Not an attempt to absolve authors of their shortcomings. But reading about a few examples of magazine staff being completely garbage-brained back in the 90s and 2000s I wonder how many more cases there are of them sabotaging stories like this that we never hear about.
At least bleach gave him enough clout to finally have his female led manga in the end. That, and I assume the industry has gotten marginally less sexist over the years.
But if you look it quite a large proportion of the most successful series written by women have male protagonists still. Not an issue, but it would still be nice to see more mega hits with women at the helm.
Like 90%, maybe 80 obviously fans and writers are slightly at fault but it's for sure the Editors mostly
high but equally many creators and possibly fans have had a role
I know for JJBA, Araki initially wanted Lisa Lisa to have a more active role in Part 2, but that got shut down - still, having a women mentor was notable. Anne in Stardust Crusaders also got cut, but that might’ve been because she was a kid.
The biggest example I can think of is that Giorno (or the protagonist of Part 5 at least) was initially thought of as a girl, but that got shut down by the editors due to being a tough sell. It was also at one point thought to reveal Giorno was a girl pretending to be a man the whole time. Afterwards though, Araki insisted on the next lead being a woman, and thus we got Jolyne. For the trade-off of the best JoJo being born from the worst JoJo, I’ll accept the misogyny of Weekly Shonen Jump.
HOLY SHIT!!! IS THAT A MOTHAFUCKIN JOJO REFERENCE???
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The author of Dandadan wanted to have Momo be the main protagonist but the editor was against it, so Okarun was made a co-protagonist as a sort of compromise.
I have a strong suspicion that they play an important role in side-lining female characters and making sure that they conform to the (assumed) tastes of the audience.
But in the end it's really hard to say for sure. So far all I have heard are anecdotes. I would be extremely interested in a journalistic report on how editors affect the contents of manga - specifically with regards to this issue, but more generally as well.
Heck, pretty tangential, there was a whole subplot about this in. ahem. lord forgive me. Oreimo