A Summer of Cute Girls: Hinako Note, Yuru Camp, and A Place Further Than the Universe

Last summer I watched like five cute girl shows in a row and also read some cute girl manga during the same period. I made some notes discussing and comparing them that I thought were worth writing up as part of my continuing obsession with story structure analysis on cute girl shows.

What makes these three shows worth discussing together, aside from the fact that I happened to watch them all within a short period of time, is that two of them are really good and one of them is pretty not good, and the two good ones illuminate the flaws of the one not good one in an interesting way.

Hinako Note: It’s Pretty Not Good

Hinako Note is a series with a lot of ups and downs. The first two episodes are extremely adorable, with cute characters and a lovely setting. It’s supposed to be in Tokyo, but the cozy little coffee shop / bookstore / girls dormitory where the characters live, and the beautiful green park with all sorts of trees and terraces and food stalls, don’t scream Tokyo to me at all. They actually look shockingly similar to the Swiss Japanese Italian village where Is the Order a Rabbit? takes place.

Hinako is a girl from the country who comes to the city to join a theater club for high school. She has acute social anxiety and whenever strangers talk to her, she freezes up and animals come and perch on her. She also has the ability to talk to animals somehow. She ends up rooming with Chiaki, a soft-voiced sempai who loves acting; Mayu, a tiny cute blond girl who wears a maid outfit and is in love with Chiaki; and Kuina, a laid back girl who likes both reading and eating books, like Bungaku Shoujo. Later, Yua, a semi-tsundere semi-rival for Hinako, comes in as a fifth member of the group.

Hinako Note is very confused about what it wants to be and flails around trying to find its feet for about six or seven episodes before it achieves any sort of consistency. It tries to do a plot in Episodes 3 – 6, but the plot is really bad and turns into a complete mess. Hinako left her home and came to start an unfamiliar life in the big city in order to join the theater club, but it turns out the theater club is on hiatus because the advisor left. So they decide to start up their own little private theater troupe, but then Chiaki’s theater club buddies make her a theater society at the end of an episode (Episode 4, I want to say?). Then in the next episode the theater club advisor is back so they can restart the regular theater club, and they do a play. It’s a complete mess. It continually sets up conflicts only to immediately shoot them down with easy solutions that require no effort on any of the main characters’ parts. You might have noticed from my plot summary that the show resolves the same conflict three times: first with the theater troupe, then with the theater society, then with Ruri, the advisor, coming back to restart the theater club. The second two times were just random happenstance that came out of the blue so something would happen.

Once the theater club resumes, the show focuses on the rivalry between Hinako and Yua a lot and how Yua comes to slowly accept Hinako by seeing how hard she works. This works a lot better. It has an actual dramatic arc where Yua starts out hating Hinako and being jealous of her, then comes to like her a little bit and feel sorry for some of her actions, but then her jealousy flares up again when Ruri casts Hinako as the lead in the play that Yua wanted to lead. But Yua finally sees Hinako working hard and decides to respect and support her. There’s also a nice little subplot about how Mayu dislikes theater because it takes Chiaki away from her, but in the end she uses her propensity for wearing a maid outfit to rescue the production by coming out of the audience to bring Yua a prop she forgot, using the maid outfit to blend in with the setting so it looks intentional.

The characters have their charms, but the character writing is also very confused and messy. Mayu and Yua both love Chiaki, which seems simply excessive, but so far they haven’t realized this about each other and it hasn’t been an issue. Kuina is supposed to be a book girl and a big eater as well as a laid back wacky character, which is just too many traits. And being a book girl is just a minor plot device to explain why she works in a bookstore and who writes the scripts for the theater troupe that they still do for some reason even though the theater society was formed an hour later and then the theater club was resumed the next day. Yua is your standard tsundere rival, but at least she’s consistent. Hinako is a pretty good, pretty consistent character, but she needed a better supporting cast to interact with, because she’s not interesting enough to sustain the show on her own. And Chiaki is pretty bland. She’s supposedly so cool that girls go gay for her—not just Mayu and Yua, but also a group of random girls we see in a flashback who switch from being gay for Mayu because she’s small and cute like a doll to being gay for Chiaki because she’s supposedly so cool.

The art and design are the bright spot of Hinako Note, but even this is marred by the fact that the show, especially in the later parts, throws in near constant and utterly gratuitous fan service, mostly of Hinako or Chiaki. The camera constantly focuses on their bouncing boobs or their butts when they’re laying down, or lovingly pans over their bodies as they’re changing clothes or in the bath, or takes cheap excuses to dress them up in bunny girl outfits like a harem show. Most of the episodes end with Hinako naked in the bath and us getting an eyeful. The next episode previews are all spoken over a piece of art of one of the characters that looks like it came from an eroge. These just get more and more gross and pervy as the series goes on (one towards the end has Hinako on her knees about to lick Kuina’s foot for some reason). What bothers me about this is less the presence of fan service and more the way it’s done. I’m old now and just a pan over a naked girl’s body isn’t going to do much for me; I want fan service to happen in ecchi situations. I want the entire show to be ecchi and sexual in nature if I’m going to enjoy that. The constant and gratuitous fan service also highlights even more how confused this show is about its identity.

A lot of the cute girl shows I haven’t enjoyed don’t pick the right subgenre of cute girls show, or they try to mix and match elements from too many subgenres in ways that conflict. Hinako Note is interesting because of just how badly the elements it chooses conflict. The characters, setting, pastel color palette, and chibi art style are overwhelmingly adorable, somewhere between Wakaba Girl and Is the Order a Rabbit?. That art style works for those two shows because they were pure cute girls doing cute things; they had no plots, they were just about fun and friends and looking at pretty things. When Hinako Note commits to that direction more in Episodes 1, 2, 7, and 8, it works well—much better than anything else the show attempts. But the middle portion, with its limp attempts at plot, reads more like cute girls drama, like a Hibike! Euphonium or a Clannad or, as we’ll discuss below, A Place Further than the Universe, except it’s exceedingly incompetent in its execution. Clannad makes an entire story arc of the theater club being shut down and Nagisa trying to get it going again and recruit members with Tomoya’s help. Hinako Note resolves that problem within the same episode and then resolves it twice more for good measure.

