Manga is divided into genres based on audience, such as shonen for young males and shoujo for teenage girls. Seinen and josei are for adult men and women, while yuri and yaoi depict same-sex relationships. Hentai is sexually explicit manga.
Manga, a Japanese literary style similar to comics, is typically divided into genres based on its intended audience, such as young males and females and older men and women. Each of these in turn can be broken down into even more specific genres such as action and comedy. The subdivisions are not unique to the manga genres and often overlap in their intended audience.
Shonen is the term used to describe manga aimed at younger male audiences. It is usually told from the point of view of a teenage male character. Common topics found in this genre mostly include action-adventure, sports, horror, and romance. Shonen differs from many other genres of manga in its preference for violence and rugged, seductive, curvaceous female characters, as well as a reduced focus on character and plot intricacies and interactions between characters. That doesn’t necessarily mean the stories lack depth. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai X are common examples of shonen.
The manga genre intended for teenage girls is called shoujo, which means “young girl”. Rather than focusing on action or situational conflict like shonen, shoujo tends to focus more on a character’s emotional state and her relationship to others. The heroines are often portrayed as passionate and pure. Compared to other genres of manga, everything in shoujo is rendered and presented as visually beautiful, and the emphasis is on the character’s hairstyle, eyes, and clothing. Sailor Moon is one of the best known examples of the shoujo genre.
There are several genres of manga dedicated to adults as well. Seinen and josei are aimed at adult men and women, respectively, usually of college age and above. The types of stories represented within these genres are usually similar to their younger counterparts, but adopt adult themes and contain adult content not found in genres aimed at younger audiences.
Other genres of manga are more focused on sex. Shoujo-ai and shonen-ai, more commonly called yuri and yaoi, respectively, deal with same-sex relationships. Yuri portrays relationships between women and women, while yaoi depicts relationships between men and men. In Japan these manga genres can also refer to pedophilia in same-sex relationships.
Hentai is the name given to manga which is sexually hardcore and pornographic in nature. In the Japanese language hentai means something like “perversion” or “perverted”. The word hentai is rarely used to describe pornographic manga in Japan, with the term 18-kin being applied to such publications instead.
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