Women Own Shōnen: Why Girls Are Just Better At It.
- Mary Sue Ann
- Jan 17
- 8 min read
Junior Journalist -
Women who create shonen are not just “keeping up” with their male peers; they are quietly proving the genre was never meant to belong to one gaze in the first place. Series like Demon Slayer, Blue Exorcist, Fullmetal Alchemist, Gachiakuta, and Inuyasha show how a woman at the helm reshapes violence, vulnerability, and heroism into something sharper, kinder, and honestly more honest than a lot of the boys’ club staples.
Why women’s shonen hits different
When women write shonen, they tend to:
Center emotional labor as seriously as physical labor, instead of treating feelings like filler between fights.
Refuse to flatten girls into trophies, moms, or mascots, giving them interiority, agency, and actual narrative weight.
Let male characters cry, fail, nurture, and depend on others without punishing them for it.
Male‑authored shonen often defaults to the same templates: passive love interests, “team moms,” and fanservice that undercuts any attempt at depth. Female shonen creators, by contrast, are statistically more likely to critique or subvert that rigid gender framework from inside the genre, bending it without breaking its appeal.
Demon Slayer
Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer is infamous for being gore‑heavy and emotionally devastating at the same time, and that balance is not an accident. Tanjiro is allowed to be gentle, empathetic, and openly tender with both allies and enemies, with the story treating that softness as his superpower, not a weakness he has to “grow out of.”
Instead of making demons pure evil, Gotouge insists on their backstories, regrets, and the systems that failed them, forcing readers to hold compassion and accountability together. Nezuko is not just a mascot in a box; her willpower, restraint, and choices actively drive the plot, in contrast to the way many heroines in male‑led shonen are benched or controlled “for their own good.”
The manga has surpassed around 220 million copies in circulation worldwide across its 23 volumes, putting it in the same conversation as giants like Naruto while being both shorter and finished.
On the film side, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train became a historic box office event, grossing over 500 million dollars worldwide and ranking among the highest‑grossing animated films ever. Even a compilation release like To the Swordsmith Village pulled in over 10 million dollars in its U.S. opening weekend and around 59 million worldwide, proving audiences will show up just to rewatch pieces of this story on the big screen.
Blue Exorcist
Kazue Kato’s Blue Exorcist takes a premise that could have been edgy boy wish‑fulfillment, “son of Satan fights his dad”, and turns it into a long, messy exploration of shame, stigma, and chosen family. Rin is feared for what he is, not just what he can do, making discrimination and internalized self‑hatred central conflicts instead of background flavor.
Kato’s cast of women, Shiemi, Izumo, Shura, carry their own scars, boundaries, and contradictory desires without collapsing into one “girl archetype.” Compared with many male‑authored battle series where girls orbit the hero’s growth, Blue Exorcist lets multiple characters push back, walk away, and define the spiritual stakes on their own terms.
Kazue Kato’s Blue Exorcist is one of those series that quietly refuses to die, then comes back with more content than anyone expected. The anime has now expanded into multiple seasons: the original 2011 series, the 2017 Kyoto Saga, the 2024 Shimane Illuminati Saga as Season 3, and a follow‑up Beyond the Snow Saga that continued airing into 2025, with new arcs simulcast on Crunchyroll and even landing broadcast slots on Toonami’s late‑night block.
On the print side, the manga has surpassed 25 million copies in circulation worldwide, making it one of the best‑selling modern shonen titles to come out of Jump SQ and earning milestone first print runs in the millions as the anime boosted demand. The franchise’s reach includes a theatrical film, Blue Exorcist: The Movie, which grossed roughly 6 million dollars worldwide and received strong critical praise for balancing shonen spectacle with a “warm, beating heart,” mirroring the emotional through‑line that sets Kato’s work apart from edgier but emptier demon‑boy stories by her male counterparts.
Fullmetal Alchemist
Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist is one of the most celebrated shonen manga ever made, in part because of how ruthlessly it interrogates power and responsibility. The series does not just depict war; it tackles colonization, genocide, and state violence, then forces its protagonists to sit with their complicity instead of gifting them a clean redemption arc through one sacrificial gesture.
The women of FMA, Riza Hawkeye, Olivier Armstrong, Winry Rockbell, Izumi Curtis, are not palette swaps of the same “supportive girl” model; they have distinct leadership styles, moral lines, and relationships to violence. In a landscape where male‑authored shonen often limits women to healers, healers‑with‑boobs, or tragic dead moms, Arakawa builds a world where women command armies, pull triggers, refuse motherhood, or embrace it without being reduced to it.
Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist is not just beloved, it is institution‑level respected in both manga and anime spaces. The manga has sold over 80 million copies worldwide and is routinely cited in “greatest of all time” lists for its tight plotting, political depth, and character work.
Critically, it has racked up major awards, including the Shogakukan Manga Award for shonen, the Seiun Award for best science fiction comic, and jury recognition at the Japan Media Arts Festival, solidifying its status as a benchmark for the genre. The Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood anime adaptation has frequently sat at or near the number‑one spot on global ranking sites like MyAnimeList and holds extremely high scores on platforms such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, which is rare for any long‑form action series, let alone one this politically dense
Gachiakuta
Kei Urana’s Gachiakuta takes literal trash and discarded people as its core metaphor, turning its garbage‑filled world into a commentary on who society decides is expendable. Serialization in Weekly Shonen Magazine plants this series firmly in shonen territory, even as its class politics and aesthetic lean more punk and abrasive than typical boy‑hero power fantasies.
