A while ago I read a forum post wherein someone was trying to propose a deconstruction, in the vein of Madoka or Evangelion, of the cute girls doing cute things subgenre of iyashikei. This deconstruction would feature a fat girl, an ugly girl, a pregnant girl, and a druggie girl going through a high school life together to show us all what it’s “really like” when you get together a group of four “real” high school girls and show their daily lives.
However, that doesn’t viscerally strike me as a deconstruction in the same way that Eva or Madoka do, for a couple of reasons. Everyone being impossibly adorable isn’t an exclusive trope of cute girls doing cute things. Everyone in all anime is impossibly adorable. If an anime character is ugly, it’s usually because of artistic incompetence, not because the character is actually supposed to be ugly; they were probably supposed to be impossibly adorable and the artist just couldn’t execute. There are some exceptions, but not many, especially if you only consider female characters. And yeah, people in real life do have problems, but lots of people in real life are happy and content, and their problems are of the same “Oh no I flunked my test”, “No I don’t want to leave my friends after I graduate!” variety that we see in cute girls doing cute things. It’s definitely not inevitable that a group of high school friends will include a pregnant girl and a druggie just because pregnant girls and druggies exist.
More recently, people have been calling School Live a deconstruction of cute girls doing cute things. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil the ever-loving crap out of it, so stop reading immediately. School Live starts off following a peppy high school girl and her three friends, leading us to believe it’s a show about cute girls in a “Mess around and have fun on the school dime” club as we see in several bona fide cute girls doing cute things shows, such as Yuru Yuri. At the end of the first episode, it’s revealed that our heroine is in a state of denial about the zombie apocalypse going on outside, which has forced the four girls to barricade themselves inside the school for defense. She’s imagining that everything is still normal because her mind can’t accept the carnage that’s really going on. I’ve never watched past Episode 2, but the rest of the show seems to show the girls surviving, gathering food and water, and fighting zombies.
School Live is also not a deconstruction of cute girls doing cute things. It doesn’t comment on the conventions of the genre; it just uses them to set up one kind of story, then pull the rug out from under you and give you a different kind of story. And zombie stories are even more unrealistic than cute girls doing cute things; grisly is not the same as realistic. School Live is like a catchy pop tune with lyrics that are really creepy when you actually listen to them. Or maybe it’s more like a heavy metal song with lyrics that, when you actually read them in the liner notes (because come on, who can understand the lyrics to heavy metal?), turn out to be about ponies and butterflies and rainbows down by the bay where the watermelons grow. Either way, it’s not a deconstruction of cute girls doing cute things; it’s a zombie story that came up with an interesting fake-out for the first episode.
Since it seems like an interesting exercise, I’ll try my hand at deconstructing cute girls doing cute things too. Just based on the term “cute girls doing cute things”, there are three obvious ways to approach this: cute girls doing ugly things, ugly girls doing cute things, or ugly girls doing ugly things.
The forum post that set off this exercise is kind of a mixture: the way it was written seemed to assume that the pregnant girl and the druggie girl would be cute, but one’s out getting pregnant and one’s doing drugs, which are ugly things to be doing (one for a teenage girl in high school, the other for most people in general). The fat girl and the ugly girl were presumably meant to be ugly girls (one explicitly so, the other by implication due to societal beauty standards). Unfortunately, this means that both cute girls doing ugly things and ugly girls doing cute things are out, for the same reasons as before. Cute girls doing ugly things isn’t a deconstruction because the fact that cute girls can do ugly things doesn’t at all invalidate that they can also do cute things. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is basically cute girls doing ugly things (going insane and chopping each other apart with big knives is pretty ugly), and though that might subvert audience expectations, it doesn’t deconstruct a genre. Higurashi does a similar thing to School Live, and isn’t a deconstruction for the same reasons.
There’s also a lesser form of cute girls doing ugly things where the story goes out of its way to highlight that the girls have periods, use tampons, get sweaty, fart, belch, and pick their noses. Oshiete! Galko-chan does this, for example. Some people might consider this sort of a deconstruction of cute girls doing cute things, but I don’t. Just because we never see Mio Akiyama belch loudly and complain about her period doesn’t mean that she doesn’t belch or have periods. J.K. Rowling never wrote a scene where Harry Potter sits down to take a dump, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t, and we can’t deconstruct Harry Potter just by writing a similar story where the wizards spend a strange amount of time sitting on the pot.
Ugly girls doing cute things comes closer to the mark–after all, who says ugly girls can’t do cute things? But this isn’t a specific deconstruction of cute girls doing cute things. If you believe the media, ugly girls don’t exist at all. Every girl and woman everywhere doing everything is beautiful, at least if you believe anime and Hollywood. Also, ugliness is too subjective. What’s ugly in one country is beautiful in another. Sometimes within the same city, or the same neighborhood, or the same family, you can find people who differ radically on what they consider ugly. Some people are even so open-minded, such good people, that they only consider others ugly based on personality. By that definition, ugly girls doing cute things are beautiful, because they’re innocent and kind people.
Plus, moe fans are freaks, so no matter what you do to make the girls ugly, some guy is going to get moe from it. You may think that an anime girl that has a lazy eye and a mole with a hair growing out of it is hideous, but some guy out there just found his waifu.
Since ugly girls doing ugly things is just ugly girls doing cute things combined with cute girls doing ugly things, that’s out too; just combine my argument for why cute girls doing ugly things isn’t a deconstruction with my argument for why ugly girls doing cute things isn’t a deconstruction and you have my argument why ugly girls doing ugly things isn’t a deconstruction.
