I was sad to see that a new “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” show called Wakaba Girls was being panned in Crunchyroll reviews because the reviewers were so burned out on the cute girls doing cute things genre. They’re so cute! How can you hate them so much?
However, I do have to admit that I’m a little burned out on the genre myself. Not enough to hate the cute girls. No, I could never do that. They’re too cute to hate. But the genre has suffered from a pretty serious lack of innovation compared to what it was just a couple years ago, in the 2012–2013 era. Yes, it’s a pretty formulaic genre to begin with, but the devil is very much in the details. What’s your theme? Who are your characters? Why are they together? What are their relationships? How do they interact? What are their running jokes, their quirks, their charm points? What brings them together? These things interact in a million different little ways, and the most insignificant effect can launch a cute girls doing cute things show into the stratosphere, or keep it stuck on Earth.
In a way, writing a cute girls doing cute things series is like writing a program in assembly language. If you’ve never done this, you should try it. A million different little factors can affect the final outcome of your program. I started an assembly class with about forty people who’d never programmed before, and at the end of it, only seven of us were left.
In a way, writing a cute girls doing cute things series is an order of magnitude harder than writing assembly language, because at least assembly language is deterministic, however complex the interactions get. Cute girls doing cute things will strike different viewers in different ways, even when all the viewers are sympathetic to the genre and not just bitching because they’d rather be watching Fairy Tail. If there were a class on writing about cute girls doing cute things, the instructor would have to randomly assign F’s to otherwise good proposals just to simulate how hard it is to get these things right.
To me, the big three of cute girls doing cute things are K-On, Lucky Star, and Yuru Yuri. Even though they seem very similar on the surface, each of these three shows works for a completely different reason.
Lucky Star is rather funny. It has almost no plot and is very random. It relies on making statements about otaku and saying “Am I right?” at the end. It somehow works even though the character interactions are just okay, some of the characters are never explored very thoroughly, and Konata is the most implausible female otaku ever, except for maybe Kirino Kousaka.
Yuru Yuri is very funny, as in, it has actual humor, which is, like, actually funny. It also has yuri. Lots and lots of yuri. Most cute girls doing cute things shows just vaguely imply some kind of yuri undertone that gets amplified way out of proportion by the otaku mind, with the help of doujinshi authors. But Yuru Yuri has actual yuri, as in, there are actually girls in the series who show signs of obvious romantic or sexual attraction to other girls. Yuru Yuri has very well-realized characters and thoroughly explores the interactions between them; even an obscure pairing like Yui and Ayano gets explored.
K-On is not funny. It does not have actual humor. It has humor which is not actually funny, it just consists of the characters acting like giant dorks. Given that, I’ve never been able to understand why I always end up laughing or smiling all the way through an episode of K-On. Probably the dorkiest joke ever was the scene in the movie when a half-asleep Azusa follows Yui in circles through the doors between the gang’s two hotel rooms and the hallways for two minutes, always missing her. Coincidentally, that scene probably made me laugh more than any other scene in the entire K-On series.
The K-On girls are guilty of all seven of the deadly sins. They sit around eating cake and drinking tea, hence gluttony. They never seem to do anything else, hence sloth. They tried to keep the money from Sawako’s guitar for themselves, hence avarice. Mio hits Ritsu, hence wrath. In the manga, Mugi fantasizes about the other girls as lesbian lovers, and in the anime, she briefly wants to sleep with Sawako, hence lust. And they constantly talk about how good they are at playing music, hence pride.
Wait, I’m missing one. Which one is it? Let me check the list of Homunculi in Full Metal Alchemist. Ah, yes, envy. Maybe they aren’t guilty of that. Who would they be envious of? They get to spend three years sitting around drinking tea and eating cake, occasionally playing music, and at the end of it all they get a trip to London. We should be envious of them.
What was my point? Oh, that’s right: all three of these shows are incredibly similar on the surface. You get some cute girls in group, sitting around and talking. But the dynamic of that group and the sort of interactions the members have with each other is vastly different between the three series. The Lucky Star girls are otaku who talk about nothing and do “Did you ever notice...?”-type of jokes. The Yuru Yuri girls do real jokes and yuri. And the K-On girls are the biggest dorks this side of a guy who writes blogs analyzing why it’s hard to write about cute girls doing cute things. All three groups ultimately lead their shows to success, at least with me and a large segment of the otaku audience.
Now let’s look at some other cute girls doing cute things shows that I consider less successful.
I read the first volume of the Hidamari Sketch manga and was not really pulled in. I’ve heard the anime is better. (It’s by Shaft, so I’m inclined to believe it, but I haven’t checked it out yet.) The group dynamic felt a little anemic. The first volume really leaned on Yuno and Miyako, but I found Miyako kind of annoying, and their relationship wasn’t really multifaceted enough to create the kind of interest I wanted right off the bat. Hiro and Sae didn’t contribute much in the first volume; it was hard to even get a read on them.
Kiniro Mosaic also felt flat to me. Shinobu and Alice had a nice relationship, and the exchange student theme was interesting, but these things weren’t enough to support a whole story, and Aya and Youko didn’t add enough to bolster it.
This seems to be the most common failure mode for cute girls doing cute things: the author manages to create lovable and very cute characters, but as a group, they just aren’t quite interesting enough to carry an entire show. That’s what makes cute girls doing cute things so fraught with peril.
