Okay okay okay, new pinned comment. There are so many (what I have to assume are) men in the comments picking fights, so let me say something in some small attempt at quelling your rage.

Did I say that the shift in romcoms to the male perspective was bad? No I did not. I noted this shift in the anime I was watching and wanted to talk about their shift in writing techniques. Theres a decent chance given my 2000s shojo upbringing that I have an implicit bias here, which I'm sorry for. But I did not intend to frame this shift as negative. It just is a thing that happened. I dont even really have any negative feelings about kaguya or Komi, so saying I "hate this" is just wrong.

Did I say that fanservice was bad? Not exactly. Fan service is fine, and I even said if you like it, I have nothing against you. It just ain't to my taste, and alsoooo I think its gross when fanservice is directed at minors, and I would like if that WASNT the case. There are plenty of fanservicey anime and even straight up ecchi that are great, EVEN WITHIN my more critical lens of it, such as Kill la Kill.

I am not attacking you? And I am not even trying to say this thing is bad. Calm down.

EDIT: To those saying I'm being negative because I referred to it as a gentrification... oops. That is my bad, fr. I thought the term was more neutral, whereas pretty much everyone in the comments tells me it's very negative. That's why the title was changed as well, sooooo oops. You're valid on that point.

Whatever you do do not watch Rent-a-girlfriend

"Remember kids there's nothing romantic about sexual coercion"
stares awkwardly at "50 Shades" still being the most sold book in the US.

The explanation I heard that made the most sense for why so much anime is focused on high schoolers is timing. In Japan, high school is the one period in life where you are both old enough to be making autonomous life choices (like going to the beach or fighting giant robots) and young enough to do activities outside of working in an office 18 hours a day 7 days a week. Thus high school becomes the most nostalgic period in a person's life, the last time they were free to be themselves.

"Guys and girls are made of the same shit. Just be normal dammit!" Describes exactly how I feel like 99% of the time as an autistic guy.

It’s interesting that you find Kaguya-Sama: Love is War to have a POV that’s tilted towards Kaguya, because I’ve always read it as being the opposite: Miyuki and Kaguya are on ALMOST equal footing, but the narrative places slightly more emphasis on Miyuki’s POV. Yes, her name is in the title, but it has the honorific “sama” attached. That means we’re seeing her name as Miyuki sees it, and, therefore, we see HER as Miyuki does too: as above him/us, as (to be slightly regressive/reductive) the goal to be obtained. We follow Miyuki on “side quests” (his various lessons with Fujiwara to get better at volleyball/singing/rap) that Kaguya is not privy to. And, yes, the audience will occasionally see things that Miyuki doesn’t see involving Kaguya, but it always seemed to me like his was the arch that the narrative gave slightly more weight to.

Fan service exhausts me. It alienates me from so much of the anime fandom that insists there's little to nothing inherently wrong with it. Thanks for being open and straightforward about your take, it's encouraging to feel seen.

Another thing to why is rom-com more boy-oriented is that girls are more okay with watching "boy stuff" than boys are okay with watching "girl stuff" (at least I do beleive through my expirience and observation).
And not just with epical entertainment. It is said that it is easier for girls to get a stereotypicaly boy profession than the other way around.
Even when I hear guys talking about "girl stuff" they enjoy, I hear them talking about it either like: "It's fire man!" or if not this hyped then in a more grounded way like: "It is truly a great show." Where as for girls, they are action hyped when talking about action shonen and talking all cute hyped when talking about cute romance shoujo.
And so I beleive that this is also a reason why there are more boy-oriented rom-coms. Because it catches more viewers than a girl-oriented one.

your point about rom-coms either being afraid of the romance aspect or embracing it and possibly losing part of their audience is a really good point

One of the reasons, IMO, why so many non-fantasy anime stories are set in school is bcause it is the easiest storytelling way to bring a group of random/different people together.
In school, you get to interact with the same people every day, while still having enough free time to pursue hobbies or socialize outside school. It doesn't matter what hobbies or ambitions characters have, they would still be in the same class.
Sure, college romance exist, but college is when you're passions and interest start separating you from other people. It's easier to make an art kid, a cheerleader and a class president part of the same social group because they're in the same class, it's much harder to justify why a professional athlete, an aspiring mangaka and a business degree student would go to the same college, have similar timetable or hang out in the same social circle. Not impossible, but much harder.
Besides, not everyone goes to college. Everybody goes to school at som point.
And it gets even harder when you take full-grown, working adults. Office romance exists, and adult romance can be done really well, but most of the time you're much more limited in your roster of characters, as people who work in the same field are likely to have similar interests and ambitions. And romance itself becomes more pragmatic - there's no time to just enjoy being in love anymore, this is the time people start thinking more seriously about the future and starting a family.