Where many male‑led shonen play with “outcasts” as an aesthetic, Urana leans into the material reality of being treated like waste, structural inequality, environmental violence, and the way marginalized bodies are policed. Character designs, especially for women, emphasize personality, power, and context over voyeuristic framing, echoing broader patterns in women‑authored shonen that resist the default male gaze.
Kei Urana’s Gachiakuta is not just turning heads on the page; it is officially leveling up as a multimedia franchise. Following the finale of its first 24‑episode anime run in late 2025, a second season has been announced, with Studio Bones returning to continue Rudo’s grimy, graffiti‑soaked journey through the Abyss.
On top of that, Gachiakuta is getting a full stage play adaptation in 2026, with performances scheduled at Tokyo’s Shinagawa Prince Hotel Stellar Ball from May 22–31 and at Kyoto’s ROHM Theatre from June 5–7, complete with a dedicated cast and director Go Ueki attached to translate its “dope and punk” worldview to live theater. In Japan, stage plays are a litmus test for which series are truly hitting, so the fact that this gritty, class‑angry shonen by a woman creator is already expanding into stage and gaming projects says everything about how hard it is resonating.
Inuyasha
Rumiko Takahashi’s Inuyasha lives at a delicious intersection of shonen and shoujo sensibilities, and that hybridity is part of why it still resonates. Kagome is not dragged into a fantasy world to be a prop; she argues, leaves, returns, and makes choices that reshape the quest, while Sango and Kikyo carry their own grief, vengeance, and romantic terms.
Where male‑authored adventure series of the same era often treated romance as either a gag or an end‑credits prize, Takahashi lets longing, jealousy, and miscommunication have as much narrative weight as demon slaying. The women in Inuyasha are allowed to be wrong, petty, furious, and powerful instead of perfectly “supportive” girlfriends orbiting a boy’s hero’s journey.
Rumiko Takahashi is not just a legend, she is capital‑L legacy, often cited as one of the wealthiest manga artists in Japan and widely described as the richest woman in the industry thanks to decades of hit series and adaptations. Her catalog is ridiculous in the best way: Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, Ranma ½, Rin‑ne, and now Mao have collectively sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide and spawned long‑running anime, movies, and endless merch, making her one of the most commercially successful comic creators on the planet.
That cultural weight has been formally recognized, too. In 2020 she received Japan’s Medal with Purple Ribbon, an honor given by the government to people who have made significant contributions to academic and artistic development. On top of that, she has been inducted into Western comics halls of fame and even awarded France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, underscoring that her influence as a woman shaping shonen and beyond is not just fan‑deep, it is state‑ and institution‑level certified.
To Your Eternity
Yoshitoki Ōima’s To Your Eternity is a shonen that begins with a shape‑shifting orb and somehow becomes one of the most intimate meditations on loss and connection in the magazine it runs in. Serialized in Weekly Shonen Magazine, it chronicles Fushi’s slow accumulation of forms, memories, and attachments, treating immortality as a curse of endless grieving rather than a convenient power‑up.
Ōima is known for emotionally heavy work like A Silent Voice, and that same commitment to disability, marginalization, and the cost of existence runs through To Your Eternity, even under the trappings of adventure and fantasy. The women Fushi meets March, Parona, Pioran, and others, are not just lessons for him; they are agents whose choices, hopes, and deaths permanently rewire his understanding of what it means to live.
Yoshitoki Ōima’s To Your Eternity is not some niche, artsy outlier; it is a full‑blown franchise that keeps getting invited back to hurt everyone’s feelings in HD. The anime is now on its third season on NHK General and streaming globally on Crunchyroll, continuing the “Present Era” arc with Fushi in a more modern setting.
On the accolades side, the manga has been nominated for the Manga Taishō and won the Daruma for Best New Series at Japan Expo in France, while the anime has pulled wins and nominations for Best Drama and Best Fantasy at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and even snagged nominations at the Venice TV Award and the Shanghai International TV Festival. The series has over 4 million copies in circulation across its volumes, solid streaming presence, and a steady award footprint, proving that Ōima’s brand of existential, grief‑soaked shonen absolutely connects with audiences well beyond the usual power‑scaling crowd.
So why does it feel better when women write shonen?
Looking across these series, a pattern emerges:
Violence is never just cool. It leaves scars, rearranges families, and exposes systems, not just power levels.
Women are people, not props. They have political stakes, messy feelings, and narrative leverage equal to the boys.
Boys are allowed to be whole. They can be caretakers, crybabies, survivors, and caretakers of each other without being mocked by the story itself.
Male creators can absolutely write nuanced women and emotionally honest stories, but the genre’s default has made female characters disposable for decades. What Gotouge, Kato, Arakawa, Urana, Takahashi, Ōima, and their peers have done is prove that shonen does not lose its hype when you write girls and feelings well; it actually levels up, because the stakes finally feel like they belong to everyone, not just the boys in the spotlight.
Women are just better at shonen than men because they are playing on “hard mode” in a genre built around male fantasies and still managing to out‑write, out‑feel, and out‑innovate the template. They are forced to be more self‑aware: they know what it means to be the target of the male gaze, to be sidelined by default, and to have your desires treated as optional, so when they step into shonen, they bring a double vision; loving the genre while seeing every crack in it.
That double vision is an advantage, not a handicap. It lets women keep everything people love about shonen (friendship, ambition, insane fight choreography) while stitching in perspectives that have been historically barred from the center: girls with agency, boys who can cry without being humiliated, violence that actually means something, and worlds where care and accountability matter as much as who throws the strongest punch. In a field where men have long been allowed to coast on the same formula, women have had to be sharper just to be taken seriously, and the work shows; when they touch shonen, the genre stops feeling like a boys’ club and starts feeling like it finally belongs to everyone.