In most shows, the characters are shown in action or in some sort of crisis. That’s equivalent to saying that most shows have a plot. The majority of the show is about how they deal with this crisis. If a certain character’s personality is a little bland, or if their interaction with another character is not well-defined, you probably won’t notice, because you’re focused on the action. If the plot is cliched enough, the conventions of the genre might have already planned all of the character’s actions out, from Episode 1 to Episode 345 (and beyond).
Cute girls doing cute things is all about the personalities and the interactions. There is no plot. As the cute girls are doing cute things, the viewer is essentially doing them too. We’re going to the hardware store and messing with the tools, or sitting around in the clubroom drinking tea and making jokes, or running a marathon, or touring London, alongside the cute girls. And even the most fun activity can be ruined if you do it with a boring group of people. Moreso when you’re experiencing everything vicariously through images on a screen.
It’s the author’s job to make sure the cute girls are a fun group that can make even ordinary activities enjoyable. The author has to create the personalities, and the group dynamic, and script all the interactions. Creating likable characters is just the first step; then the author has to define how they get on with each other, and come up with conversations and events which show it, and make sure the interaction is interesting and cute to the viewer, all within the confines of the genre.
Making a good cast under these conditions is much harder than throwing together a cast for an action show. Action is inherently exciting. If we’re stuck in the middle of a ninja war with a boring group of people, we probably won’t notice how boring they are, because the ninja war is exciting in itself. The characters in a lot of romance shows are actually really boring as people. They don’t have hobbies or future goals or dreams, or they have cliched future goals and dreams like “become a doctor because my brother died of a mysterious illness”. All they seem to do is worry about the person they’re in love with, or try to get the person they’re in love with to love them back, or try to convince the person they’re in love with to love them instead of someone else. They may have friends, but the friends just listen to their romantic woes, and perhaps have romantic woes of their own. Romance shows can get away with this because the plot is inherently exciting for many viewers. A tangled love triangle is just as exciting to romance viewers as a ninja war is to action viewers.
Cute girls doing cute things doesn’t have that. There’s no ninja war to go back to when the hero is done explaining his philosophy on the futility of modern life. There are no ex-girlfriends to throw back into the picture to spice things up. It’s just us hanging out with a group of cute girls. It’s a given that they have to look cute. The challenge is making a group of cute, fun girls.
The cheap way to build a fun group is with sex. That’s what most harem shows do. They insert a character into the show who represents the viewer, and then have cute girls strip and dry hump that character. Some harem shows kind of have a plot. Lova Hina and To-Love-Ru both have plots after a fashion. Love Hina’s is probably strong enough to work even without the sex, though it surely doesn’t hurt.
The cute girls doing cute things genre emphatically rejects the easy way. Even cheesecake shots of the girls getting dressed or bathing is fairly rare in cute girls doing cute things. Sometimes there will be a beach episode, but it treats the swimsuit-clad girls in a very casual way. Of course they’re in swimsuits, they’re at the beach! the writers seem to be saying. The bath scenes in K-On and Lucky Star are about as erotic as the bath scene in My Neighbor Totoro. Aside from very occasional sidetrips, like Sawako stripping Mio or a few imagine spots in Yuru Yuri, the sexual aspect of cute girls doing cute things is all in the viewer’s imagination.
In the end, what you have is pure, raw, characters. Raw characters are like raw meat: you can eat it, but the ingredients and preparation better be damn good, or else it’s gonna be gross.
A raw, stripped-down, constrained minimalism can be a scary thing, and the general trend in the modern age has been to run from it. All modern poetry is free verse. All modern Hollywood movies are gigantic in budget and scope, using CG to escape the bounds of the physical. All modern programming languages have baroque systems of rules for defining class hierarchies and types. Well, maybe not all, but most of the notable ones. No one writes sonnets in iambic pentameter anymore; no one makes horror movies in their backyard with guts they borrowed from the neighborhood butcher shop anymore; no one writes production systems in Scheme or Io.
But cute girls doing cute things is that kind of minimalism. It’s like the Scheme of the moe world. All you get is characters, their personalities and their interactions, and a setting, which is usually a school. The successful examples of the genre figure out what they can do with that kind of minimalism. It can be real humor and yuri, like Yuru Yuri. It can be dorkiness and fun with some music tossed in, like K-On. It can be randomness and otaku jokes, like Lucky Star. It can be something more out there, something that varies the formula just enough to put a new spin on the constraints, like GA’s creative use of its art theme or Aria’s unique setting and philosophy. (I consider Aria an honorary cute girls doing cute things show. After all, are the girls not cute? And do they not do cute things?)
I don’t know if Wakaba Girls is good or not. I haven’t watched it. I don’t know if I will watch it. I was pretty disappointed with Hanayamata and Kiniro Mosaic, and while Gochiusa had its moments, it also had its anti-moments. I suspect we won’t see too many more cute girls doing cute things shows. The constraints are so hard to write within, and they’re basically kryptonite to casual viewers. A gag show or harem show might attract a few people waiting for the new season of Fairy Tail to start, but a cute girls doing cute things show is primarily of interest to otaku.
I hope I’m wrong, and that even now, somewhere in Japan, a mangaka is laboring to produce the next great series about cute girls doing cute things. After all, when I was without hope for anime, drowning in a sea of bad harem shows and shounen action, it turned out that my SOS had reached someone after all...
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