What is a Shoujo Investigation??
It’s probably about time we address the white elephant in the room - namely what the heck our blog name means. It may not be particularly important to anyone why this name exists, but still…
To break things down first, Shoujo (shōjo) means “young girl” (少女) and should be a very familiar term in manga terminology designating manga that is targeted at audiences of young girls. As accurately described on Wikipedia, this “genre” of manga “covers many subjects in a variety of narrative styles, from historical drama to science fiction, often with a focus on romantic relationships or emotions”.
Similarly, we as the admins who generally watch dramas (and read stories) of this genre, the focus of our blog would inevitably be related to such content hence the “romance-centric” direction. Of course, this doesn’t mean at all that we don’t watch any non-romance dramas, which brings us to our next point.
The “investigation” in this case stems from the topics of discussion that we usually have amongst us admins. The types of dramas we talk about usually ends up being the romance-centric ones as mentioned above. We’d discuss and also rant about overdone tropes, problematic characters or even attempt at analysing when some things work and do not.
Some ideas that we conjured up were lists of common tropes, ones that we were tired of, with examples of tropes that were used but in a likable fashion, lists of typical male leads (because there were tons of them) and rants on problematic things like Bai Zi Hua from Journey of Flower……. orz.
Thus, we started this blog in hopes to be a platform where we can share our two cents about what we hope good romance-centric dramas should be like by investigating in all that is shoujo!
(Of course with time and procrastination, many of these articles have since been left hanging, but we still do have new plans for the blog in any case!)
~ Admin JY