What is the ‘shōjo’ and how does it often function in anime?
Shojo means ‘young woman’ in english, and within anime refers to series that have young women as the target audience. It is the opposite of the medium’s most popular category, shounen. As the name of the category suggests, shojo anime are designed to be appealing to young women, and many conventions have become a staple of the genre because of this. Despite many Shojo anime being quite similar to each other, the category is quite difficult to define in terms what strictly is and is not shojo, if your manga is published by a shojo magazine, then your manga is a shojo, and that’s really it, outside of that the best way to analyse shojo is to highlight its common tendencies.
Like many age categories the protagonists in shojo anime are often the same as their target audience, in other words the protagonist is a young girl, usually at some point in their time at highschool. Some of the most common traits
Easily the most common and well known genre to fall under shojo is romance. There is so much romance in shojo that some think romance and shojo are the same thing, shojo are often about the protagonist’s romantic endeavors with one or several people. The love interest is a character with a few consistent traits as well, they are often the one to make all the moves in the relationship, and have some form of issue or trauma that the protagonist can fix. The setting is often based in the real world, and is often a school or some form of educational facility. The antagonistic force in your typical shojo isn’t an actual threat to the wellbeing of the protagonist, but rather is some form of romantic rival such as an ex, or fiance.
Although the conventions I’ve highlighted do make up for the brunt of what can be found in the category of shojo, and I don’t believe it to be an unfair representation. I still don’t think it’s a sufficient definition for what shojo is and how it functions in anime. Which is why I will offer some broader appeals of the category.
Rather than being romantic, I think shojo is romanticism. Shojo is visually quite a distinct category, where both male and female characters look feminine, where the backgrounds are often abstract use of shape rather than a set piece, where the aesthetic of the anime is highly dependent on the emotional mood in the story (Jappleng n.d.) I call shojo romanticism because it is emotionally heightened and expressive, at least moreso than other categories. The mix of unique character art, shapes, and color creates what I call the shojo aesthetic, and it’s this aesthetic that brings us the question. Shojo, is a category, but it has also become its own style, one that can be applied to other categories as well. The function of shojo, is to introduce high emotion into a scene without messing with the overall tone of the scene, displaying that a character is angry in a funny scene, without turning that funny scene tense, is one of the primary applications of the aesthetic and conventions that come with shojo anime.
Jappleng. (n.d.). What is Shoujo / shojo and everything you need to know. https://www.jappleng.com/culture/articles/anime-manga/117/what-is-shoujo-shojo-genre-anime
Pop Genres 2020 