Some elements of Hinako Note read more as wacky surreal comedy with cute girls, like a Digi Charat or a Bakuon!!; Hinako’s ability to talk to animals and the fact that they cluster around her or that she can walk through the city with chicks on her shoulders and no one remarks on it is either a genuine supernatural ability or comedic exaggeration. But I would accept this in a cute girls doing cute things show; after all, in Is the Order A Rabbit?, it’s strongly implied that Chino’s grandfather died and his soul possessed an Angora rabbit. I have a harder time accepting Ruri, who is only nine years old, but is a professional actress as well as a drama teacher in a high school, and also has like C-cup boobs at the tender age of nine. (Her boob size is remarked on in the show.) I would have accepted her, with exactly the same character design, as a very short woman in her twenties. That’s a common trope for teachers in anime, and it wouldn’t have changed anything because no part of her personality and nothing she ever does in the plot are in any way affected by her being a child. But a nine-year-old teacher is too far from anything remotely realistic for me to accept in a cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things. Hinako talking to animals can just be a weird, mysterious thing that exists on the fringes, but for a nine-year-old to be a teacher, society has to be fundamentally different than it is in real life. That’s fine for a wacky comedy where these things don’t need to be addressed; it works in Negima, or Pani Poni Dash. But cute girls drama or cute girls doing cute things need to be more grounded.

And then there’s the constant fan service, which doesn’t fit within any of these three subgenres. It’s the closest fit with wacky comedy, but in wacky comedy, the fan service is usually played for humor by making it part of a ridiculous situation. Hinako Note just slips it in there for no reason. The characters aren’t aware it’s happening. It comes from no one’s perspective. The camera leering at the girls ruins the cute and fluffy tone that the art and the stories in later episodes create, and sabotages the show’s attempt to be cute girls doing cute things or drama of any kind.

I won’t say I hated Hinako Note; in the end, I enjoyed some parts of it and liked some of the characters. But it’s more interesting for its flaws than for its minimal successes. Someone with some level of competence was clearly working on it, but either they let their worse natures win out or they were overridden by studio executives who were out to make a buck, or they too faithfully adapted a manga that had the same flaws. And what makes it frustrating is that when it finally starts to succeed towards the end, it does so at something that’s well understood. It is well known in the anime world how to make a good cute girls doing cute things show. You pick a fun theme, pick a beautiful setting, you get some cute girls, you choose from a couple standard art styles (something more realist like K-On, something more chibi and cute like Yuru Yuri, or something in between like Kiniro Mosaic) and put your own little spin on it, you put the girls together and let interplay happen, and after that it’s all down to your skill in executing said interplay and how well you planned out the way the girls’ personalities mesh. And that part is indeed hard, but that’s not where Hinako Note messed up. It messed up in the planning stage, the part that should be well understood and almost formulaic at this point. They picked a fun theme, theater. They picked a beautiful setting, the nice little enclave of Tokyo that looks exactly like the Swiss Italian Japanese village from Is the Order a Rabbit?. They set up some cute girls and picked out some of the standard dynamics (the strict tsundere one who yells at the slow clumsy one, the girl who’s gay for another girl, the one who eats a lot, the short girl who looks like a child and hates being called a child). They had an obvious path forward from here: get them together in a theater club or troupe and show them enjoying every day while they prepare for performances and then give performances. Instead the show decided to try and do drama for six episodes, and then gave up and went back to what seems to have been the original plan, based on the art style, all the while sabotaging itself with massive amounts of gratuitous fan service and unrealistic elements that take away the cohesion of the world.

Yuru Camp: It Made Me Want to Go Outside

Pretty shortly after watching Hinako Note, I watched Yuru Camp. This turned out be a good decision, because Yuru Camp is almost certainly the best anime I watched in 2019. I can’t remember the last cute girls doing cute things show I enjoyed so much.

It absolutely nails every part of the formula I described above: the theme (relaxing winter camping), the visuals (beautiful forest, mountain, and lake shots with an amazing color palette that’s both earthy and vibrant—if you told me the backgrounds were all Bob Ross paintings, I’d believe it), the music (a fun, relaxing, eclectic mix of country, folk, and Celtic), and the characters. Unlike a lot of cute girls shows, Yuru Camp actually take a long time to bring the main group together; we don’t see them all on a trip together until the last two episodes. Because of that, I didn’t get as attached to some of the characters as I might have, but I loved loved loved Rin Shima, the de facto main character. Not only is she adorable with her huge bun, her scarf, her shawl, and her introverted, quiet, and bookish nature, she’s also awesome. She’s genuinely competent and rugged, braving the tough road and the bitter winter cold in return for the solitude of an empty campground and a beautiful private view of the mountains and the lake. In the first episode a campground worker sees her going out to the empty campground in the winter cold and comments on how tough she must be. She pitches her tent and sets up her campsite with a practiced efficiency, and she has no trouble gathering supplies, planning out her trips, hauling all her things on a bicycle, or building a campfire from wood she gathers off the ground. But she’s also not perfect; she still has trouble pitching her tent when it’s windy out, she needs help to figure out how to make the coals hot in her portable grill, and she falls asleep in a roadside rest area and ends up having to make camp in the dark. When her first trip by scooter takes some unexpected turns, Rin gets worried and frustrated, but she also keeps her cool and thinks through what to do next, and she gladly accepts help from her friends to get her through.

