So I've thought this was a problem for a while, and its always bugged me when searching for manga. Though today my curiosity has got to the point where I have to ask; why aren't there general protagonist categories?

For starters:
-Female lead
-Male lead

With these for the non standard manga patterns:
-Couple//Lead couple
-Male/Female protagonist duo
-Two male leads
-Two female leads
-('Multiple protagonists' already exists)
-('non-human main character' already exists as)

The current situation when searching for manga with gender specific protagonists is that you have to either know the type of character you want or be prepared to spend a long time looking. There are 7 pages of character-specific female/male lead categories. So if we were to take the scenario of looking for a historical manga with a female lead (a fairly common topic in 'I'm looking for...') You'd have to search through all the female lead categories. Like:- 'smart female lead+historical', 'strong female lead+historical' 'fashionable female lead+historical,' stoic, taciturn, sprightly, etc. in order to find all of them with female leads.

It seems just common sense to me to have general terms to work with, rather than random individual qualities the protagonists may or may not have.

Am I missing a search function? Is there a special reason there aren't general categories? If not can I create them? I would have created them already but felt I may be doing something wrong because it felt too obvious to not be there...Hence why I'm asking.

I believe you can add categories that haven't been previously used. You don't have to use already made ones.

Please don't add a category for just "male protagonist" or "female protagonist," because most demographics strongly favor one gender as protagonists (e.g., the vast majority of shoujo have female protagonists), so you can usually tell just from that. For the cases that are not the norm for the demographic (e.g., a shoujo with a male protagonist), we have the categories "Male Demographic with Female Lead" and "Female Demographic with Male Lead" to mark them.

You can create any category that you think will be useful, just make sure to think over its usefulness very carefully--for the general categories you're thinking of, redundancy is a big concern, so watch for that. (Besides the male lead/female lead example above, where you can usually already tell by the demographic, another example would be "two male leads": Most shounen ai and yaoi would fall under this tag. People can already tell that it'll very likely have two male leads from it being marked shounen ai/yaoi, so the tag would be redundant if added to those. So the name "Non-BL with Two Male Leads" works better.)

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@sapphiresky: Thanks, I already know I can add new categories. I was just wondering if 'female lead' and 'male lead' were off limits in some way. That's my question really XD.

@lynira: Right, so that would be why there isn't a couples tag, cause of the shoujo, it makes sense now XD. I like the 'Non-BL with Two Male Leads' it works a lot better.

Ok I see your point, I did think that creating them would both solve and create problems at the same time. I think those two do cover it fairly well, provided they're known about. I knew about them and would use the 'shoujo with male lead/FD with ML' tag but didn't really take to the 'MD with FL' tag. Mainly because I saw it as 'aimed at guys' more than 'shounen+sienen.' I'm a girl that reads mainly shounen/sienen so that just irked me a little. I don't even mind about the contents XD. Its just the wording that irritated me. I'm fine with it now I know its function. Its stupid really, I read manga under the term 'shounen' and 'sienen' everyday which are just 'boy' and 'young man' in Japanese but for some reason the term 'male demographic' bugged me lol.

There's mangas that change genres too. For instance, Nishi no yoki majo, originally that was classified shoujo, then shounen, then sienen and now its back to shounen. It's demographic isn't really fixed, its in a weird paradoxical place between shounen and shoujo that occassionally is slightly dark like sienen. That sort of manga may slip through the cracks of this system.

Maybe you need to explain it somewhere because I doubt a lot of users are aware of the categories' purpose. I certainly wasn't. Plus if it was made more official it would be more likely to get mangas added to them, though the lists are pretty good atm.

If its that system, would it be ok to put 'Male demographic with male/female duel protagonist' and the same with the female counterpart? it is ridiculously long though...maybe leaving out the male/female bit? just duel protagonist? Though that leads onto the problem of BL/GL again.

Its just that's the only thing I'd say was missing because, for example, if someone wanted a male demographic with a male lead they'd have to exclude the 'male demographic with female lead' tag from the search. However some mangas are tagged with it when the female lead is one of two main characters, a guy and a girl. This means that they'd get search results without those mangas, even though there is a male protagonist as well and the female protagonist is often featured slightly less. An example of this is Jormungand and maybe Death edge.

Anyways, so a test example according to the rule: all historical mangas with female leads

1.Shoujo+Historical-'Female Demographic with Male lead'
2.Josei+Historical-'Female Demographic with Male lead'
3.Male Demographic with Female lead+Historical
4.Shoujo ai + Historical (presuming that all shoujo ai/yuri have female leads)
5.Yuri+Historical
6.Hentai+Historical-shotacon (presuming the hentai have female leads)

So that's 6 searches rather than however many it would have been, I'm happy enough with that. Plus most people wouldn't search that many times, all depends on their preferences.

Thanks for replying to me ^^ I'll start backing that system in the future then.

Last edited by Tsubamex at 10:27 pm, Feb 7 2014

It means "shounen/seinen with female lead," but "male demographic with female lead" is a little less clunky sounding.

Demographic is determined by magazine here, making them fairly concrete. As far as I can tell, Mag Garden's Comic Blade is shounen, so Nishi no Yoki Majo is shounen.

Finding a good name for that one is kind of difficult. No, I don't think the male demographic/female demographic part is necessary; I would only include that if the category was unusual in one demographic and typical in another, in order to exclude the one where it's typical. The "male and female" bit is needed, otherwise it overlaps with the two male lead & two female lead tags that already exist. Maybe "non-romance with male & female dual protagonist"? (Still long, though. I'm definitely open to a shorter name.)

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