Josei series tend to have a good amount of character development, which can be quite evident in the anime Hachimitsu to Clover (Honey and Clover), as pictured above. Not surprising in a josei anime, Honey and Clover features a male protagonist who falls in love at first sight, but the series isn't mainly focused on love. Actually, romance is an underlying theme in the anime, however, truly the series revolves around the characters as they mature throughout their university lives and learn what it means to be an adult. A lot of josei series can actually be about one's own identity and the internal conflicts that may accompany it, as so many of us struggle with in our adolescents and well into our adulthood. Such as with Sakamichi no Apollon, where the main character struggles with his own fears of loneliness, with an inability to properly express himself to his own friends. How many of us have battled that in our lifetimes? The series can be a long journey of battling many different internal conflicts that plague the character, but in the end, the hero is that much wiser and happier, even if it means breaking the mold and challenging authority. That is why I think Paradise Kiss makes such a great example of josei anime considering Caroline (as the characters refer to her) has always lived in loneliness trying to live up to her mother's expectations only to fail time and time again, so her identity is wrapped around the idea of achieving perfection without any real happiness result in it, but as she mature through the series, she soon sees what she wants to do rather than going out of her way to do what her mother wants. How many of us out there have had to go through this turmoil time and time again?

Josei is a very tricky anime genre that tends to get mistaken for other genres because of its content and choice of protagonist. A common anime that gets mistaken for shounen would be 07-Ghost or Karneval, but in fact, these anime are categorized under josei. Even the anime Loveless, known to be shounen ai, is often mistaken for shounen or just shounen ai for its action and fighting scenes, when in fact this anime is a josei anime. These anime tend to have mainly male casts which so many people mistake them for another genre, so that's where it gets tricky. Josei anime can draw in a large audience without others knowing it is a josei series. One anime that tends to be misconstrued as josei is Nana by Ai Yazawa, who also happened to write Paradise Kiss as well. While I have seen the anime and read the manga numerous times, it is quite evident that the series itself is quite mature in content with themes around drug use, sexual relationships, and learning to achieve independence. One could argue that the series is more mature than Paradise Kiss considering some of relationships and the fact that the characters are not in school, however, the fact of the matter is that Nana is a shoujo series. Why? The main reason why Nana is defined as a shoujo series is because it was published in Cookie, a magazine for shoujo manga only. Though it does possess properties of what defines a josei anime, the publication is a huge deciding factor in its genre. Just because it has the same qualities of josei anime does not make it josei. See what I mean by tricky? Another example of this would be the Japanese cell phone novel series Deep Love that contains sex, drug use, suicide, prostitution, and rape, yet the manga is categorized as a shoujo series, even though it clearly has content that would usually be under josei. However, Deep Love's manga was serialized by Bessatsu Friend under Kodansha making it a shoujo manga.