So, I was looking for something to read and trying to filter the top ranking novel by excluding josei and shoujo, but there's still a lot of novel with female lead that appears in the ranking? Is there a reason why these novel didn't have either tags? Or am i missing something? Anyway, have a great day everyone
I can only speak for Korean novels, and they don't have shoujo/josei. It's labeled just straight up, romance. I guess if you're looking for something similar they would divide the two with the following genre tags: mature/healing/child rearing/etc. They might use another tag, plot centered novel. In Korea, they are super specific and there is no large umbrella like shoujo/josei.
Hmm.. I get what you're saying, but I don't think tags can only be used for novel from a certain country. For example; the korean novel with Male lead use the tags shounen or seinen to differentiate their target audience. Uhh.. I don't mean to offend anyone, just in case, y'know i was just curious.. anyway thanks for stopping by.
Though rare, not every FML is stuck in a shoujo/josei. They can also be the leads of action adventure stories, horror, historical geo-political stories, mysteries or even cultivation novels. And all of these with little to no romance. In the strictest sense, shoujo/josei just means "written for girls/women" but having a FML doesn't automatically mean it's strictly "for females". Though I'm sure that's, unfortunately, not the case here. If you're looking specifically for a "male protagonist", you can search for that tag. Then you can avoid any female centric stories you care to.
Not every FMC is under shoujo / josei, sometimes the genre doesn't fall under that umbrella. FMC can be labeled as shounen / seinen genre too , for example K-On If you don't want FMC , you should exclude FMC in your tag too.
Nah, I'm not offended. I see in novelupdates, people can choose to tag their novels with borrowed genre tags from Japan for Korean novels. It can be used because it's common knowledge in this community. However I would disagree that shounen and seinen is used for Korean fantasy novels. In Korea, pirating novels is almost nonexistant. I stress, almost lol. Genre tags are mostly driven by the people who sell novels to the Korean consumers. In most Korean novel websites, they are tagged very specifically so that readers can easily browse through whatever niche they like. For example, ridibooks, they have four huge categories for fantasy novels: genre/story/job/atmosphere/etc. Each of these branches out to more than 10 different tags. genre: modern fantasy/game fantasy/fusion fantasy/ traditional fantasy/sport centered/historical/etc story: munchikin (drawn out, long journey power growing plot), reincarnation, raids, maturing, celebrity, survival/etcetc jobs: game system/business/magician/knights/ real soldier/ warriors/ necromancer/etc atmosphere/mood: refreshing read, feel good read, depressing, urgent, erotic, confident, quiet, etc etc. of course there is more than this. In korea, they tag the genre in this way. So, it could possibly be the reason why it's tagged so differently from japanese novels.
Ok, guys calm down.. And thanks for the tips, i know that, I have used novelupdates for quite sometimes.. . Like I said, I thought josei,shoujo,shounen, and seinen was a tags that indicates the target audience of a novel, anime or something. Anyway have a good day Hmm, I kinda get it. They use a very specific tags, and not the wider genre for their story. Hey thanks for the information,
You need to keep in mind that shoujo and josei are not really genre tags to begin with even if NU lists them as such. There is no real clear definition for tags like shoujo/josei/shounen/seinen outside of that they are written or marketed toward a specific demographic, so the actual content is typically less important than it would be for a real genre tag, since if you would take a story full of shounen tropes but market it towards young girls instead, then it would be a shoujo even if it lacks the typical shoujo tropes. So the problem is if the author or the publisher never gives a demographic for the work in the first place, trying to add one then is complicated since all you have to go with really is "do I think this story is meant for boys or girls?", and the gender of the protagonist isn't really enough to answer that. All that said I have no idea if all those novels you found lacked a demographic to begin with or if whoever added them to NU just lacked that information.
There's a troll who's been removing shoujo/josei tags from every novel that's not Japanese. The mods are pretending it's a silly war between fans and not stepping in to stop them. It's quite stupid as shoujo is literally 少女 and josei is literally 女性, which has the meaning in Chinese (and I presume Korean). There's no actual confusion about targeted demographics. You can literally go to a Chinese webnovel site and find those as actual genres/demographic markers. Someone is just proudly displaying their ignorance of languages.