Recs if you like Mars, Vol. 1...

🌹Genre-defining, highly popular, and influential classics of Shoujo (girls') manga, all bestsellers in their demographic or influential series by the Year 24 Group.🌹

✨The Year 24 Group was a group of manga creators (mangaka), all women, who redefined shoujo manga in the 1970s, focusing on contemporary problems and high-stakes, emotional drama as well as defining shoujo's signature style of big, emotional splash pages, beautiful men, using imagery to illustrate emotional states, and on-panel text to denote inner thoughts - all visuals used across all genres of manga to this day. The Year 24 Group is also credited with creating the genre of BL, aka BoysLove, sometimes called shounen ai, as well as pioneering GL, GirlsLove or yuri.✨

🎀All of these have official English releases and were first printed in magazines for girls.🎀

💖Expect sparkles, pounding hearts, and romance, and BL, but also science fiction, fantasy, action and melodrama!💖

Shoujo and Josei series everyone should read.

A collection of the most influential shoujo manga from the 90s. Magical girls were big, but there's more than that! ⚠️WIP, I'm happy to add any suggestions!

Note: I'm including volumes with their first publication or serialization date in Japan in the 90s. Some may have been published into the 2000s, or they may not have been officially translated until later.

This list focuses on characters that have lived through physical, sexual, or religious trauma. This is not a list of self help or feel good books. This is for the people who know life is dark, love is conditional, and trust is something you guard. Endings are not guaranteed to be happy (tho some are) and characters may not be likable (trauma does that to you), but all books listed are ones that I've personally read and like. I will not add books that I do not know.

Inspired by the popular in the 00s list, I wanted to make a list cataloguing all the manga I owned in high school. Please read to the tune of Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye.

just my personal favorite couples/love stories¯_(ツ)_/¯