少女shojo
Quick definition:Shojo is manga and anime aimed mainly at teenage girls, often focusing on emotions, relationships and personal growth, though stories can include fantasy, comedy, mystery and adventure.
Meaning
Shojo, also spelled shoujo, is a demographic category describing works published for girls of roughly school age. Like shonen, it names the intended audience rather than the genre, so a shojo title can be a romance, a fantasy, a school comedy or a historical drama.
The style often puts feelings at the centre. Stories explore friendship, first love, family and self-discovery, and the artwork tends to use delicate linework, expressive eyes, flowers and decorative backgrounds to show a character's mood. Panels may overlap or float freely on the page so that emotion, not action, sets the pace.
Readers of all ages and genders enjoy shojo, and the magazines that carry it, such as Ribon and Nakayoshi, have run for many decades. Nakayoshi was the home of the Sailor Moon manga.
Origin:Shojo is written with characters meaning few and woman, and the word means a girl or young woman. As a magazine category it grew in Japan during the early twentieth century, when publications for girls became popular, and the term was later carried into English-language fandom as the label for that kind of manga.
Example:Fruits Basket, about a high school girl who becomes involved with a family under a strange curse, shows the mix of romance, comedy and emotional drama that shojo often offers. Cardcaptor Sakura, about a girl collecting magical cards, shows the fantasy side of the category. Both began as manga and later became popular anime. Did you know?Many classic shojo works were created by women artists, a change from earlier decades when most girls' manga were drawn by men. This shift in the 1960s and 1970s brought new stories and visual experiments that still influence manga today.
