If yall aren’t aware there was a recent interview Chuck Dixon did where they were talking about comics and the guy mentioned pandering to a female audience has been one of the things that have ruined comics. Third wave feminism to be exact. Dixon talked about his girls used to read comics like Archie, Little Lulu, romance comics, etc. He then mentioned that his sisters read Green Lantern because they thought Hal Jordan was cute (I can’t judge because I had every cd and now every album of Fiona Apple downloaded because I thought she was beautiful).
Some people took that to mean “see girls read comics” when he was essentially saying that if you make comics that cater to what girls/women like you can sell to them. Manga has proved this along with countless YA novels. For whatever reason Superhero comics and Sci-Fi don’t appeal to women in large numbers but that doesn’t seem to stop the IPs from sunken costs.
Manga HAS specific manga catered to women, they're not superhero stories, often times slice of life with family or romance as a focus but not always. I actually enjoy a couple of those, they're very niche though. Jousei especially has amazing stories but barely anyone knows of a lot of them.
Instead of making stories women would enjoy let's take these super heroes and try to morph them into something women might enjoy and the original audience won't. That's what they are doing. Women are not ijnto super heroes, it just doesn't work like that.
I bought my first manga ever last spring and it was Oh My Goddess. Loved the anime but I would say the core audience would be women for that but manga sells very well because they know their audience and there will always be some crossover. There were women who read and enjoyed super hero comics but they definitely weren’t in large numbers. A good analogy would be a romance novel company changing stories to action and adventure to cater to males but then all the women stop buying them
There's always gonna be crossover. I do enjoy a lot of shoujo and josei stories but obviously like the broad appealing ones and more male centric ones also. Oh my goddess is btw categorized as Seinen, meaning for young adult men. It does have that crossover though from what I remember(it's been years since I delved into that one). Manga is just different, they don't put a black guy in it and then claim it's for the black kids.
Really? I assumed Oh My Goddess would be something appealing to women. I liked it because I can relate to being awkward when trying to talk to women at that age. Shoujo and Josie mean for women? What’s an anime or manga that has a large female audience?
I think the ones with biggest female audiences are usually the mass appeal ones but I could be wrong there. Shoujo means girl and is the equivalent to shounen(which is for boys, stuff like one piece fits in there) , josei is the equivalent to seinen, young adult female.