With the recent announcement of Mitsudomoe getting an anime adaptation, I’ve noticed that some people here on the internet are having trouble with pegging the series and its target audience. From the looks of things, a comic about chubby adorable triplets seems like the kind of thing that would appeal to more of the Dengeki Daioh moe otaku crowd, but Mitsudomoe runs in Shounen Champion, the same magazine which runs the insanely long-lived baseball manga Dokaben.

First, before we begin, I want to point you to one of the earliest articles I wrote here at Otaku Crush, my article about the meaning of “Adult” Manga. To summarize (though I recommend you actually read it), the distinction between “adult” comics and “childish” comics in Japan has very much to do with tapping into the values of the age group and understanding their dreams and fears. With that in mind, let’s explore a side of this that I didn’t go into last time, that of the blurring of genre lines.

The most popular boys’ manga magazine in Japan is currently Shounen Jump (something that Viz is eager to point out on the cover of every issue of their English version), but if you were to look at the demographics for the magazine about half of it is actually female. How did Shounen Jump end up like this? Some time during the 1980s the editors at Shounen Jump realized that titles such as City Hunter and Saint Seiya were attracting a secondary audience of girl readers, and wanting to make more money and be more successful as any company is wont to do, they started consciously throwing bones to the female readers. Put a bishounen here and there, boost some sales. The most prominent examples here are Prince of Tennis and Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, both of which sport significant female fanbases.

Now you have series which are designed partly to appeal to otaku in a similar manner. Otaku have emerged as a group that can be marketed to in order to feed into their obsession, and while there are magazines which take full advantage of this (Comic High for instance), this doesn’t mean that the other magazines don’t want a piece of the pie. This is why you can have a title with obvious otaku appeal like Medaka Box in Shounen Jump and Mitsudomoe in Shounen Champion.

There’s a certain line that creators and editors try not to cross though. While where exactly this division is differs from person to person and company to company, one thing that can be agreed upon is that the title must still bear enough of the “shounen” manga traits to fit in with what’s around it. Mitsudomoe, having run since 2006, is clearly a title that has found its niche within the magazine, successful enough to help the magazine while still staying true to Shounen Champion’s philosophy.

Back when Mitsudomoe began it was “It’s Fun! It’s Interesting!” Currently it’s “The Open-Division Manga Magazine!” These are two statements that can definitely apply to it.