Rin pairs really well with Nadeshiko Kagamihara, the co-lead, too. Nadeshiko is energetic, friendly, and sort of an airhead. She and Rin meet because Nadeshiko heard she could see Mt. Fuji, so she biked up to the same campground where Rin is camping, but she forgot to bring her phone or any money and she doesn’t know her home number because she just moved, so she gets stranded dying of hunger and has to borrow Rin’s food and phone to call her sister. Nadeshiko later joins the Outdoor Exploration Club and makes friends with its two members, Chiaki Oogaki and Aoi Inuyama. With them she starts to learn more about camping and acquire equipment. She also goes on more trips with Rin, who seems fond of Nadeshiko even though she sometimes acts standoffish towards her. There’s enough contrast between them to be interesting, but enough similarity that their friendship feels realistic. Rin has a type anyway—her other friend, Ena Saito, is also sort of a lackadaisical airhead. The one Rin claims to have trouble dealing with is Chiaki, whose personality is more hyper and purposefully silly. Since the series takes so long to get all five girls together, there’s less focus on group interaction, but we still get to see them interact in pairs or triads throughout the series before the big finish, which means the series doesn’t have to purposely set aside time for certain members of the group to peel off and interact like in shows that build the group right away. Plus, with Rin as the main character, it feels true to her personality that she’d be slow to join a larger group and only want to do it after feeling comfortable with all the members.

Every episode of Yuru Camp felt like it was only ten minutes long because I enjoyed it so much it just flew by. I delayed watching the final episode for a week because I didn’t want it to be over. I ordered the soundtrack from CDJapan because it makes such great music to work or read to. Rin’s peaceful weekends reading by a beautiful lakeside even made me consider camping myself, something I’d never before felt the urge to do. In the middle of writing this blog post I felt a sudden urge to rewatch it, which I’m now doing, and it’s just as I remembered. The first episode just shows Rin go to the campgrounds, set up her campsite, read, make a fire, meet Nadeshiko, eat cup ramen, and see Nadeshiko home, but it felt like it was over in ten minutes and I enjoyed every second of great music, beautiful scenery, and the vicarious cozy feeling of sitting by a warm campfire eating hot soup while piled in shawls and cloaks and scarves.

A Place Further Than the Universe

I watched A Place Further Than the Universe slightly before either of the other two, and it, along with Quintessential Quintuplets, got me fired up to watch cute girl anime again. It’s a comedy/drama about four girls who go on an expedition to Antarctica. Shirase Kobuchizawa lost her scientist mother to an Antarctic expedition and is determined to get down there herself. What she hopes to get out of the trip isn’t entirely clear at first—does she hope her mother is still alive? Does she want to continue her mother’s work?—but her determination inspires Mari Tamaki, aka Kimari, and Hinata Miyake. Kimari is ditzy and lacking in ambition, but she meets Shirase and gets fired up to do something amazing. Hinata has stopped going to school and is working her tail off in a convenience store when she meets Shirase and Kimari and also gets sucked in to their passion. They get their chance by teaming up with Yuzuki, an idol who’s been asked to host a documentary following an Antarctic expedition led by Gin Toudou, an old friend of Shirase’s mother.

A Place Further Than the Universe has a similar vibe to Hibike! Euphonium. The look is more realistic than Hinako Note or even Yuru Camp, the color palette more muted. The characters come off simple at first, but we’re kept somewhat at arms’ length from them and we discover they’re more complex than they seem as the series develops. Hinata, for instance, seems friendly and boisterous at first, and Shirase seems cold and impassive. But we soon discover Shirase is burning with passion, and Hinata is actually deeply standoffish. And also like Hibike! Euphonium, the drama comes from the characters’ actions, which come from their personalities, and not because of happenstance dictated by the script. Every character gets a satisfying arc to unravel what she was trying to get out of going on the expedition. Shirase’s was suitably the most full and satisfying, but I really enjoyed Hinata’s arc, and her unique personality made her my favorite character. Kimari’s and Yuzuki’s were less good, but they also received less focus because their problems were smaller, so it still came together well.

Between the drama, we get to see what daily life is like during several stages of an Antarctic expedition. We see the girls learn how to pitch their tents in sub-zero temperatures, and how to avoid getting lost in a blinding snowstorm, during training. We see them dealing with nausea on the ship ride down. Then we see what meals and work shifts and sleeping arrangements and Christmas are like at the Antarctic base. It sometimes felt like the best written and most moe school video ever. Yuru Camp made me want to go camping, but A Place Further Then the Universe didn’t make me want to go to Antarctica—still, it was a great series that I enjoyed a lot, with light humor to keep the drama from getting overbearing and great arcs for all the main characters.

What made the other two better than Hinako Note?

Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are far and away, unquestionably, undeniably, indubitably better than Hinako Note, and it’s interesting to think about why. After all, from the outside, it might look like they’re all the same—three shows about cute girls doing boring daily stuff.

But there’s one big reason why Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe are better than Hinako Note: both of them are original ideas with carefully thought out casts and clear identities, while Hinako Note is the cute girls doing cute things equivalent of a taco you make by throwing whatever’s left in your refrigerator in a tortilla and microwaving it. Some things it directly stole from other, better anime: Hinako wants to be in the theater club only to find it’s shut down, just like Nagisa in Clannad; Mayu works in a coffee shop, just like the girls in Is the Order a Rabbit?; Kuina eats books, just like Touko from Bungaku Shoujo. Its characters are common tropes: the tiny cute girl who gets mistaken for a child; the tsundere rival who comes to like the main character; the big eater; the gentle, mature sempai; the child teacher. The way they relate to each other is mostly tropes: both Mayu and Yua have yuri crushes on Chiaki, but the show never goes anywhere with this, so it just looks like they were so out of ideas that they just went, “Make two of them in love with Chiaki!”

This refrigerator taco nature of Hinako Note is the main reason why it fails. For a cute girls show, identity is vital. Yuru Camp and A Place Further Than the Universe both have very strong identities. When I read their names, I immediately get a picture of the visuals in my head, the earthy browns and greens and beautiful night sky for Yuru Camp and the muted color palette and bright white snow and orange snowsuits for A Place Further Than the Universe. I immediately identify them with their characters—especially Rin for Yuru Camp, and Hinata or Shirase for A Place Further Than the Universe. I recall specific scenes and events. The whole show—visuals, characters, story, music—comes together in a coherent package. Even less original, more bland cute girls shows can still cohere into an identity, albeit not one that leaves as strong an imprint on the mind as these two extremely good ones create.

