[El_Roy_1999]

Hi!

As I was reading some manga online, I thought of an interesting project that might be worthwhile. One of the genres of manga is the shonen. It addresses typical boys' stories and is all about personal growth and overcoming difficulties by training and competing.
Sounds familiar? Indeed!
While there are manga on almost any subject, with both male and female protagonists, I have yet to find one on female bodybuilding. (For g*d's sake, there's even one on male figure skating and one on bread baking!)

Anyway.
How about creating a manga series (nothing fancy, not necessarily manga-style illustrations), involving female bodybuilding, powerlifting and all kinds of other competitions involving strength and toughness?

Here's a very rough plot outline:
The protagonist is a skinny, waifish student who realises upon enrolling that she should have applied for a sport to participate in due to a rule of the college she's going to. Sadly, all the places are taken and the only thing she still finds to be free is… strength sports. Of course, our heroine is distraught. She joins, meets various muscular athletes and her primary competitor. A strong, muscular girl her age, who's been doing this for years and who is rather unhappy at being forced to share training facilities with such a wimpy woman.
However, (and this is where the shonen manga kicks in) the protagonist is extremely talented for the sport: She has great genetics, takes every challenge and is very serious about being the best. We now have two archetypes: the talented woman with a bad start and the woman who's been training for years and who managed to overcome many challenges in order to achieve what she has now.

The story should also involve several contests of various complexity (all involving strength and training of course). Examples: Powerlifting, shotput, traditional weightlifting, wrestling, tug of war, whatever.

Other cast: competing enemy teams with special techniques (necessary for that special flavour), a love interest guy, a love interest girl (because whatever), a paternal coach and a crazy manager-type woman responsible for the organisation of events.

If anybody is interested in participating, in writing, drawing and pitching ideas, or just criticising, I'd be honoured.

[Reason]

Yes, yes, yes, and yes! I've been looking for something like this for ages. Well an anime about female bodybuilding to be precise,  but a manga would be the first logical step. The closest I found were Battle Athletes manga/anime and Ayane's High Kick anime. Battle Athletes is about a group of female athletes from all over the world competing against each other in a series of outlandish events for the title of Miss Cosmic Beauty and Ayane's High Kick is about an athletic high school student who wants nothing more than to be a female professional wrestler, but gets tricked into competing in kickboxing instead. They are both quite entertaining, but are a bit on the silly side. It would be great if your manga could have a slightly more serious tone and deal with some of the more serious issues that female bodybuilders are faced with like getting rude comments from people when they go out in public, or putting up with creepy schmoe types that lust after their muscles but don't respect them as people, etc. You could even ask to include some stories from real female bodybuilders.

I should warn you though, collaborations on projects like this are rare, as people prefer to use their talents on their own personal projects, when they're not getting paid. If I was better at drawing I would offer my help, but for now I'm just gonna keep practicing. Good luck with the project, though. I'll be following it very closely.

[El_Roy_1999]

I posted some doodles on this thread:

http://amaz0ns.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,135/topic,9115.0/

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