I kind of feel sad sometimes that the shoujo genre has become so narrow. Basically all I see that has ran in the past few years is high school dramadies. Which isn’t always bad, but please, artists of today, try to take risks! And I know you can point to everyone’s current shoujo (anime) favorite Chihayafuru but even that started running in 2007, five years ago! Like before, in the 80s and 90s, we had sci-fi like Please Save My Earth and action like my current fave Banana Fish. Even the 49-ers believed in a bit of diversity (like both Keiko Takemiya and Moto Hagio wrote science fiction, for example.) Josei’s still got it going on in a few places like with Princess Jellyfish but I feel like a lot of the good stuff passed in the early 2000s (Ai Yazawa’s stuff before she had to quit, Chica Umino) and now what we get is a lot of smut and I’m just like STOP.

And sometimes I wonder what the mamas of shoujo would think of their market today. Now it’s vast and successful but ultimately kind of predictable and stagnant and that was exactly what made them want to create the genre in the first place, to make something different, to differentiate themselves from the rest of manga that at the time was basically male oriented.

We just need a little innovation again.