What makes a good female protagonist in a shounen/seinen series? Why are they less common than male protagonists? Are they harder to write?
What makes a good female protagonist in a shounen/seinen series? Why are they less common than male protagonists...
Jose Smith
Hunter Turner
Yeh you can, it's just than shounen is mainly targeted to young boys and having a male protag would be more relatable I guess. Outside of shounen/seinen there's a lot of good female portags (Miyazaki girls, Dirty pair, madoka, gun buster, die buster, Maka)
Eli Hernandez
Almost everything you listed is shounen or seinen.
Owen Smith
>Yeh you can,
didn't mean to add that, was writing a different sentence
Aiden Martinez
if you go away from the mainstream bubble
theres quite alot of female protagonist in seinen and shonen
not alot in fighting shonen specifically,but theres are some
Nicholas Cooper
>write a boy
>call it a girl
that easy
Camden Hughes
oh right my bad. Still, it just shows there's a bunch of good female MCs to pick from
Benjamin Brown
because actual women are absolutely nothing like they are in anime. They lie, manipulate your emotions over petty shit, cheat, steal, and do everything in their power to get ahead and ruin your life.
women are the root of all evil, and so it doesn't make sense for them to be the protagonists of most shounen. Women are incapable of doing the right thing for the right reasons the majority of the time.
you can of course, trick people and make a female heroine, but they are strictly fantasy. No woman like that exists in reality.
Grayson Kelly
Japanese men hardly interact with women at all. One who isn't their wife or sister. They don't understand the concept of a man being friends with a woman
Matthew Walker
Women owe me sex
Jose Jones
>Are they harder to write?
That depends. If you're a man and are trying to write a traditional female character, then yes that's going to be harder for obvious reasons. If you're writing a tomboy then you can basically get away with essentially just writing them as a male character.
Bentley Edwards
Is it gay to fuck a tomboy?
Luke Allen
why would it be gay, they are just women who like typically boy stuff. They dont wanna be men
Cameron Butler
Yeah sure but men are like that too, and if you think otherwise it's because you are one of those men
Hunter Diaz
>if you disagree with me you're the enemy I was talking about
ask me how I know you're a faggot leftist
Nicholas Miller
Ask me how I know you're a terrible person :)
Gabriel Russell
i have a male friend who is just like that(he is not gay)
Justin Harris
Because every female protagonist for a shounen/seinen series is basically just a dude with a vagina. I don't have a problem with it, but it begs the question of why the author even made them a woman in the first place. If they're not going to elaborate why this female character chooses to live a man's life, it just makes the whole thing superficial and stupid.
Lincoln Young
I like when they have an exposed navel
Nolan Fisher
I was actually gonna make a thread about this a couple weeks ago.
Female protags are harder to write in action series in general. Reason being, for an action series, a GOOD protagonist, regardless of sex, is one that drives the story forward. They have goals they actively work towards, and the story is about the obstacles that stand in the way of those goals.
However, women by nature are very passive. What motivates men and what motivates women are to very different things. Men are motivated by external goals and achievements, women on the other hand are motivated by internal changes. So a more accurate female protag is someone who has something internally she has to resolve in order to be complete. This unfortunately isn't suitable for an action story (perfectly fine for a romance or mystery) Thus, as a writer, when writing a female protag you've got three options:
You disregard this, and you write s female protag with masculine motivations and goals (thereby making the protag a girl completely pointless as it's just a dude with a vagina), a lot of stories with tomboyish feMCs go this route.
You forcibly try to fit a passive MC into the role of the protag in an action story: which always results in a Mary Sue.
Or, you pair her off with a male protag and make them both co-protagonists. You utilize the male MC to suit the traditional role of the active hero that drives the story and had external desires, while feMC can focus more on that internal conflict resolution and be allowed to be feminine and passive as she should be.
I could go more in depth with this, but that's the general gist of my thoughts. feMCs are clearly not a good fit for action stories, because those are male power fantasies made to appeal to the sensibilities of men, and women are psychologically different and motivated by different things. It's like trying to fit a cylinder in a square peg.
Mason Sullivan
this was a good girl protagonist. she was cute and autistic.
Carson Gomez
LLENN was also cute and funny
Aaron Turner
basically just stop watching shonenshit
Jonathan Jones
>instead watch yurishit
No thanks, I'll pass.
Carter Hall
>Cross Ange
So keep watching shounenshit?
Dominic Morgan
Good post. What do you think is the best female protagonist in an action focused story? What do they do better than other female protagonists of similar genres?
Jason Gray
Why are you posting Rally? What did she ever do to you?
Ryan Williams
>short hair
>underboob
>belly button
>teenage
That's what makes a good female protagonist in such a series.
Xavier Perez
I agree with this in a general sense, but I think your conclusion lacks nuance. You can write a female character with more masculine personality qualities to drive an external battle, you just need to utilize characterization effectively and explain why that character behaves in a way that is atypical for their sex and do it in an interesting way. Also, the best action series are equal parts external and internal battles, a simultaneous masculine and feminine struggle that the protagonist needs to overcome. In short, as long you're a good writer you can make the protagonist of a story whatever gender you want.
Aaron Clark
The best female protagonists are ones that are motivated by external goals and achievments, but also have internal problems to resolve and don't wholly discard their feminine nature.
Alexander Jenkins
>posts shonenshit
based retard
William Gomez
The same could be said for a male protagonist. A character that is driven entirely by external factors is boring as hell.
James Sullivan
why is navel fetishism on the rise in this board
Jaxson Evans
>good female protagonist
>kill la shit
Landon Ross
Alita immediately comes to mind as a good one, at least in the OVAs.
