Re: Weekly Shonen Jump [2011] - Discussion and TOC Talk - Part 2
I am delighted to see Magico below St&rs. St&rs remains a delightful series, I really hope it can hang in there. Plenty of series have overcome poor early poll results, St&rs can too. When older series like Enigma and Magico crash that can only help.
How are so many people predicting failure before a series has even started? Seriously, unless someone here can see the future there is absolutely no way to predict how the presence of two romantic comedies will do in Jump. They have not had two in the magazine at once in god knows how long, so there is not even recent precedent to base a prediction on. It is silly for anyone here to assume they know how Jump readers will react to a manga beforehand, with absolutely no objective evidence. This happened with Medaka Box too. Everyone here predicted doom when it did not poll well, that Jump fans have no tolerance for ecchi, that this or that action series will survive. Funny thing: two years later Medaka is thriving, quite to the contrary of the conventional wisdom in this thread. The facts are that new non-action has an advantage: they have fewer series to compete against. Every new action series has to compete with ten other series for votes. Only two romantic comedies means that fans of the genre only have two choices. And romantic comedy is a hugely popular genre in Japan, always has been and always will be. Last weeks Oricon chart included eight romance/romantic comedy titles, that is almost a third of the charts. It is likely that there are plenty of Jump readers that enjoy the genre two sustain two series. It is not as though a series needs to rank in the top 5 to survive, both can have nice runs placing in the middle of the magazine. Who knows, maybe the two series will each appeal to different people, instead of splitting votes they develop their own fan bases. And it is not as though Jump does not have a history of popular romantic comedy series. They do and it is a history that dates back to the founding of the magazine. The history of rom-con in Jump is almost as august a their action manga history, with a massive list of recent, popular titles. The only fact we have available is that their have been few recent examples of the genre, Ane Doki being the only really recent series. Before we proclaim that one will fail before the other has even started maybe we should wait and see if it is, you know, any good. Jump has room for more than one example of genres other than action. Everyone who proclaimed that Sket Dance and Medaka Box would meet quick ends has proof of that.
The recent failure to produce a second sports manga is poor proof that there is not enough room for two romcons. Different genre, to begin with. Sports is failing across the board, there are fewer examples of popular sports manga while romantic comedies, of all demographics, thrive. In addition, most of the recent examples of sports manga stunk. From Meister to Light Wing to Dois Sol they were poorly written, boring, generic shounen and the argument could be made their failure had nothing to do with genre but with readers rejecting bad manga. Hoop Men is the only one that genuinely good but still failed.