But Hinako Note has no identity. It has no idea what it wants to be. The visuals say it wants to be cute, simple, and colorful like Wakaba Girl. It manages to somewhat succeed at that, but it sabotages itself with elements that work against that identity. The attempts at story say it wants to be more of a drama, like Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe. There’s a big difference between the type and scale of problems the characters face in a drama compared to a more simple, iyashikei cute girls doing cute things show like Wakaba Girl or Is the Order a Rabbit?. In these shows, the characters’ problems are small-scale and resolved easily because the show’s goal is a fun, light feeling of daily life. In Hibike! Euphonium or A Place Further Than the Universe, the problems are much bigger and much harder to solve. They come from the characters’ personalities and personal journeys, and showing how the characters resolve them and how it changes them is the show’s goal.

Hinako Note sets up problems that could be on that scale. Getting a theater club running and a theatrical production put on is the subject of an entire story arc in Clannad. And nearly the entire story of Hibike! Euphonium revolves around rivalries, grudges, crushes, and friendships in a club. The story towards the end of Season 1 where Reina is given the solo but Yuuko insists that Kaori should have it is conceptually pretty similar to Yua’s jealousy when Hinako is given the lead role in the play. But Hinako Note simply resolves these problems with a wave of the hand, by pure coincidence, so it utterly fails as a drama. On the other hand, these kinds of problems don’t set up a fun, light, everyday tone, so they don’t fit an identity as an iyashikei show either. Later on, when the show does find some measure of success, it does it by scaling down the problems to Mayu getting lost at the beach and feeling embarrassed because everyone treats her like a child and she just proved them right.

And the unrelenting, utterly pointless fan service works against both identities as well. Neither Yuru Camp nor A Place Further Than the Universe would do something like a scene late in Hinako Note where Hinako and Chiaki are sitting at the table talking, and while Hinako thinks about what she wants to say, the camera pans over Chiaki’s boobs and ass for no reason and then goes under the table and shoots up her skirt apropos of nothing. That’s because they understand the stories they’re telling, and the place that eroticism and fan service have in those stories (pretty much none). A Place Further Than the Universe is a touching story about four girls who become friends and find themselves while doing something extraordinary for personal reasons. If it was the same characters, same story, same visual style, same dialogue, same voice actors, but the camera was constantly focusing on the girls’ boobs and asses and we got shot after shot showing how their boobs bulge out under their orange snowsuits, it would be as if everything happening in the show was occurring under the gaze of some unseen horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. That detracts from everything happening on screen. Just imagine the camera pulled back a little and you could actually see the disgusting horny man leering at the girls from the sidelines. Imagine you could hear his inner monologue thinking, “Look at those great tits! That amazing ass! I want to rub my face on them and touch myself!” while the girls were having personal revelations and learning to survive in Antarctica. It would completely undercut the girls as characters and devalue their personal journeys, which are the things that make this show great. Same for Yuru Camp—the feeling of relaxing immersion is ruined if some horny man is constantly leering at the girls from the sidelines. Both of these shows understood that that sort of eroticism would completely destroy the tone they were trying to create and the feelings they were trying to invoke, that there was nothing inherently sexual or erotic about their characters and that it would be ruinous to try and impose that eroticism on them, and consequently both ended up on this list of most feminist-friendly anime of 2018 that I randomly turned up when I was looking up one of the minor character’s names.

I’m hammering on this point about the fan service so much because it’s the most common mistake for cute girls shows to make. Even K-On got this somewhat wrong, with Mio tripping and showing her panties on stage and Sawako forcibly dressing Mio up in fetish costumes. But K-On minimizes the damage to its tone; we viewers don’t see Mio’s panties, and the fetish costumes aren’t revealing and aren’t framed in an overtly sexual way. And unlike Hinako Note, K-On did this only when it was an actual part of the story. Mio trips. Sawako forces her into costumes. It’s not being imposed on scenes where it doesn’t fit in at all. Eroticism and fan service work when they’re a purposeful part of the show’s story and tone, as in harem and ecchi shows like To-Love-Ru and High School DxD. You may or may not like these shows, but they were made to be sexy and the fan service is part of that purpose. Throwing fan service into a show where it doesn’t fit is like throwing birthday cake into your refrigerator taco. It may taste good in the right setting, but it can’t be just thrown into whatever food you want as some magic spice to improve it. If you put birthday cake in the wrong food, you’ll ruin both the birthday cake and whatever that food was.

“Is the Order a Rabbit?” Quick Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a purebred, dyed in the wool cute girls doing cute things show as much as I have while watching Is the Order a Rabbit? recently. Gochiusa is pretty formulaic, but it has enough charm points, including beautiful art, likeable characters, and absorbing atmosphere, that I had a ton of fun watching it.

The show follows a standard cast of five girls, who live in a town that looks Central European despite being also sort of Japanese, and all work at coffee shops. Chino is an expressionless loli whose father owns Rabbit House and employs the ditzy Cocoa (who also lives with them in their house above the shop) and Rize, a military otaku whose father is super rich and an old buddy of Chino’s father. Chiya is the offbeat scion of Rabbit House’s former rival, a Japanese tea and sweet shop called Ama Usa An, and her childhood friend, the serious and ladylike Syaro, works at Fleur de Lapin, a cafe that specializes in herbal teas. Supporting characters include a novelist named Aoyama Blue Mountain, Cocoa’s older sister Mocha, and Chino’s middle school friends, the tomboyish Maya, and Megu, who takes ballet. There are a few random supernatural elements to the world, mostly revolving around Chino’s grandfather and his Angora rabbit Tippy, which is reminiscent of Aria along with the European-inspired architecture of the town.

I saw Series I back when it first came out, and in my memories it sort of dragged its feet for seven episodes before getting its act together and serving the same kind of dorky but inexplicably funny humor as K-On, as well as amazingly drawn backgrounds and atmosphere that rivaled even Aria, for its last five. That was pretty much how I felt about it this time too. The first seven episodes are pretty and full of anodyne cuteness, but most of the jokes just don’t seem to ever land and the characters don’t develop a whole lot. Then we finally start to learn things about them, starting when Chino gets annoyed at Cocoa for finishing a jigsaw puzzle that Chino wanted to finish on her own. After this, the stories become a lot more character-driven. They’re still slow-paced iyashikei slice of life to the core, but they’re things that happen because of a character’s personality being a certain way, or because of the characters reacting to situations they’ve been placed in, instead of just scenes of the characters doing things the writers have decided would be cute. They’re still cute–painfully adorable, even–but the characters’ parts in the activities feel more distinct in later episodes than in the first seven. I wasn’t sure it would be able to continue into Series II, but it did; while not every episode of Series II was brilliantly paced or written, and some of them had noticeable story problems, they were all at least fun and presented something interesting about the characters.

