Talk:Bishōnen

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Reading through this article, I honestly find the article quite problematic and sometimes inaccurate, especially concerning content about whether shonen manga/anime tend to have side characters that are bishie or whether the entire style can be bishie.

There has to be a clearer delineation of what it means to be bishie, and the article needs to use more up-dated and modern examples than manga from the 80s that a public audience may be more familiar with, nor is it very well-representative of bishonen as an art movement and development and how it's depicted and stylized over time, since the 80s, and to a degree, 90s style, is extremely different and unrelatable to modern-day manga that is being produced and it is extremely difficult to do stylistic comparisons between modern mangaka to how manga looked like back then. For one thing, the overall style was much more clunky and there was a clearer difference between bishonen and non-bishonen in how males were drawn and depicted and individual style and flair of each mangaka was not nearly as distinct and prominent as it is now.

Take a modern manga such as Bleach that began being serialized in the early 00s that began as a strict shonen and had no elements of bishonen, though Kubo Tite over time, began to develop a style that moved closer and closer to bishonen which was true for almost every character he draws/drew, even though he initially introduced stereotype bishonen side characters such as Yumichika. It's extremely difficult to argue that very few male characters do not to one degree or another, nowadays, fall into a bishonen category, and his overall personal style is that of emphasis on slender limbs and effeminate faces. Similarly, the "new" generic baseline of how males look like in most modern produced anime tends to lean closer to bishonen than it does other styles, especially if it's a non-seinen. Case in point would be the Final Fantasy franchise and while neither manga or explicit anime in that it's computer- as opposed to "traditional" animation, men are primarily stylized according to bishonen aesthetics, even though Final Fantasy as a video game franchise tends to adopt shonen story tropes and values over shojo and has, historically speaking, appealed more and meant to appeal more to a young male (shonen) audience.

Contrast this with the bara manga scene that tries to de-emphasize how modern-day depiction of men in Japanese media has moved further and further towards effeminization, which isn't just a thing in anime/manga but Japanes youth society as a whole (see Iida Yumiko's works here, can provide sources later if needed.) This needs to be addressed somehow in this article, or it feels quite disingenuous and inaccurate given the current social context that exists in Japan, especially concerning youth culture that bishonen has as a target audience. Bishonen isn't just a thing for girls anymore, but has slowly become adopted as an overall social ideal and standard for male youth in general and one can theorize it is so as an attempt to backlash the otherwise rigid patriarchal values that are set in place. /Rant over. (I should add that the more traditional bishonen style is retained in more typical shojo works such as yaoi, perhaps a bit ironically.)

--Entr0pic08 (talk) 13:15, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I was under the impression that 'biseinen' meant a man who was attractive in a masculine way, as opposed to the bishonen, beautiful in a feminine way.

Literally, it would mean beautiful group of manga aimed at a demographic group of 18-25 (look up meaning of prefix bi and

seinen, so I'm even more confused than you are. — Ambush Commander^(Talk

) 20:53, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Aesshen (talk) 07:36, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article is skewed to a western perspective, and shows a lack of knowledge of Japanese culture relative to the rest of Asia and of Japanese/Asian aesthetics. The original writer was quite thorough with what s/he had, but lacking background for the topic beyond pop culture and sources typically available in the west.

This is an old concept, although I am not sure how long the word 'bishounen' itself has been in use.

Transliteration with a 'u' is quite proper under the Hepbern system, although in American English we tend to simplify the spellings; the 'u' letter is actually in the word in Japanese, which translates in letters to "bi sho u ne n"; however, the 'u' simply marks a long vowel, when following 'o'.

All things considered, I'm going in for an edit, here. This is my thesis topic. --sazynska 16:56, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Seconded, for what it's worth. Not only does the author use some improper definitions (a rather creative misdifining of the word which the article is about, actually, borne of American Manga pop culture more than the definition of the words in question and their meaning) but also there are some really, really bizarre editions. Ie: The Master Chief from Halo being included in the list of Bishounen. 68.96.255.13 22:05, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm thinking the original author was intending to link to

Checking with the others before I edit it myself.

Why can't he list it? Or anyone list it?

Also, why do Japanese cartoons show non-Japanese people most of the time?

Puzzled.

207.200.116.67 03:19, 22 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure most of them in reality are heterosexual is an accurate or appropriate statement capable of citation. I would say that most often the characters of shonen-ai and yaoi, the predominant areas in which bishonen appear, are in male/male relationships. Whether or not someone wants to refer to these characters' sexual identities as "homosexual" can go under dispute, but the relationships they are in are certainly not "heterosexual" in nature either.

Is this statement saying that bishonen appear most often in heterosexual situations? Can this be qualiified a little--maybe with an academic source? There has been plenty on bishonen representation.

Also, the phrase "in reality" is a little problematic, as bishonen characters exist predominantly in works of fiction.

I'm going to go ahead and rephrase the sentence, but if these questions can be accurately answered please feel free to re-alter.

As is right now, the list is way, way too long to be useful to readers of this article. If someone wants to spin it off into its own article, a List of bishonen characters or something, that might not be a bad idea. I think for the purposes of this article, the list here should be cut down to ten or so very typical and paradigmatic examples of bishonen characters that everyone can agree are bishonen. We're not keeping a scorecard of all the bishonen characters, we're trying to give readers an accurate and succint explanation of what bishonen actually is. Ford MF 13:18, 17 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Not to mention that half aren't really bishounen. They're just cute characters drawn in the anime style. I'm going to take out a lot of them. Clevomon 9:41 EST, 23 December 2006

I've moved the list to List of bishonen characters. The page is still in a very crude form, so any help there would be appreciated. Also, if anyone wants to take out the list here, feel free, but I didn't want to be presumptuous by doing it myself. Jediserra 20:29, 11 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Concidering how many women disagree on which characers are bishounen & that almost all anime & manga have them, it's best the list not exist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.160.77.255 (talk) 07:23, 1 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also it may be considered original research. That's why we're not doing it at bara (genre) for the bara character type unless there's a reference. --SykoSilver (talk) 02:02, 1 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]