Where did all the shoujo shows go?This question came across me as I popped in Marmalade Boy into the DVD player last night. It should be apparent to most people that old anime are unmistakably different than new anime in all sorts of regards.Perhaps it's a fault of the genre Marmalade Boy (girls' romance) is compared to most shows I watch today (guys' harem), but there really is no such thing as 'moe' in a lot of the old shows, and even if there was, it probably wasn't by design. Likewise, other cutesy things such as the 'chibi' form, present in the 'shoujo' shows of today like Shugo Chara, don't exist.Things are simpler looking, without fancy 3D CGI effects; everything is done with simple animation trickery. There is, unsurpisingly, a retro feel to all these retro anime, from the animation to the music and more.Now I'm not one to harp on how one era of anime is better than the other, having known very little of the 199X years of anime outside of English dubs and Cardcaptor Sakura, but it seems quite apparent to me that there has been a mass shift of sorts of the types of shows presented for consumption.Quite simply, there are next-to-no real 'shoujo' shows left today.Now, I will admit that I don't go out seeking girls' shows, but perusing a list of all the fall 2007 shows there seems to be a great dearth in feminine fare.All that's really left is the ever-resilient 'magical girl' strand, which I doubt will ever die, but even this is becoming increasingly infiltrated by male-orientated shows. What seems to be missing is the Marmalade Boys of today, the girls' romance shows.Certainly there are romances today that girls could enjoy, such as KimiKiss, but most of these still have a decidedly masculine audience that they pursue most of the time, what with the full body pans and the focus on the male leads and the girls throwing themselves at them.The days of those shiny stills of guys' faces, of the bishonen and all the squee-ing involved, seem all but assimilated by other shows. They still show up, yes, but they cannot survive on their own, it seems.Whether this is a good thing or not, it's uncertain. Being a guy I am not fond of seeing 'dreamy guys' in anime but there does seem to be a growing discontent among some places about how females in anime are becoming increasing stereotyped, true or not, and girls' shows, being aimed at girls, tend to have the most well-fleshed-out female characters.There are guys' romance shows that can do a reasonable job of this at well (one could almost argue a case for Clannad) but in the end there's only so much one can do before the largely male fanbase starts complaining about how they are being cheated; for example, KimiKiss had a bit of a backlash when in the start it felt more like a girls' romance than anything, but it's lapsed pretty much back into its original, mostly-guy-orientated (although not overbearingly so) genre.The unsuprisingly male anime fanbase - if you can picture the stereotypical geek for a moment - probably does more for this situation than anything else; as many dissenting voices that we hear against moe and against cliched characters, they are still drowned out by what I imagine is a large mass of people demanding their tsunderes and their childhood friends and their ridiculous harems.One would think I am part of the mass, but being a typical "counterculture" teenager who doesn't like to agree with anything I find myself preferring a more balanced view, as I've argued time and time again. Yes, I find shy, deredere girls to be adorable, and yes, I'm a sucker for a sad story, no matter how contrived, but even I can't survive on a diet of this alone. Which is why I don't just watch the harems by themselves but also dabble in a bit of the Very Manly Shows, and the magical girl shows as well.Which is why I personally thing it's a little alarming that there are very few of the girls' romance shows out there; those that are left are usually of the magical girl variety, which is very good and all, but somehow I find myself missing a simple love story without frills, without relatively unrealistic characters. Old-school girls' romance like Marmalade Boy may be a little melodramatic at times with all the drama that has to come out of a love triangle (or, quite often, a larger polygon) but it's refreshing, with typically a balanced view from both sides of the gender divide.It's not to say that magical girl shows are inferior - rather, I've seen many of them put together an interesting premise - but sometimes it just gives off a contrived feel, the whole "let's fix everything with magic" concept. Undoubtedly the magic is just training wheels for a character to develop themselves, which is good in the end, but sometimes it's nice to watch a character learn to walk on their own.Y'know, without the three minutes of stock footage every episode, and all.It probably just boils down to my packrat nature in that I'm sad to let anything go or see anything end, and so despite the oh-so-cheesy nature of something like Marmalade Boy (which I must say, was spoiled pretty well in the OP sequence) it's still something that I wouldn't mind seeing a little bit more of these days.I like all sorts of variety...in the one genre I watch.-CCY(A closing thought...could this also be because the girls' tastes are changing as well, away from the stereotypical romance shows towards other genres I wouldn't identify as 'shoujo'?)
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