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Do you remember sometime ago, there were someone who shared thread about shoujosei sports manga? At first, I was excited, then I was so disappointed that most of them have het romance tag in them. Like why? I know some shouen/seinen sports series also have het romance but most of them don't have romance at all (just bromance)!
Oh yeah have you read this short romcom GL : Shoujo Manga Shujinkou x Rival-san?
It's like dream come true for me. Just when I lose interest in het romance stories (especially high school romcom shoujo), and wish the femMC end up with their rival female character, well this is it ....
I haven't seen that thread. And I haven't read much shoujo or josei sport manga because I wasn't interested in sport manga until 2022 after watching Haikyuu and reading Ao Ashi. I'm still not big on them but when I find one I'm interested enough to try, I usually fall deeply for them (recently, that's been the case with Medalist). From what I have seen, most long sport serialization in shoujo/josei magazines are older works. Nowadays, they are pretty short and sport isn't even the actual focused. Like you said, there's focused on the romance. I don't mind them but when I look for a sport story, I want them to focus on that (it's OK to have some romance, I mean, Ao Ashi for instance has that thing going on with Ashito and Hana but it's not their main priority so it's just there as an extra). One of the reasons i ended up dropping Blue Box was because it was marketed as a sport series but was focused more on the love triangle/romance and the first female lead was just not it for me. She had no substance even tho she was the star of the female basketball team.
Sorry, I'm mentioning lots of shone/seinen sports series. They are all I have read. For shoujo/josei, the ones I have read are pretty short and again, sports is second to romance so I disregarded that and read them for the rom plot. I wonder why there has been such a separation of the sport genre from shoujo and josei magazines when there was a time they used to thrive... I do know it was during the times when the Olympics was held in Japan in 1964 so sport manga were a buzz across manga 🤔
Like it or not, the female and male demographics cater readers different wants and likes. It's true that there's a different, vast and wide catalogue of stories in the female demographics with different genres and tropes but there's still things that separate them from their male counterpart. And these days, they are focused on selling romance. Well, worldwide it's the most read genre as far as I'm aware of.
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Haven't finished that short GL. Back in 2022, before I was tracking things properly, I was reading it but I ended up dropping it cuz I lost interest.
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