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♪MONSTARR~ will eat all your cookies and steal your bishies~♪ Φ_Φ

Childhood friend lost to a robot and still chased after girl.

Abusive childhood friend always wins.


Cappuccino, sort of.

Typical shoujo is the best. No surprises there~ Everything is nice, short, sweet and heart-warmingly predictable.

Oh right, we're not thinking like Japanese people are we?

Darn Westerners and their love of radical story lines and strange love interests with main characters with their ridiculously righteous and feminist main characters.

Maybe we should all just go read American comic books? (Oh wait... ewww they aren't cute enough)

Irony.

Bahahaha I love your outlook.

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It's all about delivery. I don't know, I've read my fair share of shoujos and I can't say that they all stray away from the cliches, but some are just better than others. I'm ruling that it's just all about how the mangaka presents the story.

I typically don't like mangas with too many cliches too close together, that don't have an ounce of originality.
I really didn't like Hana Yori Dango for this reason...

And, as what's already been said a couple of times, I get quite annoyed with the overly aggressive/rapist-style bishie boyfriend and totally passive/naive styled girlfriend cliche also. But, when saying that, I can think of a dozen manga that I'm still reading anyway with this plotline. I guess I'm a tad hypocritical
I'm also not a fan of the 'gender-bender' cliche, girl dresses up as guy, goes to all boys school, falls in love with room mate, you know how it goes... But I've never really enjoyed it, so it's probably just personal preference.

I suppose, at least to a certain degree, it certainly wouldn't be a Shoujo manga without a couple of cliches

Last edited by GunslngrGal92 at 7:27 am, Jan 7 2010

I dont mind some cliches. But anything that involves the following I will either refuse to read or drop:

-Lead character is molested and enjoys it but complains and makes it look like she is being raped.

-Any rape to love scenario.

-Overly aggressive male lead who never learns his lesson. Instead his aggressiveness and persistence is rewarded. This annoys me and makes me REALLY want to see the guy not get the girl. Call me unfair but for some reason though I wouldnt mind seeing a persistent and aggressive girl.

-Love rivals who have no chance and yet continuously keep showing up and causing problems. If they arent gonna help the main couple get closer I'd rather they just gtfo.

-Anything involving the lead character being weak, having no pride, a pussy, indecisive, or anything like that.

-Character who dumps the main character and suddenly later on want them back. Even worse if the main character takes them back.

Wasn't HYD the original source of all those cliches? Just like how Glass Mask is cliched, but it's so classic you have to appreciate what it did to the genre. Granted, my knowledge of older mangas is limited, but I can't think of any major shoujo manga before HYD that popularized school life romantic comedy themes like HYD did. That might actually make HYD a creative trendsetter, even though if you read HYD now, it seems terribly cliched. Weird, no?

Last edited by Odette at 10:49 pm, Jan 26 2010

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Avatar by tassyn.livejournal.com

Reading: Kingdom, Sangokushi, Historie

Yes, when it's too much it becomes insulting, my blood usually successfully boiled after reading this kind of cliches.


Ditto. There're chances the cliches still catch my interest simply because the mangaka is skillful. So yeah, it depends

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Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
The winds will blow their own freshness into you,
and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
- John Muir -

They get annoying due to repetitiveness.
There is more to shoujo manga than just romance stories.
And there is more to a real relationship than cliches.

Cliche is unavoidable. No matter how great the imagination of the author is, there are not many way to create a story about the relationship between 15-17 cute girls and cool guy (and mostly in high school).

Shoujo is not like josei or seinen where the author have more options in picking protagonist and background. Shoujo is not like shounen where the author can make huge fighting fantasy world that overpower the cliche. Shoujo authors don't have so many weapons left to cover the cliche: comedy, charaters, supernatural background...what's else?

Shoujo which the author throws away all those supports such as Honey x Honey Drops is simply cliche story and became a failure.
As long as, the author can find somethings good to support the Shoujo cliche, I still enjoy it.

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Cliches by themselves aren't bad, that just means that it's a commonly used set-up/situation. If the characters are cliche, it means that they're personalities are unoriginal. That's okay too. But if it's going to be standard stuff, it also have to have something extra that makes them stand out. While I can read a completely cliched and unoriginal story, I'm very likely to get bored of it. I don't want every story I read to feel the same, it needs some creativity to it.

For example, if I feel like I've read about the main character in half the manga I've read before, it should have a very interesting plot, and some interesting side characters. If the plot is uncreative, the characters have to feel fresh and new to me. That sort of thing. Being 100% original is hard, so I can excuse some lack of creativity, but only so much.

Therefore, the standard shoujo cliche 'nice girl meets nice boy, they like each other, they have a few blushy moments, they go out' sort of thing is dull to me.
Boring characters + boring plot = my lack of interest. I need some depth.

If it's done well, then there's nothing wrong with them. It's just that when they are constantly used over and over and without any character development and a lot of predictability, that they become annoying. You can tell what's going to happen without reading it, so reading isn't fun anymore.

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Lalala~

Nothing. I mean, sure, some of them make me go crazy and want to strangle the main character, but honestly, you can't have a shoujo mangas without SOME cliches. Besides, a bit of cliches are what make reading shoujo mangas fun!

I guess people don't like them if they are overused. It's like your reading through different shoujo mangas, and you keep seeing the same plot bunny being used again and again (eg childhood friends, gorgeous love rival, etc). But a few cliches won't hurt, will it? ^^



I agree.



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I ♥ Shoujo!

The thing with cliches is that it gets sorta boring. They can be ok if it's like three manga... but after reading like 20 with similar characters, plots, ending, it gets boring and dull.

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Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.