Top Ten Tuesday: Love Freebie! Shojo manga that are kinda ridiculous but I love anyways | #2

Today’s topic is officially ‘Love freebie’, allowing us to come up with a topic that fits, and considering I’ve been in a major shojo manga kick recently, I figured ‘Shojo manga that are kinda ridiculous but I love anyways’ would fit the bill.

Top Ten Tuesday is run by That Artsy Reader Girl!

For anyone not familiar with manga genres:

Shojo manga are typically romance manga, aimed towards teenage girls, think the equivalent of YA. They often have humor in them along with over-the-top dramatic events and quasi-unbelievable plots. But that’s the whole point, they’re meant to be entertaining, not realistic. And dammit, I think they’re cute.

So here are my favorite shojo manga that are totally batshit insane sometimes but I love them anyways, divided into categories:

Honorable Mentions

 

These two are just honorable mentions, but I’m listing them so it’ll get me to almost ten (pbtbt). The reason for both of these is that they’re technically not shojo, they just feel like shojo. O Maidens In Your Savage Season by Mari Okada is actually shonen, and Wotakoi by Fujita is josei. But whatever they are, they both have shojo-esque feels to them, so they’re making the list, even if they don’t qualify for the list. Fight me.

Read a long time ago and remember really liking

 

Both of these, I read back when I was a teenager and really liked them. The one on the left, Wanted, is a one shot, fluffy thing about sailors and pirates and first love. Absolute Boyfriend on the right is about this girl who orders a ‘love figurine’, an AI boyfriend. I remember the second one in particular being completely ridiculous but man was it funny.

Read for the first time recently

   

Recently, I got back into the kick, which is what inspired this post! My favorites of all the shojo I’ve read recently are these: Orange, Wild Ones and Kiss Him, Not Me! The first is definitely the most serious of the three and deals with some pretty heavy topics, including suicide. Wild Ones is more light hearted, following a girl living with a yakuza household, and Kiss Him, Not Me is definitely the goofiest one. It follows the girl on the cover as she tries to navigate a bunch of boys while shipping them all together instead of with herself. It’s pretty funny.

Favorites from teenagerdom

 

And out of all the shojo I’ve read, these two are my faves. I read them back when I was a teenager and I’ve reread the manga and rewatched the anime multiple times throughout the years. They’re just so wholesome. Ouran High School Host Club follows a middle to low class girl who gets accepted to a prestigious high school, and shortly after breaks a vase she could never afford, so she dresses as a boy and joins the Host Club to work off her debt. It’s cute and funny and I like it!

Fruits Basket follows a girl whose mother passes away, and instead of burdening her grandfather, she decides to live in a tent. She quickly finds out she’s camping out on the Sohma property, and when they find her, invite her to live within the household, where she accidentally discovers the family’s curse, that they transform into animals. This one I think, is my favorite out of the two. So much nostalgia, waaah.

---

And that’s it! I got up to nine this time. Maybe next week I’ll actually make ten? Who knows! Happy reading!