TLDR: While it's not impossible to set the romance in more adult environments, school setting makes it easiest to justify why characters with diffrent passions, backgrounds and dreams would be in the same group, and help keep the romance more light-hearted.

It's been exhausting not really seeing any high quality anime target at women for so many years. As you said those stories can't rely on flashy animation so they make it on great character writing which I love. This season there's a few good ones but up until now it's been cheep reverse harems or the occasional teenager pines after immortal older man. Finally a solid one this season with "7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!" Here's hoping it stays good. :)

Sdude: "Kaguya and Miyuki are both very dense characters"
Me: "Oh yeah, that's I relate to them so much"
Friend: "Not that kind of dense, he means actually high density as in complex"

My dense ass:
👁👄👁

Regarding Marin "flip-flopping" between being overtly sexual/flirty and then getting embarrassed, I think it's pretty realistic. When I was a teenager and hadn't experienced any kind of love or sex, I was very flirty and sexual around everyone but when someone actually flirted back or a partner made an actual move, everything would shut off and I'd be flustered as all hell. Not sure what the psychology behind it is, but at the very least, I can relate to that

I think its impossible to talk about this as gentrification steering away from "romance's roots" when urusei yatsura (written by a woman) practically invented all the shonen romance tropes back in the 1980s. It's a pretty direct parallel to Dress Up Darling since that one is also written by a woman. Trends just come and go but it is a shame that more shoujo romances aren't getting picked up to be adapted.

love is war sounds like it's literally just the prisoner's dilemma as a romcom LMAO

I mean, in the measuring scene of Dress Up Darling, the reason Marin suddenly gets shy is because Gojo accidentally touches her in a sensitive spot and she's suddenly reminded that she's nearly naked and there's a cute boy closely looking at her body and she's not as ready for that as she thought. As for other scenes that happen later, such as the love hotel photoshoot, I tend to read it as less "lets undercut this with a joke" and more "these are too teenagers who haven't quite gotten comfortable enough for the level of intimacy they're pretending to have, suddenly being reminded of how intimate the situations they are in are, which causes them to panic and retreat back into shy awkwardness.

I think this video makes so many good points, but it's worth pointing out since it causes a lot of confusion - shonen/seinen/josei/shojo are not genres, they're demographics. The genres featured in these shows would be rom coms, but their target demographics vary.

as someone who likes shojo, personally, the gentrification of romance has pushed me out of anime. It feels like young girls are losing 'their' genres to boys, girls are being pushed out of spaces that used to be designed for them, and that makes me sad. It's the same with how the magical girl genre has been getting darker and darker - the occasional dark magical girl anime is GREAT but also a little girl deserves more space to watch girls be awesome and fight and be the powerful, strong ones who save the day without having to sacrifice their femininity or being reduced to a sex object. It just makes me sad yk? and i'm all for young boys and men enjoying traditionally female orientated genres but I wish that that didn't come at the expense of them being FOR girls.

oh man... I love Ouran so much, I'm glad you spoke of it so highly. Haruhi's attitude toward gender was really my first big identification with a character who felt the way that I did about my gender. and I also think Ouran does something kinda special with the boys, by making them so completely down with being seen through this campy lens of male beauty. it kind of felt like it was evening the playing field between girls and boys to me... like, these boys are relating to beauty standards in a way that you mostly see applied to girls, while one of the central traits of our main "girl" is how ambivalent she is toward how people perceive her. the guys literally have to step in and apply their own techniques for beautification, in order for her to more eloquently pass... as a guy. as someone who has literally been in Haruhi's shoes when it comes to cluelessness over how to be anything other than a scruffy nerd, it's actually kind of comforting to see someone like Tamaki get passionate about his own styling, but also think that Haruhi is genuinely cute no matter how she's styled. the standards are different for Haruhi in his mind because, well... he just really likes her.

also, I really really agree with that little paragraph about FMA Brotherhood... tbh, I'm grateful that my first exposure to the story was through the manga. I feel like I can appreciate what all the various components of the two adaptations are doing (and not begrudge their flaws too heavily) a lot easier, because I know how the story was originally intended to go.

as for the split between male vs. female target audience in romance... I love the way you defined it a lot. like, the idea of the girl being the POV character vs. the guy being the POV character, is such a great way to qualify it. because like... if, say, the woman was the POV character, and the series had a ton of stupid sexy fanservice that still serviced her POV, then it'd still feel like a romance with a female target audience. not that a ton of those exist... but there's an argument to be made for the idea that they should. because for as much of a problem as it can be, that fanservice targeting straight men has oversaturated anime as a medium... the inverse lack of fanservice that targets a female audience becomes conspicuous once you notice it.