In my review of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I mentioned that I have a type when it comes to characters in cute girls doing cute things shows: I tend to like the weird ones, then the earnest and serious ones, then the shy ones, in about that order. This pattern holds again for Gochiusa: my favorite is the weird and spacey Chiya, followed by the serious and misfortunate Syaro, and then the shy Chino, with Rize and then Cocoa bringing up the rear.

That said, Chiya never quite reaches her potential as the weird character. Even though Gochiusa doesn’t need to have character arcs to do what it does, Syaro, Chino, and Cocoa actually have small character arcs anyway, but Chiya doesn’t. (Nor does Rize.) I would have liked to see her behave like the sort of person I imagine when I hear the over-the-top poetic names she gave to the items on Ama Usa An’s menu, but she doesn’t live up to that very often. Her other primary role is embarrassing, worrying about, and generally mothering Syaro, but the show is never entirely self-aware about this. I liked the joke in Series II where she wanted to be cuddled by Mocha, but I would’ve liked it more if the show had pointed out that Chiya has the same kind of motherly presence and gone somewhere with the idea that Mocha considered her an equal in some sense as a big sister.

I do like the characters, but none of them are as well realized as the K-On or Yuru Yuri cast (let alone MLP), which meant even though I had fun laughing along with their lives, I didn’t feel as attached to them, and when the show ended, I was pretty satisfied to leave them. Well, I do feel like I might want to check in on Syaro every so often, just to make sure she’s doing all right. Between her poverty, frustrated crush on Rize, bizarre fear of rabbits, constantly having people get her drunk on coffee just because they think it’s fun, getting perved on by Aoyama, and general misfortune, I worry about that girl.

Gochiusa is also really good about making sure everyone gets paired up so we can see how they get along. We see a lot of Cocoa with Chino and Cocoa with Chiya and Rize with Syaro, but we also get to see Chino with Chiya and Rize with Chino and Syaro with Cocoa. Even Maya and Megu and Mocha get to pair up with almost everyone in the main cast for a scene or two. The only character I didn’t find surpassingly adorable and charming was Aoyama Blue Mountain. She’s not that interesting and doesn’t do much of note, and she’s responsible for some of the worst jokes in the show. In general, anytime the show tried to do a sexual joke, it didn’t work for me, and Aoyama looking up Syaro’s skirt was the worst. It was also the only sexual joke that continued past the first seven episodes, and it made me feel a small dread every time a scene would open on the interior of Fleur de Lapin, where Aoyama did her perving. I wanted to see Syaro quit Fleur de Lapin and go work with Chiya at Ama Usa An, where she could wear a nice concealing kimono, but that unfortunately never happened.

On the big scale of cute girls doing cute things shows, Gochiusa doesn’t reach the top tier of K-On, Aria, and Yuru Yuri, and it’s not revolutionary, but I enjoyed it for its cute characters, charming atmosphere, and beautiful scenery. It was good to know this subgenre can still deliver.

How to Reinvigorate Cute Girls Doing Cute Things: Or, A Review of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

The first time I ever knew there were adult male fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I had wandered onto a classmate’s Facebook page and discovered that his feed (or whatever it’s called; I don’t Facebook) was full of My Little Pony porn. Our genius professor had decided Facebook was the perfect way to disseminate class announcements, and this classmate of mine had joined the class group from his personal account. The Pokemon avatar picture he was using caught my eye and induced me to click over to his personal page, where I discovered the existence of My Little Pony porn.

After getting over the initial shock, I read some articles about the so-called “bronies”, and it made sense to me. In fact, the bronies felt like kindred spirits. After all, I was the guy who giggled over the banal daily lives of high school girl bands and girls training to become gondoliers in 24th Century Martian Venice. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was basically a cute girls doing cute things show, but with ponies instead of human girls. So I instantly sympathized with the guys who were into it, because I understood both what they were getting out of it and the shame and isolation they probably felt over the mockery that society would heap on them for liking it.

Now, several years later, I’ve cooled a bit on cute girls doing cute things. I thought maybe I was entirely over the genre, but that doesn’t seem to be true. After all, I checked out a few episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and after a false start when I enjoyed but wasn’t bowled over by the first few episodes, I’ve come to really appreciate the show. And yes, it is just a cute girls doing cute things show with ponies.

I still don’t get the porn, though. They’re ponies. It feels too much like being sexually attracted to Minnie Mouse.

The Boring Reviewing Part

Even though I’m about to heap a lot of compliments on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the show isn’t perfect. Sometimes the story payoffs or the jokes’ punchlines are way too obvious. Sometimes characters act out of character or forget they have certain abilities for the convenience of the plot. Some episodes are extremely light on story content and are basically extended musical numbers. Sometimes the denouement of an episode seems contrived or rushed, as if a few extra scenes were needed to develop the plot threads. (The worst offender on both of the last two counts is probably Magical Mystery Cure, the Season 3 finale, which brings about a vital change in the show within the confines of a rushed episode made up of a cursory setup followed by a pair of long musical numbers.)

I’m also not a big fan of Flash animation. The show does a decent job varying the shots from the typical sideview and establishing a realistic sense of a physical world, which is something Flash animation seems to have a lot of trouble with; most of them end up looking not like a three-dimensional world but like multiple two-dimensional planes superimposed on each other, like a pop-up book or a puppet show or the cutscenes from Disgaea. My Little Pony comes closest of the Flash shows I’ve seen to actually creating a world that feels like a 3D space. I sometimes wish the color palette were a bit more subtle, but that’s just the nature of the My Little Pony toys. It’s not all bad on the art side: the ponies’ expressive faces lead to great reaction shots, and physical artifacts like houses, trains, household objects, jewelry, and clothes are all uniquely designed and feel like an organic part of the world. But I prefer the more realistic and subtle style of anime or Renaissance-era Disney.

