Shoujo anime has long been the demographic genre of choice for the love-addled anime fan. Unlike the shounen genre where series of big action and epic intensity are laser-focused at young male audiences, the shoujo genre – a genre aimed at young women – makes it seem like all girls just want a whirlwind romance.
While shoujo anime is often the home of many good romance anime, the shoujo genre is about shows that focus more on meaningful relationships with others and more grounded stories. Unlike josei anime – a genre aimed at adult women – the relationships in shoujo anime are often “sugar-coated” rather than displaying the stark complicated realness of actually dealing with people.
If you do like more cheerful character stories, but really aren’t in the mood for romance to be the only plot in sight, you do have some options when it comes to shoujo anime with no romance.
Now, to level-set expectations here, all shoujo anime has romance, even if it is just obscure subtext. It is actually a keystone of the demographic genre. However, not every shoujo anime had the plot centered around the relationship. In these series, the romantic feelings may be present, but the romantic relationship isn’t the focus of the plot.
Shoujo Anime Not About Romance
Arte
Arte is the sort of shoujo anime that starts off with a female main character that is very focused on her profession – In this case, creating art. Taking place in Renaissance Italy, of course becoming an artist as a female is difficult and unheard of. However, she is determined to make it come true.
However, like all shoujo anime where the female main character is focused on her work, Arte threatens to let romance take over the plot. She develops very distracting romantic feelings, but just when you think she is going to take the usual nosedive into full lovesickness, she snaps herself out of it.
It was a treat to watch a character dodge such a common trope so artfully and then return to being a story that is dripping with passion, but not romantic passion.
Natsume’s Book of Friends
It is commonly mistaken that shoujo anime means the anime will have a female main character. While female main characters are common in shoujo, the main character can be any gender. In all truth, shoujo basically means it is marketed at young women and not much else these days.
Natsume’s Book of Friends follows a boy who has always been an outcast because he can see spirits. However, he realizes that he inherited his ability as well as a book that binds many spirits to him from his grandmother.
Instead of wielding this mighty supernatural power like a shounen anime would have him do – or like his cat demon companion would like to do – Natsume just decides to kind of free the non-threatening spirits from the book as he finds them or as they ask him to.
While it has its moments of action, Natsume’s Book of Friends is more a thoughtful episodic anime about different small stories surrounding various spirits as well as the main character learning to find his place among both the spiritual world and humanity.
Yashahime – Princess Half-Demon
Yashahime is a Boruto-style sequel which follows the children of the previous generation from the original Inuyasha anime.
However, while Inuyasha was very much a shoujo anime often focused on the romantic relationship of the main characters, Yashahime is a sequel surprisingly averse to it. Just to make sure fans didn’t try to will romance into existence, it made the main trio three strong and independent women warriors with not a potential ship in sight.
Unfortunately, the plot of Yashahime is often focused on them trying to meet up with characters from the original Inuyasha series. It is very difficult to treat this series as a solid standalone when it clearly wants to be fanservice for nostalgic Inuyasha fans.
7 Seeds
7 Seeds follows a series of young people put into cryosleep and woken up 200 years later. They were put to sleep as one of a series of programs to try to preserve humanity after an extinction-level event. However, only the 7 Seeds Program seemed to survive the end of the world since they wake up to a barren, dangerously wild, and greatly changed Earth.
Unlike the typical shoujo story, 7 Seeds wedges in character stories and relationships among the overall plot of the characters trying to survive. Throughout the series, people will form romantic feelings, but also reconsider those feelings instead of getting lost in romance. Furthermore, it isn’t just about romance, 7 Seeds is also very much about different people with different ideologies about survival and how humanity should restart itself learning to work together.
Laughing Under The Clouds
Again, Laughing Under the Clouds is a shoujo anime that proves that not all shoujo needs to have female main characters. In fact, this series has three male main characters, all brothers.
Laughing Under The Clouds follows three brothers that serve as enforcers of the Shogun’s sword ban and ferrymen for these lawbreakers to a special prison in the center of Lake Biwa. However, in truth, the anime actually isn’t so much about their job.
Instead, the series becomes increasingly focused on the mysterious curse that is spreading over the city and its connection to the middle brother with the older brother knowing more than his laidback attitude lets on.
Jyu Oh Sei
Shoujo and sci-fi are not something you see mixed too often. However, Jyu Oh Sei proves that we could use a little more of it.
This series follow twin brothers who are abandoned on a planet of carnivorous plants after the murder of their parents. There, they learn of the four sects of humans that live on this planet and decide to become the rumored Jyu Oh Sei, the one who conquers the fours sects and is allowed to leave the planet.
As these things often go, there are some dark truths waiting under the surface. However, as it builds up to that, this series has a lot of great survival action and more than a few bishounen men.
Little Witch Academia
Alongside being a shoujo anime without any romance, Little Witch Academia is one of those highly approachable anime series that is whimsical and doesn’t have any of the questionable content that anime can sometimes have. It makes it a great entry to anime for younger audiences, and just a pretty fun watch overall.
Little Witch Academia follows a girl inspired to be a witch after seeing a magic performance by a witch she idolized. When she does manage to make it into a school for witches, she discovers that her idol is widely viewed as a charlatan in the community. What’s more, as a normal human, her magical capabilities are well behind her peers.
While the series starts out as a magical school life anime, it quickly builds towards a bigger, more exciting intrigue. However, what keeps people so engaged with Little Witch Academia is the high energy pace it adapts to storytelling. That doesn’t means it moves so quickly that it is hard to keep up with, but rather it moves just fast enough to add that extra layer of excitement to the action.