and my stance on fanservice is that like... it's fine, with a couple of asterisks.

as much as I liked certain parts of Dressup Darling, that part where Gojo walked in on Juju was super uncomfortable. Gojo himself didn't intend for this to happen, so I'm not feeling too icky about him as a character, but the writing is conspiring to create a fanservice scene that Juju isn't consenting to. in fact... neither character is into it. so like... ick! who is that even for?? and as a side note, just in general... it's not always one character textually displaying disrespect to another character that qualifies as fanservice being disrespectful. the writing can be disrespectful by conspiring like this, even if zero characters are behaving disrespectfully at all. and in general, it's impossible to be respectful to an underdeveloped or poorly written character, who was clearly only dropped into the plot to be a fanservice sock puppet. so a lot of harem shows that underdevelop the waifus are still in hot water with me, because these girls are just bodies at this point. their personalities only barely exist to further the primary function of their creation, which is to get looked at by a male audience.

and then there's the age thing... which I completely agree about. a lot of these characters didn't need to be in high school. and in cases like Dressup Darling... if you do the narrative situational equivalent of blurring your eyes just a bit, you can almost forget that the show said that, and pretend they're in college. it clears up a ton of stuff immediately! like, why is Marin, as a teenager, so into erotic visual novels? ostensibly, she has no experience with sex, so her laissez-faire attitude toward it as a concept is kind of weird if we actually think she's that young. this attitude in and of itself would fit more into the characterization of a 20-something.

and I feel like this is why anime has to be taken on a case by case basis with this sort of thing. in cases like Dressup Darling, it feels reasonable to just mentally age the characters up in your head, because the high school premise feels like such a check on a marketing list, rather than an integral part of the characters' lives. in stuff like Kaguya-sama, the sexuality actually does feel kinda teenagery... as in, this is how teens kind of are, whether we like it or not. and the horny parts mostly stay conceptual, rather than explicit. the one time in Kaguya-sama that we get confirmation that two characters have actually done it, it's Kashiwagi talking about something that she and her boyfriend did, long after the fact. it's not gratuitously showing us what they did on screen... it's Kashiwagi, as a friend, talking to Kaguya about an experience she's had. it's awkward, and embarrassing, but in a way where you really believe that it's a facet of the characters' lives that they're trying to deal with. it's just part of the uneven road that different people take in different ways on the way to adulthood.

but then, most anime just exist in this sort of la la land, where teens being portrayed as hyper sexual is just kinda... hand waved? the elements of sexuality are as unrealistic as the pink hair and the magic system. at that point, it's as weird as the show wants to make it. some shows just divorce themselves so heavily from reality that you're just like "questioning this is the least of my worries tbh" while others will stake their whole premise on like, an age gap romance with a teacher or something, and you're like "hang on, I'm not having fun, I think I need to leave" and that's where I typically draw the line.

but yeah, I would love for anime with sexual overtones to just, please, be about adults! the adults in the audience would feel immense relief, and actually really enjoy themselves, if that condition could just be met. and then, within that, please... for the love of god. please, please, please also sexualize men. because there's nothing wrong with being an adult who is horny on main for other happily consenting adults, but it feels uneven when women are the only subjects that see this sort of treatment. this is why I love Golden Kamuy tbh... it's one of the few shows that, in a very good natured way, can take a bunch of buff adult men with cute personalities, and give the audience a bunch of casual fanservice of them. and still maintain a strong plot with cohesive themes... the fanservice doesn't detract in the slightest. it never misses a beat. chad type way to handle fanservice. more shows should aspire to the level of comfortable sexuality that Golden Kamuy achieves.

my main qualm is, why is this unique? and also, why can't women be the subject of fanservice that still respects their character? so often, fanservice scenes will be applied like a template to female characters, with no regard to her characterization. like, she's strongly written right up until it's time for her to get walked in on while she's bathing, and then we skyrocket to unprecedented levels of "she would not fucking say that" and like... why?? it'd be so easy to just make her a normal person with her own unique relationship to her sexuality. give us fanservice that's in character! use it as a tool for characterization even!

idk, I just think that there are fine ways to do fanservice in shows that have decided that that's part of what they're about. but the poor execution, and improper application of fanservice in ill-fitting places, is what's really spitting in my cereal.

Oh also, kind of shocked you didn't mention Girl's Montly Nozaki-kun, even in passing! Definitely more comedy than romance, but firmly rooted in the shoujo genre with plenty of jokes and reference to tropes and staples of said genre. There's an anime and a longer 4koma manga. HUGELY recommend for literal lough out loud jokes.