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This question will seem a bit weird so I'll give a bit of background.

I like to view anime that follow a specific genre and target audience.

So naturally when a new title pops up on here, MAL, from friends or whatever I
promptly Google it to see if it's something I'd like or not.

Is there a way to infer a target audience from analyzing the content of the
first episode?

What I mean is if there are tell tale signs of each genre (ex. Supernatural,
romance, sports) and demographic(ex. Shonen, seinen, shojo, josei etc.) that
seasoned anime fans look for that allow you to know the genre and demographic
without prior research?

If there is a viewing style or technique involved I'd like to know it.


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2016-12-14T16:52:03.570
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2016-12-17T22:39:13.427
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question
anime-production
Analysis of target demographic?


There are a couple of clues that I can think of are a good indicators that
indicate the probable demographics of a anime series. The first is the use of
[furigana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana), which indicates the target
demographics is probably young, and the second is the target demographics of
the magazine that the source manga was original published in. The later
obviously only applies to series derived from printed manga, but that's still
most anime.

Furigana are those small Japanese characters that can appear over kanji
characters in order to provide their pronunciation to readers who might not be
familiar with the kanji or there use in that context. They can appear even
works targeted at adults if the kanji is very unusual or the author's intended
pronunciation is non-standard, but mainly the appear in works targeted to
children. I'm not entirely sure what age the cut off is, but a show targeted
at younger teens is probably going to use furigana while a show targeted at
older teens probably won't. Apparently this has changed over time and current
works targeted at teens are [more likely to use
furigana](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1246) than older works with the
same demographics.

In an anime show the place to look for furigana is things like the titles, eye
catches, subtitled opening or closing song lyrics and any Japanese subtitles
of foreign language dialog. The credits won't normally have furigana, being
essentially aimed at adults working in the industry.

For example despite the fact the characters in Wooser's Hand to Mouth Life all
look they were designed by Sanrio, the lack of any furigana in the show's
title screen suggests an older target demographic:

[![Wooser's Hand to Mouth Life title screen
shot](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZqmG.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZqmG.jpg)

This is supported by the fact [the show originally aired on TV in Japan at
1:35 AM in the
morning](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2012-08-24/wooser-hand-to-mouth-
life-manga-gets-tv-anime-by-supercell-members).

While anime series often try to target a broader audience than the original
source material (if any) that their based on they rarely try to target a
completely different demographic. In the case of anime series based on printed
manga it's usually not too hard to find out what magazine the manga was
originally published in. Most manga magazines have a entry on the English
Wikipedia which gives the target demographic of that magazine. Sure it
requires a bit "previous research" but it usually requires no more work than
finding the Wikipedia page for the anime and clicking one or two times.

As far as genre does I don't think it possible to come with any good rules to
determine the genre of a show by watching it. Sure it's not hard to categorize
a show after viewing 15 minutes of it, but codifying that process would be
well beyond what can be answered here and not all the useful. Genres are
basically just piles we place shows in order to provide some sort of
organization. They're sections in a video store. A show has to go on some
shelf, but not every store is going to make the same determinations of where.
And at the edges it's not always possible to say whether a given
categorization was right or wrong.

Another problem complicating determining genres is that Western genres are
often different the Japanese genres, and anime fandom has created its own
genres distinct from either. For example "slice-of-life" is an anime genre
that [doesn't have direct translation into
Japanese](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/how-to-say-slice-
of-life-anime) and differs the older Western meaning.


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2016-12-17T22:39:13.427
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answer