Gemuste: Anime/Comic Ranking By Gender (Japanese language)
Compiled by the otaku matchmaking service (!) Otakuma from a poll conducted between April and August of this year, here are the top anime series ranked by popularity by gender.
Males
1) K-On!
2) The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
3) Lucky Star
4) Gundam (all series)
5) Saki
Females
1) Gundam (all series)
2) K-On!
3) Code Geass
4) Macross Frontier
5) Evangelion / Toradora! (tie)
So what do we have here? Four out of five of the top shows watched by girls are about giant robots, while four out of five of the top shows watched by boys are about little girls! Welcome to the new world order, otaku-style...
I think that last one is Evangelion in a draw with shounen-romance series Toradora!
Which is really fucking weird.
Posted by: wah | November 06, 2009 at 11:42 AM
Also, why did Hetalia rank on the guys side and not the girl's side? Weird...
Posted by: wah | November 06, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Good catch.
This probably says as much about the success Japanese companies have been having in re-orienting robot stuff for a female audience (something that's been going on for years) as it does about the consumer demographics.
Just like Americans "only read Playboy for the articles," I suspect most female viewers "only tune into Gundam/Macross for the prettyboys."
Posted by: MattAlt | November 06, 2009 at 12:17 PM
So there's truth to the song lyric about how 'Chicks Dig Giant Robots'...
Posted by: SurfPenguin | November 07, 2009 at 05:05 AM
Actually, to be a bit pedantic, the age of the primary characters to all the series in the top five for both genders are high-school age (except Evangelion, which is more like junior high age, ironically).
The K-On girls ACT like little girls, though, granted, often to the point of being annoying. The Lucky Star cast is drawn in a cartoony, semi-SD style due to the 4-koma source material (but is often simple jokes about things like classic and mecha anime, adult games, and other otaku subjects) so the protagonists look cutesy-moe.
All Gundam series have a cast of adolescents and have since the original series. Code Geass and Macross Frontier? High school students. Same for ToraDora, though focal character Aisaka Taiga is clearly loli in appearance (but not in attitude). Saki is a moe fan-service high school tournament mahjong show, with the full range (or lack thereof depending on your view) of character types that implies.
I'm not arguing against your overall observation, just wanted to say that anime has pretty much always centered around adolescent (and younger in the kiddy shows) characters, by nature of the original intended audience. The shows that didn't were certainly much less common, even if its easy to cherry-pick them in hindsight. The focus has stayed the more or less the same, even if the general viewing audience age has gone up for otaku-centric productions.
I can't think of many shows I enjoyed in the 80's that weren't adolescent-centric, which suited me fine enough then as a growing teenager myself (and Urusei Yatsura, Project A-ko, Kimagure Orange Road, hell, even Bubblegum Crisis, Macross, and Megazone 23 were all pretty "moe" before the term was popularized). Shows like Votoms and Hokuto no Ken were the exception, not the rule in the 80's.
At least the stuff that got me first into anime in the late 70's had mostly a more mature-seeming cast (StarBlazers and BOTP), when I was still a kid, heh.
Posted by: microbry | November 07, 2009 at 04:49 PM
The age of the protagonists isn't the surprise -- the content is. Back in the day, I cannot imagine boys near-exclusively tuning into shows about girls, little or otherwise. I don't want to get on a maudlin Okada-esque kick about how much more variation there was back in the "golden age," but times have definitely changed.
Posted by: MattAlt | November 10, 2009 at 10:43 PM
Indeed, and as I said I agree with the overall observation. I was just quibbling over the "little girls" remark--which is otherwise true enough in more general terms, if not precisely these specific shows.
As a casual moe-convert and from what I've witnessed over time, I think part of the swap on the male side has to do with the lull in the early-to-mid-90's where the most entertaining series anime-wise on television in Japan were shoujo series like Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura (the latter of which really seems to set up a *lot* of moe tropes and the overall popular look--and done by Madhouse with CLAMP no less). These shows had their non-moe merits, but also created more a demand for this kind of look from the male fans that were caught up in this boom with little other interesting current anime to turn to at the time. The other factor was of course eroge.
Meanwhile, to cope with this, mecha shows have moved (particularly since Gundam Wing) more to pretty boys to make up for their slipping original core demographic.
I'd argue (though this latest season is the most wretched in a long while) that at least the overall quality of moe has gone up though. It's a lot better than the late 90's/early 00's where you could almost not count the number of shows that featured a whining gynophobic male lead surrounded by a harem of airheads who all want to jump him--stuff that makes Ah My Goddess and Love Hina look like high art by comparison. Most of the moe shows these days are still junk, but occasionally a good story accidentally slips through the cracks... but then Sturgeon's law has never held more true than when talking about anime just about any year, really.
Posted by: microbry | November 13, 2009 at 08:09 AM
Hmm. It's a very fascinating read.
After all, the mech subgenre sure has come a long way when every mech merchandise were catered for the entire male population of the globe. Well... some parts of the globe, (other than Japan) anyway.
I view that as a 'bold' experiment anime writers are trying to aim for. To test some new unfamiliar waters.
Posted by: Andy Wong | December 17, 2009 at 05:39 PM