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The story
When e-book store BookLive analyzed its own catalog data to mark passing 2 million cumulative distributed titles, it found that the average character count of manga titles had roughly doubled over the past 15 years. In shōnen and seinen (boys’/young men’s) manga, words like “another world,” “reincarnation,” and “strongest” have become conspicuous, while shōjo and josei (girls’/women’s) manga shifted from love- and marriage-focused terms around 2016 to more raw, real-life words like “housewife,” “toxic (black),” and “neighborhood” by around 2019. On 5channel, reactions ranged from jokes about “villainess”-genre title clichés to comments noting that long titles have actually been around for ages.
It’s no longer unusual these days to spot manga on shelves or in apps with long titles like “The Strongest… Who Got Exiled,” but how much have titles actually grown? E-book store BookLive analyzed titles from its own catalog to mark passing 2 million cumulative distributed copies, and found that the average character count had doubled over 15 years.
The words used in titles have also shifted over the past decade. In shōnen and seinen manga, for example, terms like “another world,” “reincarnation,” and “strongest” have risen to the top, reflecting a growing tendency to convey the setting or the protagonist’s powers right in the title.
The change looks even more dramatic in shōjo and josei manga. Compared to 2016, when love-centered words like “love,” “marriage,” and “romance” dominated, by around 2019 titles were leaning toward grittier, real-life drama terms like “housewife,” “toxic (black),” and “neighborhood.”
Source: 0115765.com / Original article here
What people said
Man, there sure are a lot of reincarnation stories out there.
But if a nobody like us with no talent or skills got reincarnated, we couldn't actually do anything with it —
we'd probably just end up living out our life as a lowly nobody in the new world too.
Isn't there a manga where the guy gets reincarnated and just… stays an ordinary commoner the whole time?
People pick these up because they want catharsis — a way to vent the frustration of their own crappy, low-status lives.
No matter how much readers crave a twist on the formula because ideas are running dry, a story where the hero just stays a nobody to the end will never catch on,
because that's literally just the reader's own life.
Even I forgot the actual full title of "Yamaguchi Roppeita."
"General Affairs Department, General Affairs Section, Yamaguchi Roppeita" —
it popped up as an autocomplete suggestion while I was typing it out lolololol
Yeah, it's probably from manga adaptations of that stuff.
Mine is "Hazakura no Kisetsu ni Kimi wo Omou to Iu Koto" ("Thinking of You in the Season of Leaf-Cherry Blossoms").
"Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" (Murakami's novel).
"I Trained Insanely Hard to Defeat the Demon Who Killed My Parent, But Somehow My Sister Turned Into a Demon Too and Now She Dotes on Me Way Too Much and It's Exhausting"
That's basically what we're talking about —
typical titles for "Narou" web-novel manga (riffing on Dragon Ball and Demon Slayer).
The word "doted on" in a title is almost always aimed at a female readership.
Another world
Overwhelming strength
Broken engagement
Villainess
Exiled
Serves them right (comeuppance payoff)
Actually the strongest
Frontier lord
Slow life
The villainess genre is already running out of fresh ideas.
There's a butler, and it feels like there's always a prince, a princess, and a knight somewhere.
Guess ancient Africa or Mongolia just wouldn't cut it as a setting.
>some kind of medieval-European-ish
Apparently that's called "Naroppa" (a mashup of "Narou," the web novel site, and "Europe").
She just keeps getting her engagement broken off, huh lol
Is she about to go running to a crooked lawyer next?
In image 10, doesn't a character just flat-out say "villainess" out loud lol
Whoa, I thought the heroine kept getting her engagement broken off over and over within the same story.
Guess I'm getting old.
– "As Selfish as Love, I Won't Hurt Only You"
– "Let's Break Up, I'll Disappear From You"
– "Love Syndrome — A Study on Its Onset, Tendencies, and Countermeasures"
There are some surprisingly long song titles too, huh.
"I'm the one breaking up with you, so YOU get lost" — what a brutal title 😂
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (the Japanese release title).
And once something becomes a hit, a lot of titles show up that seem designed to be mistaken for it.
"No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!"
→ shortened to "WataMote"
→ which then got mixed up with "What Would I Even Do If I Became Popular"
Not that either one is a bad series, but still…
"Your Lie in April."
I thought "Talentless Nana" landed its title payoff beautifully.
The stories themselves are painfully thin.
On the flip side, plenty of series only match their title for the first few chapters,
and then the title stops having anything to do with the story pretty quickly lol
Re: #115
That's not even a long title at all lol
When it comes to long titles, the manga adaptation of "Chi-Fuyo" (short for a cheat-skill isekai title roughly 100 characters long) pulls off its title payoff through pure, absurd brute force lol
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Behind the lengthening of titles lies the web-novel culture epitomized by the site “Shōsetsuka ni Narō” (“Let’s Become a Novelist”). Because a story’s premise had to be conveyed within the few characters shown on a ranking list, titles that crammed in the whole synopsis became the norm — and industry insiders often note that this habit spread to ordinary bookstore shelves as those works were turned into published novels and manga adaptations. On the thread, opinions split over the blanket claim that “long title = bad work”: some pointed to examples like “Your Lie in April,” where a short title still lands a powerful payoff, while others argued length and quality have nothing to do with each other. Some also brought up Shōwa-era pop songs like “The Room, the Dress Shirt, and Me” and works of foreign literature, noting that long titles are hardly a new technique. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the underlying data comes from a single company, BookLive, and its own distributed catalog — not a comprehensive survey of the publishing industry as a whole.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Geinō/Sports News Plus) thread “Manga Titles Have Grown “Twice” as Long on Average Over 15 Years… What’s the Reason? A Clear Trend of Surging “Reincarnation” and “Lady” Words.”
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