Still, it’s pretty amazing what’s been achieved. A show conceived purely as a giant toy commercial for little girls was so well written and designed that it managed to attract hordes of adult male fans (and probably no small number of adult female fans) who personally identify with the characters, and to not only sustain the quality but actually keep getting better across six seasons and 143 episodes so far. The more I read about Lauren Faust, the creative force behind the show’s conception and showrunner for Season 1, the more I respect her. She worked as a writer and director on The Powerpuff Girls, which would definitely go in my top ten of American animated television alongside Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles, and Freakazoid. She clearly identified the problems with children’s programming of her era, such as the vapid, stereotypical characters and overly simplistic stories, and created a fun, unique direction for Friendship is Magic that would let it sell toys while also telling genuine stories. She even fought back, with grace and dignity, against an elitist culture critic who was determined to make out Friendship is Magic as racist, homophobic, and “smart-shaming”. (It’s funny that that last accusation would be lobbed at My Little Pony, of all shows aimed at girls. I’ve seen a lot of these shows with my younger sister; it is the only one of them in which I’ve ever even seen any of the characters pick up a book and read it, and it is one of the few that portrays being bookish or nerdy in a modern way, as a positive trait that can lead you to great things and won’t preclude a healthy, balanced life, instead of lazily recycling old clichés like Spock-speak and big thick glasses.)

The strong plot and character writing is the chief reason for MLP’s success, but it stands out creatively in other ways too. Every few episodes there’s a musical sequence, and I give huge credit to the writers and composers for choosing to go with a classical style for the songs instead of trying to do something more modern-sounding. Other children’s shows that I’ve seen also feature music, but they always try to make it sound current, which often means it sounds dated just a few years after the show first aired. The music of My Little Pony is, in the main, strongly influenced by the Disney musicals, but it experiments with various genres—pop, country, a capella, European folk music—which gives it a timeless sound. It’s a big deal to me that, watching Season 1 seven years later, I’m not wincing at a bunch of music that sounded trendy in 2010 and now sounds like bad music from 2010.

The Fanboying

Whenever I watch a cute girls doing cute things show, the first thing I do, after I’ve watched enough to get to know and love the characters a little, is decide who’s my favorite. Like most fans of this sort of anime, I have a type. I like the weird ones, the earnest and serious ones, and the shy ones, more or less in that order. Extra points given for smartness or sarcasm. Execution matters; in a given show, the shy character might speak to me more than the weird character and end up my favorite. Bonus for combining: Azusa of K-On is sarcastic while also being earnest and serious; Kagami of Lucky Star is sarcastic while also being smart; and Alice of Aria is weird while also being sarcastic, plus she’s a little serious and earnest and sometimes a bit shy. Naturally, all three are my favorite character from their respective shows.

By great good fortune, My Little Pony has a weird character, a smart character who’s earnest and serious, and a shy character. I went for the shy for number one here: Fluttershy is my favorite. She’s adorable. The writers’ American cultural background also means that Fluttershy ends up in the same kind of predicaments that I did and sometimes still do as a shy person in America, so she’s easier to identify with than a lot of the shy characters in anime, who live in a land where shyness is regarded differently. It’s refreshing, too, because it’s been far too long since I saw an anime with a good shy character. They used to be a mainstay of 90’s and early 2000’s anime, but the type didn’t evolve and the only two characters that come to mind when I try to think of good shy characters from recent shows are K-On’s Mio Akiyama (my third favorite from that show, after Azusa and Mugi) and Shiori Shiomiya of The World Only God Knows. There’s a whole other essay on what makes a good shy character, but Fluttershy really hits the mark. She has a personality beyond just being shy (unlike, say, Naru Sekiya from Hanayamata); she has to deal with real, ridiculous situations that only seem to happen to shy people; and even though others, especially Rainbow Dash, get frustrated with how shy and timid she is and try to teach her to be more assertive, there are also plenty of episodes that focus on the positive side, the kind and gentle nature that her shyness is part and parcel of. Fluttershy is content with who she is, and there’s no arc in the show about her opening up or becoming someone different and supposedly “better”, unlike, say, the aforementioned Naru Sekiya. Sometimes she has to step outside her comfort zone and speak up, but this doesn’t mean she has to change herself. There’s also never any suggestion that only Fluttershy needs to do this; all of the main characters (known punningly as the Mane Six among fans) have to step outside their comfort zones and learn new things. In a world where every shy character is just a setup for an arc where they either become assertive and outgoing or lose their minds and start flipping out and killing people, I love the way the writers approach Fluttershy’s character.

I’d like to say that earnest, bookish Twilight Sparkle is my second favorite and spastic joking party planner Pinkie Pie is my third, but fashion designer Rarity is a confounding factor. In the earlier seasons I considered her my second favorite, followed by Twilight and Pinkie Pie. She makes me laugh. Her Transatlantic accent and accompanying swank slang always make me chuckle (in one episode she sorts good apples from bad apples and proclaims them “lovely” or “horrid”). Her terrible date with a rich guy she just met in the Gala episode towards the end of Season 1 evoked the perfect mix of laughter and pity. She’s the closest thing the show has to a sarcastic character. (Pinkie Pie’s sister Maud doesn’t count, though she definitely makes me laugh.) I also love how hardworking she is, always bent over a sewing machine making something for someone.

Pinkie Pie has become some sort of meme in certain circles due to her ability to occasionally break the fourth wall. There was even a video about a death battle between her and Deadpool. Of course, they didn’t fight, but instead became best friends, broke the fourth wall together, and celebrated Deadpool’s birthday. What made that video great was how true it kept to Pinkie Pie’s character: she’s wacky and crazy and can be annoying sometimes, but she cares a lot about others, always going out of her way to make friends and to try and make sure everyone has fun and feels included. She’s cartoonish and chaotic, but also compassionate, and even feels realistic and fleshed out as a character, gaining depth by sometimes struggling with the more straightlaced and haughty parts of society, or the more immature parts of her own personality. It takes a long time to get to this point, though. In the earlier seasons Pinkie seems to just flash in for a joke or a song, then flash out. She’s usually not even visible in serious scenes. It isn’t until later that she starts to feel like a three-dimensional character.