Sabagebu
Sabagebu is a part of the great moe mass that is Cute Girls Doing Cute Things anime, but while you may think CGDCT anime is a good sub-genre for shoujo to look into for a lack of romance plots, in truth most CGDCT anime are aimed to be more shounen. Again, the shounen and shoujo genres are more for marketing purposes, and boys tend to love moe waifus the most.
Sabagebu is one of the rare, specifically shoujo-labeled Cute Girls Doing Cute Things anime. It follows the members of the Survival Game (read: Airsoft) club.
That seems more shounen than you would expect, but this series is not trying to sell you waifus nor is it particularly focused on airsoft action. In fact, Sabagebu is actually just a really good comedy that is often about gals being chicks. Their shenanigans are more about them goofing off in unexpected and fun ways.
Children of the Whales
A lot of new anime that comes out these day doesn’t really feel like it puts a ton of effort into the world. Why create an interesting world with diverse cultures, politics, and lore when boilerplate medieval fantasy world will do, right?
However, Children of the Whales, while it actually remains rather small in scope by being set in a series of islands floating across a vast sand sea, has a unique and well-built world that will show you what good world-building in anime looks like.
The series follows a group of 500 people who have always lived on the back of an organism that floats across the sand. What resources they need, they scavenge when they pass other floating islands, but have never seen another human community. That all changes when the find a random human on an uninhabited passing island. This, as you can expect, sets off a whole series of events where they discover the world is much more vast and complicated than the small piece that they have always known.
Midnight Occult Civil Servants
Midnight Occult Civil Servants looks like it will be just another “supernatural guy fighting supernatural things” anime to add to the large pile. However, it goes a distinctly less shounen and more shoujo route by being more about talking problems out.
In Midnight Occult Civil Servants, Tokyo has a secret agency that kept its supernatural creatures in check – by fighting them. However, they had to fight them since no human could communicate with them. However, the main character possess the very useful ability to talk to the supernatural, and thus much of the series is about him solving issues through mediation.
Yona of the Dawn
In truth, most anime fans – myself included – often laud Yona of the Dawn as a great shoujo romance, but here’s the thing – it’s not actually that focused on romance. Compared with similar great shoujo anime romance, Snow White With The Red Hair, where romance kind of takes over the plot, Yona of the Dawn establishes hints at romantic feelings, but widely ignores them.
Regardless, I thought to include it because the romance does play such a small part in the actual bulk of the series. Yona of the Dawn follows the titular Yona as she was displaced from her palace by a coup led by her crush and cousin. She flees with her bodyguard and decides to unite the Dragon Warriors of legend to retake her throne.
While the anime spends plenty of time on her complicated feelings for a man that killed her father as well as the building feelings for the bodyguard that faithfully protects her, the series is very much just about searching for a specific dragon warrior, solving the problem in the area, recruiting them, and moving onto the next. It provides a nice adventure, albeit one that occasionally smacks of reverse harem.
Banana Fish
As an organized crime-centered thriller, Banana Fish is one of those series that makes you wonder – do demographic genres even really mean anything?
However, you can see what is very shoujo about Banana Fish immediately. It is a slow-burning dark sort of thriller, but it is telling its story in a way that makes it very much about the characters and their building relationship.
The plot follows a man raised in the criminal underworld investigating the titular mysterious two words that his older brother kept repeating after returning home from the war. In his search, a Japanese photographer gets pulled into his investigation, which lands the otherwise innocent civilian into a dangerous spot.
As caveat, while there is debate on the subject from some, the romance that is present in Banana Fish is a shounen-ai one.
Opera Girl
Although it is sometimes not so subtle with the yuri-baiting, like every proper yuri-bait anime, Opera Girl never actually admits any romantic feelings or pursues deeper romantic plot. Then they’d have to call it yuri, and gods forbid they alarm the pearl clutchers by doing that.
Anyway, Opera Girl takes place in a prestigious and competitive all-girls’ school for the performing arts. Instead of pursuing any romantic plots, Opera Girl is often focused on drama – professional and personal. Each girl is vying to be a star at the school, and not everyone gets to shine like they feel they should.
Requiem of the Rose King
While Shakespeare’s Richard III is probably not what you think of first when it comes to good stories to convert to shoujo drama, Requiem of the Rose King found a way to make it compelling.
Compelling, and occasionally very weird.
If you are unfamiliar with the time period in history or the classic story about it, Requiem of the Rose King follows England’s civil war for the throne between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. While each house held the throne at one point or another, Richard would go from fourth son of the Duke of York to King of England using intrigue, murder, and manipulation.
Requiem of the Rose King definitely highlights Richard’s infamous talent for cunning, but it also inject a whole lot of creative liberty into the mix. So while it definitely isn’t anything close to historically accurate, it does provide a Game of Thrones-esque intrigue and war story with some shoujo melodrama.
Hell Girl
Hell Girl is the dark outlier in the shoujo genre in that it is not a particularly happy series. Nothing is sugar-coated here and everything often ends awful for everyone involved.
Hell Girl is an episodic series in which the main character is barely a character at all. Instead, she is a being in the shape of a girl that approaches people who are being tormented after they contact her on a supernatural website. She offers them a doll that will send their tormentor to hell, but also guarantees that the person being tormented will go to hell after their life is ends.
While this is a darker horror anime, it does tell a wide array of different stories. Although, in later seasons, it does start to flesh out the mystery surrounding the main character a bit more.
Do you have more good shoujo anime that are not about romance? Let fans know in the comments section below.
