| name | shoujo-romance-manga |
| version | 2.0.0 |
| category | comic-styles |
| description | Classic 1970s–90s shōjo romance manga — fixed sparkle-highlight eyes, flowing hair mass, floral emotion backgrounds, and organic panel borders for tender, longing, quietly delightful stories. |
Shoujo Romance Manga
Style Lock (do not deviate)
- Classic shōjo romance manga, 1970s–90s magazine era (Margaret/Ribon lineage), black-and-white print feel
- Fixed sparkle-eye grammar: one dominant catchlight + two small satellite sparkles + one soft lower crescent — exactly four elements per eye, identical in every panel
- Delicate, varied line weight: maru-pen-fine faces and hair strands, slightly heavier figure outlines, lace-fine costume detail (cuffs, collars, ribbons)
- Flowing hair as one designed mass — long strands ribbon across the panel with a consistent flow direction; the hair silhouette is a character asset
- Floral and bubble emotion backgrounds: roses, lilies, soap bubbles, and sparkle fields replace the literal setting when feeling peaks
- Selective screentone reserved for flowers, sparkle fields, and blush gradients — figures stay line-dominant
- Organic panel borders: panels may curve, tilt, or dissolve; characters may overlap borders when emotion overflows
Negative Locks
- No color; no digital gradients or airbrush glow — softness comes from line and tone, never blur
- No modern moe/anime rendering: no glossy hair bands, no chromatic eye stacks beyond the locked four-element grammar
- No heavy action staging: no battle speed-line panels, no impact frames
- No photoreal faces or photo-textured backgrounds
- No full-panel screentone wallpaper; tone is selective or it is wrong
- No sterile rectangular grid — borders must keep hand-drawn, organic character
When to Use
- First love, longing, confession beats, gentle heartbreak-and-repair, quiet self-discovery
- Reference images cueing shyness, hope, tenderness, or blossoming confidence
- Strips where the payoff is a feeling landing, not an event happening
When Not to Use
- Warm everyday comedy without romance machinery → use
retro-hand-inked-manga-comic
- Gritty adult drama or noir weight → use
gekiga-cinematic-manga
- Color-forward modern romance serialization → use
manhwa-color-webtoon
Story Harness (Image-Driven)
- Translate the four cues into one heartbeat of feeling — a glance, a gift, an almost-touch; stakes are emotional, never physical
- SETUP: character in a soft everyday setting (school gate, window seat, garden path); plant the emotional trigger (a letter, a familiar voice, petals on the wind); medium shot with fine literal background
- REINFORCE: emotion takes over the staging — floral/bubble background begins replacing the setting, eyes widen, hair mass lifts; camera steps closer; one border may bend
- TURNAROUND: warm, quietly delightful — a blush, a smile behind a hand, the feeling blooming; largest panel, full floral or sparkle field behind the face, borders may dissolve entirely; never ironic, never cruel
World Guardrail
- Default to gentle school-and-town settings: classrooms, festival evenings, gardens, tea rooms, seaside promenades
- Era-soft props (letters, wrapped gifts, umbrellas, bicycles); phones only if the reference insists, and never as the emotional center
- Season is an emotion instrument: cherry-blossom spring, first snow, golden autumn light
Dialogue & Lettering
- Soft rounded and cloud-edged bubbles; interior monologue floats border-free over tone fields — the style's signature
- 1–2 bubbles per panel, ≤ ~8 words; inner-voice text may replace dialogue entirely at the turn
- SFX policy: decorative only (a soft heartbeat, a chime), hand-lettered, at most one per strip; never action SFX
Direction Notes
- Camera diet: medium and close; the eye close-up is the style's money shot — spend it on the turnaround
- Transition diet: subject-to-subject between the glance and its object; aspect-to-aspect to dwell inside the feeling; one moment-to-moment breath before the bloom
- Pacing: gutters soften and may vanish as emotion rises; let the final panel take half the strip when the feeling must land
- Eyelines exit right (or left under an RTL contract — this style is RTL-eligible)
Consistency Notes
- What drifts first: eye-highlight count (creeps upward) and hair flow direction; lock both in the DNA template
- Screentone assignment is a style-memory asset (
comic-style-memory-system): tone belongs to flowers, sparkle, and blush — tone creeping onto skin or clothing is drift
- Re-anchor the face against the canonical sheet every 6–8 panels; sparkle eyes degrade toward modern anime stacks fastest of all period styles
- Keep the floral vocabulary finite: pick 2–3 flower species per project in the world bible and reuse them
Prompt Block
Classic 1970s-90s shoujo romance manga style, black and white,
delicate fine-nib linework with varied weight, large sparkling
eyes with one dominant catchlight, two satellite sparkles and a
soft lower crescent, flowing ribbon-like hair mass, floral and
soap-bubble emotion backgrounds, selective screentone on flowers
sparkle and blush only, organic curving panel borders that
dissolve at emotional peaks, elegant costume detail, vintage
shoujo magazine print feel.
Style Quality Gates
Integration
- Loads
comic-core and comic-consistency; rendered via comic-image-generation-adapter
- Native habitat:
3-panel-horizontal; patterns setup-reinforce-turnaround and kishotenketsu; RTL eligible
Shoujo treats emotion as visual texture.