I personally identify with Twilight Sparkle probably even more than Fluttershy, at least in the early seasons. When the series starts she’s got her head so far into books that she barely acknowledges anyone. Across the events of the first episode, she learns to value her connections with friends and what she can learn from friendship, but she also stays smart, studious, book-loving, and a bit tightly wound. Even in Season 6, where the story has conspired to force her to lighten up a little, we don’t lose track of that basic part of her personality.

No matter how you slice it, Applejack and Rainbow Dash are at the bottom of my list. Not that I don’t like them; I just like them less than the others. Both get several great episodes where their characters get expanded beyond “pony who says ‘tarnation’” and “brash tomboy pony who loves speed”. I’d probably give Dash the slight edge over AJ because she was at the center of two of my favorite episodes in the series. The first is “Read It and Weep”, in which a hospitalized Rainbow Dash learns to enjoy reading and becomes a huge fangirl of the Daring Do books, which star an Indiana Jones-like female pegasus named Daring Do. I especially enjoyed a scene where Rainbow Dash says reading is for eggheads and all the other ponies, including the not at all bookish Applejack and Pinkie Pie, laugh and tell her that everyone enjoys reading. The second is “Stranger than Fan Fiction”, in which Rainbow Dash attends a Daring Do convention and meets a fanboy named Quibble Pants. They get along swimmingly at first, sharing their obsession for the character, but later start to argue since Quibble hates the later books and Rainbow likes them. (All the ponies in My Little Pony have an emblem on their flank called a cutie mark that signifies their special talent; Quibble’s is a speech balloon emoji, signifying that his special talent is complaining on the Internet. Even though Equestria doesn’t have Internet yet.) The episode packs in a ton of fun references to fandom and fan culture, my favorite being the creepy Daring Do body pillow cover that flashes by in a montage, without feeling either condescending or exploitative about it.

It’s kind of a toss-up between AJ and Dash, though. As good as several of her episodes were, Rainbow Dash has a self-absorbed, arrogant, and callous side to her that makes her harder to like than the others. Applejack is the opposite: she’s very likeable, but as far as I can remember she never starred in a good story. She’s extremely hardworking, competent, ethical, loves her family, is involved with her community, is grounded and knows who she is. That seems to have made it very hard to write stories for her, so most of the stories that center around Applejack involve her acting in some way that seems inconsistent with how she is in other episodes. (My least favorite example is “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off” from Season 6; it had an obvious setup for a message about not working yourself to death, which is such a vital message in this day and age that I would’ve forgiven it for being the same message as Season 1’s “Applebuck Season”, but instead they went for a payoff that was strange and hard to swallow.) The best Applejack episodes are the ones where she goes up against Flim and Flam, a pair of carnival barker ponies who show up in town every so often with some sort of snake oil scheme. These are episodes that don’t usually involve her learning anything or growing as a person/pony; they’re tests of her existing character, not transformative. They also work because the somewhat bland Applejack has the flamboyant Flim and Flam to play off of.

The Quintessence of Cute Girls Doing Cute Things

If you don’t believe that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a cute girls doing cute things show, let’s strip away all the trappings, the art style, the voice actors, all of that, and just look at the premise. A cute girl, a powerful student of magic who loves reading and being organized, is sent by her magic teacher to live in a rustic town. She meets a girl who is shy and quiet and loves animals; an athletic tomboy; a wacky, crazy girl who lives in la-la land; a tough, straightforward farm girl; and a high-class girl who loves fashion and making dresses. The six of them soon become best friends and discover the power of friendship, after which they spend their days having tea parties and sleepovers at each other’s houses, organizing and attending festivals to celebrate various holidays, enjoying hobbies, and learning lessons about friendship.

That sounds like a cute girls doing cute things show to me.

Of course, they’re not at a school or in a goofing off club, but those are far from necessary elements. A raw, stripped down minimalism is an essential part of cute girls doing cute things, which imposes constraints that can make the genre hard to write well, but watching MLP: FiM, I’ve realized that the minimalism can also be liberating because it means there are fewer constraints than average on the world you can create or the kind of personalities and relationship dynamics you can explore. Earlier cute girls doing cute things, like Aria, Azumanaga Daioh, and Ichigo Marshmallow, felt more creative and open to possibility than the newer shows. Then K-On came along and solidified the “in a school in a goof-off club” paradigm, and constrained the genre in a way that eventually became stultifying. As Eren Jaeger would put it, the genre became like livestock in a pen, instead of being like starving wolves roaming in the forest looking for stuff to kill. (“Kill” is to be understood as a metaphor for “overwhelm with cute and gentle feelings”, and the starving wolves are really more like adorable bunnies. Or unicorns. Or pegasi. Or alicorns. Or earth ponies.)

I’ve touched on what makes a cute girls doing cute things show previously, but let’s codify it a bit. It turns out there are six elements which come together to make a harmonious expression of cute girls doing cute things. I like to call them the Elements of Harmony. All six are abstract qualities that can’t be boiled down into a formula, but have to come from a place of feeling on the creators’ parts.

A cute girls doing cute things show is fun and has a lot of laughter. The most successful ones all have a festive atmosphere, whether it’s celebrating the small treasures of daily life like Aria, highlighting the good times of youth like K-On, or showcasing the characters’ unique way of looking at the world like GA.

A cute girls doing cute things show is kind and gentle. The characters don’t have to be perfect, but they’re good at heart and soothing to be around. The world may have dangers, but the characters aren’t under constant threat and for the most part live quiet, happy lives. If the humor gets too cruel or the stories get too chaotic, the show slips into being a wacky comedy, which can be a fun genre but is definitely distinct from cute girls doing cute things. (For me, this was the main failing of Anne-Happy as cute girls doing cute things.)