I also liked Rin in UBW, but she took an obvious back seat to Shirou.
I you notice though, both are very passive in their desires compared to someone like Midoriya, or any other shounen male lead. Rin also has moments of shoddy writing, where she acts based on what's necessary for the plot, rather than things that align with her goals and desires. Though there is accuracy in how whimsically she shifts from trying to win for herself, to trying to help Shirou. That's a very feminine thing to do.
It a lot harder to do than you think, especially in the fast paced shounen landscape, where things need to be established quickly and with clarity, leaving very little room for nuance, which a feMC in such a story would absoultely need. Of course all character change needs to be both internal and external, but you're foregoing the genre, and medium for which this is written for, and the limitations that proposes. When you've got 55 pages for a 1st chapter, and then quickly dwindle down to 17 pages a week, and if you've failed to hook an audience within 17 pages you're done, you don't exactly have the room to convey the slow paced nuance behind the motivations of your female protagonist right off the bat, and if you fail to clearly convey the WHY "does she try so hard" with clarity, your story leaves less of an impact on your readers.
Basically what I'm saying is, being strongly driven toward achieving an external goal isn't a natural trait for a girl in the first place, so you're gonna have to go out of your way to explain this, couple this with thrusting her into a fantasy world and all the exposition that needs, PLUS, the space you need for the action, it becomes an incredibly difficult task which thoroughly narrows the ways in which you can even write your feMC.
Anthony Morales
>entirely
Nobody ever said entirely. But an action story needs a clear external goal to set the pace of the story, and hook the audience in.
The internal character development happens along the way toward that external goal.
Adam Hall
Wrong, almost everything he posted was anime originals, not manga.
Carson Adams
the producer said it wasn't yuri
Hunter Rivera
>what makes a good female protagonist in a shounen/seinen series
just write them like guys with tits and fill in the gap with some lesbian love interest
Camden Ross
>Nobody ever said entirely
Your average isekaishit story begs to differ.
Robert Peterson
>They don't understand the concept of a man being friends with a woman
Only virgins think this is possible. There is always sexual tension between the sexes, either she wants to fuck you, or you want to fuck her, and once that sexual tension is gone, the "friendship" dies with it.
Grayson Bailey
Your average normalfag is not very keen to seeing women beaten within an inch of their life nor engaging on fighting.
Samuel Rogers
I don't understand what you're saying? Are you suggesting that isekai set the standard for "good writing"?
Luis Diaz
The average normalfag seemed to like Kimetsu a lot, and that typically put Nezuko in those situations all the time.
Juan Gonzalez
Nezuko is practically immortal though. She can heal back any damage she takes, so getting hurt isn't much of a big deal like it is for the human characters since all the damage can be undone. If it was a human girl on the other hand, there would be permanent consequences to taking damage and people would have an issue with it.
Cooper Gutierrez
I thought you were talking about storytelling in general, not writing within the context and constraints of the current manga industry. In that case, you're definitely right about that. Righting believable characters is hard and doubly so when writing manga.
Leo White
My wife Ryuko!
Logan Young
This is just entirely untrue. Ever heard of horror movies?
Evan Hughes
The simple, most basic answer is that women are weak and are thus unsuited to be the main role in an action series. Sure, it's fantasy, but at it's core the idea of women fighting is way too jarring to ever achieve mainstream popularity.
Nicholas Long
My point is that many people love consuming stories where the main character is driven entirely by external circumstances where the protagonist experiences absolutely zero doubt or any sense of self reflection.
Isaiah Garcia
that's different, they're just running away/getting captured and stuff. no different from a damsel in destress type thing. When he says "beaten within an inch of her life" he means this
Elijah Turner
Generally showing girls hurt in any way is super wrong, even if they're fighters and are asking for it/can endure just like a guy
>Sure, it's fantasy, but at it's core the idea of women fighting is way too jarring to ever achieve mainstream popularity.
what do you mean? there's tons of shounen side girls who fight and no one has an issue with it. Hell someone like revy who's an MC is beleivably strong
Isaiah Wright
In general it's still harder than a male protag, and easy to fuck up (hense all the Mary Sues in western media - though having an agenda also adds to that), but in a weekly manga it's doubly hard.
FeMCs are harder to write than MaMCs in action stories by and large, but there are ways to do it if you're clever enough and understand the needs of your story and characters, it's very much doable, but in weekly manga, you're so narrowed in what you can do, that imo, if you ACTUALLY want a feMC for a battle shounen, and not a tomboy or a Mary Sue, then your best bet is to pair her with a boy who plays the more traditional shounen hero role, and they play off each other. You can use him to streamline and let readers self-insert, place her as an object of admiration for readers, giving her the right amount of mystery to let you throw that nuance at them when the time comes, and slowly give her a more and more important role as the protagonist as the readers come to understand her better. That's imo the best way to do it. For an action story at least.
The easy way is to just write a tomboy or Mary sue though. Look at Promised Neverland, Kill la Kill, or etc...
Jaxon Bell
they why are you friends with him . . .
Alexander Price
>side girls
That's why I specified "main role". Sure, side girls get to fight but they're subordinate to the men.
Gabriel Morris
>but they're subordinate to the men.
how exactly? What if they're a leader/not following orders of others?
Dominic Reed
I'm sorry, user.
Carter Young
tomboy ass
Mason Baker
Tsunade is utterly useless in her series so I'm not sure what your point is.
Alexander Mitchell
>utterly useless
Good for a good fuck.
Camden Hernandez
>What makes a good female protagonist
If she's cute
Christian Cook
>What if they're a leader/not following orders of others?
Did that ever matter in Naruto? I remember the solution to problems was always through fisticuffs, politcis didn't mean a thing