vs Shoujo is one of these eigenvectors. The others are:
Highbrow (eg Richard III) vs Lowbrows (eg The Beverly Hillbillies)
Classic (eg The Bridge on the River Kwai) vs Contemporary (eg Mallrats)
Action (eg Basic Instinct) vs Heartwarming (eg Heidi)
Horror (eg A Nightmare on Elm Street) vs Chick Flick (eg Jane Eyre)
which seems to reinforce the view above that the amount or action or gore is seperable from whether an anime is Shounen or not.
Hm. I can think of examples of movies from all those categories that I like, except possibly "horror". One potential problem with ToothyWiki trying to replicate the results of the study is that it can be very easy to let self-image affect one's classification of films - "I like highbrow films, therefore this film I like must be highbrow"; we'd need some sort of independent arbiter or reference. Still, here's an exercise - everyone try and submit one thing they like to each category below, or sign themselves against an existing one.. - MoonShadow