I was in eighth grade in 2020. You know what else was going on in 2020? The start of lockdown. What else? The explosion of anime Twitter. This combination meant that at the fresh age of 14, I was spending hours every day looking at character analyses, plot predictions, and self-insert fanfiction for various shounen anime, stories generally aimed at young boys.
From my active time on anime Twitter, I learned that despite these shows existing to serve a young male audience, their most vocal fans on the Internet were largely female. I have a couple of theories as to why.
Firstly, women may be more inclined towards stories with meaningful interactions between thoughtful characters. An article from Science Direct suggests that female readers are drawn to narratives that emphasize well-developed characters. In sports anime in particular, audiences are introduced to a wide cast with a wide variety of characters—such is a consequence of having a story be centered around a team.
Not all sports anime has large female audiences, but one that I know has a huge one is Haikyuu!!. A shounen anime about a boys’ volleyball team’s road to nationals and their journeys beyond, Haikyuu!! had a rabid fan base in 2020 due to the excitement over Season 4 finally being adapted into animation after a long hiatus.
Such an array of characters with different personalities, goals, and abilities is one reason I have for the show’s popularity amongst female audiences. We see each character struggle to develop their skills and overcome difficulties. We also get to compare and contrast them to plenty of other players featured in the show, each with backstories and individual strengths and weaknesses—albeit some less developed than others.
I think the opposite can be said for Kuroko no Basuke, a series about a high school basketball team. Right from the jump, the two main characters are already amazing basketball players with special abilities that are never explained.
As more characters join the cast, they, too, have abilities that are never explained. Why can the coach, who has never played basketball in her life, accurately assess each player’s abilities and apply them with maximum efficacy? How is a side character able to switch his perspective to see the court from an aerial view?
Kuroko no Basuke had a much less vocal female fanbase on the internet. I think it’s because the characters start as powerful in the show—no training arc, no montage, just basketball superpowers right out of the gate. That’s not to say I expected Kuroko no Basuke to be realistic. I just expected them to be human, with human emotions and relationships.
The final theory I have for why some shounen anime, sports anime in particular, are so popular among female audiences is that I don’t have much confidence that the majority of female viewers watch the shows for the sports themselves. I think they watch to see characters strive to achieve a goal with their friends by their side. This narrative can be applied perfectly to sports anime because most sports anime feature teams—players who rely on one another.
Comedian Jenny Slate, in her Netflix special Stage Fright, performed a bit about how she only enjoys watching football when she thinks of each team as a group of best friends giving each other the ball because they like being nice and sharing the toy. I don’t think she’s alone in that. I think sports anime allows female viewers to watch friendships develop in high-stakes, high-action situations.
In summary, women like seeing characters develop and interact with other developed characters. Shounen anime provides an abundance of characters, all of whom are fighting to be better. In sports anime, they fight together to achieve one goal, all for different reasons and with different ways of getting there.
That’s what makes these shows attractive to female VIEWERS AND GETS the Twitter fans excited!
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