So much for the obvious path. What else can we try?
Everything we’ve tried so far has been big and dramatic; cute girls getting pregnant, or being on drugs, or getting eaten by zombies, or chopping each other up. What if we tried something more subtle? What if we followed a group of cute girls doing cute things in spite of a world that wants to stop them?
I’m picturing a story that follows a group of upper middle-class high school girls living in a society that’s stable, but oppressive. Something like modern day Saudi Arabia, maybe: people generally have food and clothing and enough to eat, but they’re hemmed in by society in subtle, but unsettling, ways. Maybe one girl has the usual same-sex crush on one of her friends, but in one scene, her mother sits her down and explains to her how their religion forbids same-sex love and she could be in big trouble if she’s too expressive of her love in public. Maybe the girls plan a trip to the beach, but they have to wear full-body swimsuits and stare with envy (or sour grapes) at the tourist women in bikinis. Perhaps the girls want to go to a festival, but it’s a men-only event, so they obediently stay home and do laundry. Instead of wondering about college and future careers, they wonder about children and future husbands of arranged marriages.
The girls we follow aren’t social crusaders struggling against the status quo, or activists railing at the injustice; they’re just girls, privileged in some ways, living in a society that tightly circumscribes their freedom. They might whinge a little, like children told to go to bed when the movie’s over, but they wouldn’t fight too hard. They’d never be caught reading revolutionary literature; their dissatisfaction would come through hints and the occasional innocent daydream, and be filled in and amplified by the audience. This could instill, in place of the relaxing feeling of a regular cute girls doing cute things series, a persistent low-level unease, like the tension at the beginning of a horror movie but sustained and renewed at intervals throughout the entire series. The show could end with all the girls being married off by their families to older men, who we’d perhaps start to meet in later episodes in lieu of the usual stories about college exams. The graduating girls would settle down to lives as housekeepers and babymakers, and the younger girls would go back for one more year of education, knowing that the same awaited them.
This definitely feels the closest to a real deconstruction of the genre. Instead of outright substituting the grotesque, the horrifying, the contemptible, or the tragic for the usual relaxing and sweet, it gives you the surface ingredients of cute girls doing cute things–namely, a group of cute girls doing cute things–but then adds little twists that make it impossible to enjoy the stories the same way you’d enjoy a regular cute girls doing cute things show. Another interesting feature: it highlights the strange backdoor quasi feminism of cute girls doing cute things. That’s a topic I’ve been wrestling with for a while, and I’ll probably come back to it in another essay.
However, the backdoor quasi feminism is also why I can’t call this concept an unambiguously successful deconstruction of cute girls doing cute things. It’s very culturally relative. For most Americans, it would probably create the unease it’s intended to, but someone from rural Pakistan or Eritrea might not see the slightest thing wrong with it. They might even find it uneasy because the girls are too free. And in Japan, the home of cute girls doing cute things? It’s hard to say. Compare that to Madoka or Evangelion: neither of those are only a deconstruction in the right cultural frame of reference. It’s a higher level version of the argument I made against “ugly” girls: depending on where you’re sitting, that girl isn’t ugly.
So far I’ve utterly failed to deconstruct cute girls doing cute things.
As I was playing out this exercise, it occurred to me that it was so hard to deconstruct cute girls doing cute things because the genre is already sort of a deconstruction. No, it’s not dark or gritty like Madoka or Evangelion. It doesn’t deal with serious issues that are usually glossed over by other similar anime. But the word “deconstruction” doesn’t actually require any of that. To deconstruct is to start from the artificial conventions of some genre of fiction and show how they would play out in the real world.
Focusing on a group of high school friends is an old anime trope. At least, it’s old as anime go; anime is a young medium, and young media tend to ignore their history. But the convention of a group of high school friends who go through something extraordinary goes back at least to the mid 90’s. In most anime, the group of friends is special in some way: they’re chosen to receive superpowers and protect the world from extra-dimensional creatures that feed on human suffering; or they’re secretly all alien princesses; or they have dramatic, convoluted love polygons; or at the very least they’re really into mahjong. But in real life, if you found a group of four or five high school friends in a first-world country like Japan, chances are they’d be none of those things. They’d be ordinary teenagers who study, hang out, eat snacks, watch TV, laugh at each others’ dumb jokes. Maybe they’d have a band, but they’d play to the school festival crowd, not to a sold out stadium. Maybe some would be foreign exchange students, but from England, not from the planet Deviluke. Maybe they’d be into mahjong, but none of them would be horrifying demons of mahjong who were locked in a back house for ten years to contain the terrifying power of their mahjong.
A group of high school students being extraordinary in some unrealistic way–that sounds a lot like the artificial convention of a genre. And how would following a group of high school students probably play out in real life? Well, they’d sit around talking and eating snacks, go out for fast food, go shopping, go to the beach, laugh at silly in-jokes, and maybe spend time doing a shared hobby. Eventually they’d graduate high school and go to college. They’d think about careers and their futures, wonder if they’d stay friends after they’re not together every day, and leave behind their kouhai. Just like cute girls doing cute things.
The people trying to deconstruct cute girls doing cute things have it all backwards. If something is made of Legos, you can take it apart and get a bunch of Lego bricks, but you can’t take apart the individual bricks. So it is with cute girls doing cute things: it can’t be deconstructed because it already is.
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