I want to like shojo anime

I don't know why I don't like shojo anime.  I try to like it.  I really do.  I vote with my dollars and watch it on my limited subscription services.  I do so hoping that maybe if more eyeballs watch it, the production values will improve, and so will the actual anime adaptations.  And it just . . . doesn't?  The pacing is off.  It seems rushed. They try to cram too much into ever-shrinking-season-length space.  The production values are generally terrible.  Lots of stills and pans, off model characters, stilted motion, bad use of CG.  It feels made of shortcuts, and the journey is janky and not worth the effort.  The current aesthetic stomps the original art / character design into the same oblivion.  Did I mention the pacing? &

To be fair, I am only one viewer, so my sacrifice watching these shows probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement to Japanese production companies.  And also, I am not (and never have really been) the target audience for shojo.  At least not the kind that generally gets translated and ends up on our shores.  I am not (and honestly never have been) a young maiden in love.  Or an old maiden in love.  Or actually in love.  Shows made for the lustful female gaze (or maidenly crushing female gaze or "just likes to look at hot guys" gaze) are going to make my eyes glaze over.

There are exceptions to my summary of shojo anime above, but they feel like exceptions that prove the rule.

I feel somewhat aligned with Ashley McDonnell on Shojo & Tell.  We both like reading shojo manga just fine.  But there's something about the anime trying to drag and direct and trap our gaze on things we don't actually care about as much (on top of the crappy production values, bad pacing, and unappealing shortcut tropes) that makes it less enjoyable of an experience for us.

Why is this not the case with non-shojo anime that have female protagonists?  Why do I love both the Freiren anime adaptation and original manga (shonen-ish) and both Apothecary Diaries original novels and anime adaptation (seinen-ish) to name a couple recent examples?  (I should probably write essays on each.)  It's probably not fair to compare.*  In addition to having compelling worlds and stories and protagonists, these shows have BUDGETS.  They are beautifully and lavishly animated.    They have time to make us care about the characters.  They have room to tell the stories coherently and well (though editing choices to cut material are still made).  They have space to breathe and expand and enthrall and fill in the blanks between the manga panels.

I want to believe that if a shojo anime could just be given a good budget, support, and room to really tell the story beautifully (and not just whip through and spend as much time focusing on "hot" guys while stupid bells chime in the background), it could be just as good and appeal to just as wide of an audience as Frieren and Apothecary Diaries. I wish that when I hear of once-thought-impossible licensing announcements like From Far Away and Red River and the Yona reboot, I could feel excited.

Instead, I cringe.  Are they going to destroy these beautiful works by giving them the "shojo anime" nightmare makeover?  Are they going to reduce them to trope salads?  Or are they planning and budgeting to make a well-paced, gorgeously animated, Fruits Basket-remake or Banana Fish-level work of art#?  Because Red River is a fantasy historical EPIC work.  (Same for Yona.  And I don't think anyone has announced them, but Basara or even Please Save My Earth the absolute Sci Fi classic just to put that out into the universe.)  

A good adaptation of any of these works could be amazingly great.  A bad one would just be another disappointment, and the investors would say again, "See, it's not worth investing in 'shojo' anime because the audience is too small to turn a profit.  We'll just keep giving them 20 yen to make something terrible for fanservice."  But the problem is the vision of the people funding/making it and the narrow audience they are aiming at, not the stories or their original marketing categories.

I've heard that for shojo and-shojo adjacent anime, the thought process is that they are spending a little to reward the faithful fans.  So they want to make sure to give those fans exactly what they want, and they think that all fans want is hot, thin guys and chimes and tropes.  Maybe I get where they're coming from.  (See above chain where no one watches the bad thing they made, so they feel justified in continuing to not fund the things, so they keep being bad.)  And I've seen the sad fates of larger-budget adaptations that do not keep the original target audience in mind and appeal to no one and are absolutely worse than cheap, shortcut trope-heavy shojo.  I am glad they want to avoid that.  And again, I am not the target audience of the original marketing for the work.  However, I am a big fan of stories, and I love when they are told well, so I can recommend them to people who like good stories.  

The audience of people who like good stories is (hopefully) larger than the audience of faithful super fans of a(ny) particular shjojo manga.  Why not make something for that larger audience, regardless of the original target marketing demographic of the magazine/site/publisher?  I know the actual answer is budget and investors and executives, but I wish it wasn't.

If they come over here legally, you'd better believe I will watch Red River and From Far Away and Yona, no matter how bad they may be.  But I would love to reward the creators with my support not just because I'm trying to be kind to shojo anime creators who don't make as much from anime adaptations but because they are great works of art like Frieren and Apothecary Diaries and Fruits Basket.  If they are really good, I will buy the DVDs or BluRays or whatever physical media you kids do these days (please release them on physical media).  I will tell other people to watch them.  And I hope the risk of trying to make a really good shojo anime will be rewarded.  I'll do my part.   : D

Notes

&Hana Kimi (and The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter) are this year's surprise shojo (and adjacent) anime I'm trying to support due to fond opinions of the source material.  And they are both standard, compressed, cheap, made-of-the-worst-tropes adaptations.  I should not be disappointed, but I sure am.  AND I AM WATCHING TO THE (SADLY) BITTER END.

*Ascendance of a Bookwork might be a better comparison.  The adaptation (especially the first couple seasons) is clearly on a shoestring budget (like most shojo), and they are forced to condense WAY TOO MUCH CONTENT into too small of a season size.  But the online and book following are not "just shojo," and, by golly, this season has a legit company adapting it with 20+ episodes, and I am full of hope.

#Still wish they'd kept Banana Fish set in the original time and been given more time to tell more of the original story (poor Jenkins and the other adults who were decent really got short shrift).  Still bitter about how cell phones wreck so many of the things that made the original make sense.  But, by golly, they took a swing and mostly made it work, and it was coherent (if still bonkers) and looked great.