A cute girls doing cute things show is honest. Most important is emotional honesty: we should always be able to relate to the joys and the travails of the cute girls on some level. A lot of anime that I’ve seen recently fail to connect with me because they lack emotional honesty. The characters’ emotions are illogical, strange, unrelatable, or just not there, either because of bad writing, because the situation creating the emotion is too rarefied, or because the writers are relying too much on clichés. (I just watched the first episode of Eromanga-sensei, the all new, no different series from Oreimo creator Tsukasa Fushimi, and really felt disconnected from the characters due to the bizarre, unrelatable situation and overreliance on clichés.) Honesty means that sad and unpleasant things are given their due as well. The senpais have to graduate; the best friends have to split up; the concert has to go badly sometimes. The characters can’t wave a magic wand and make it all go away, but they can face the situation with optimism and try to find the good in it in spite of their sadness. It’s also important that the show feels genuine; if there’s even a hint that the show was just a cynical money grab or that it was written by people who don’t respect the characters and the work, it will fall apart.

A cute girls doing cute things show is generous with showing us the characters and their lives. When I was first getting into anime, I always loved the slice of life portions of anime that were about something else. There was an episode of Dragon Ball Z, for example, where Goku gets a driver’s license. He doesn’t fight any planet-destroying monsters or anything, he just tries to pass a driving exam despite being a barbarian and outcast from society. I really enjoyed that episode. It was a fun break from bashing each others’ heads in and hair that got progressively bigger and blonder. There was also an episode of Evangelion where Shinji and Asuka have to sync up their movements to be able to fight off an Angel that can split itself into two. The episode has a couple of fight scenes and some loud comedy that hasn’t aged very well, but it also has a lot of quiet moments where we just learn things about the characters, and I loved that. Pretty much every show back then would have a couple of episodes like that, but because the main focus of the show was something else, the quieter character moments were doled out in miserly little dollops across multiple episodes of a long series, and I never got enough to feel satisfied. That’s why Tenchi Muyo was such a happy discovery; whatever other weird stuff was going on, most episodes managed to include at least a couple moments like this for at least one character. Cute girls doing cute things is extremely generous with these moments. They’re not a brief diversion from hunting youkai or engaging in high-stakes mahjong battles; they are the show, and anything else is the brief diversion.

A cute girls doing cute things show is loyal to its cute girls. As we learn about the girls and see them in new situations, we need to be surprised and delighted by what we learn, but surprise should never come at the expense of delight. We should be delighted because what we learned is surprising but also not unexpected based on what we know so far about the character. A cute girls doing cute things show can have character arcs where the girls grow and change as they story goes on, but these arcs should never involve betraying a character’s essential nature. A character should not change into an entirely different person.

Finally, a cute girls doing cute things show needs magic. When the ingredients are all just right, they combine into an alchemical reaction that creates a particular dynamic that makes the show magical.

The Lessons We Can Learn From the Ponies

So, going back to My Little Pony, what exactly about it feels so fresh and interesting? It’s a bit hard to pin down, and partially I have to fall back on vague arguments about approaching the genre with fresh eyes. My Little Pony is an American production whose creators had most likely never heard of K-On or any other cute girls doing cute things. (Though some of the in-jokes in later seasons suggest that someone on the staff was an anime fan.) Their aim in creating the series was just to sell toys. It could only have turned out so well because of the creative integrity of Faust and her team; most shows created to sell toys, and this includes anime, are soulless. But a creator with talent and integrity can make something worthwhile from even an unpromising start, and that seems to be what happened with MLP. Since it’s a convergent evolution of cute girls doing cute things, it retains enough familiar elements to be recognizable, but does enough things different to feel fresh.

The most important part of cute girls doing cute things is the characters—the cute girls—whose virtues were enumerated above, but my current best answer for why the show feels so reinvigorating is the second most important part, the setting. My Little Pony takes place in a fantasy world of ponies, unicorns, dragons, and other magical creatures. The main characters live in a rural village called Ponyville (yes, all the placenames are horse puns), but we also see big cities, enchanted castles, frontier towns, and a city in the clouds where pegasi live. The world isn’t as artistically striking or detailed as the Neo-Venezia of Aria, but it has the same kind of feeling, a mixture of fantastical strangeness and homey nostalgia that comes from the blend of familiar and unfamiliar elements.

The world of Equestria gives the MLP writers a freedom that isn’t to be found in a school in a goofing off club. The main characters are all of indeterminate age, still young enough to be learning but old enough to be independent and supporting themselves. Most episodes are slice of life and focus on one character or a pairing of characters interacting, learning a lesson, and having fun, like most cute girls doing cute things shows. Some episodes combine slice of life with fun worldbuilding that fleshes out Equestria and the pony society, the same way Aria would slip in episodes like the visit to Al’s underground gravity control center or Akatsuki’s floating island so we could learn more about how Aqua works. Season openers and closers are usually bigger stories with full struggles against villains. We haven’t seen anything like this in cute girls doing cute things that I can think of, but harem shows like Tenchi Muyo and early Negima use a similar structure. Three of the villains so far have reformed and become interesting characters in their own rights, again like Tenchi Muyo and Negima have done. Thanks to the setting, the Mane Six can have the special abilities they need to fight these villains while allowing those abilities to be a natural part of their world. They aren’t special abilities in this world, they’re just facts of their biology. Rainbow Dash’s speed is just her world’s form of training to become an elite athlete, and Twilight’s magic is just her world’s form of studying to become a scholar, and both have developed these abilities as part of their careers. This is hard to make natural in a more realistic setting; most anime try to justify the existence of powers with some sort of threat that necessitates them. Probably the closest any anime I’ve seen has come to pulling off this sort of mundane magic as an organic part of the world is Someday’s Dreamers, with Kiki’s Delivery Service a close runner-up. I give Someday’s Dreamers the edge because it had actually worked out how magic had changed society, whereas in Kiki’s the wider world is still pretty much oblivious to magic. Flying Witch also had a good go at it, with similar results to Kiki’s; it struggles early on to keep reminding us that Makoto is a witch, but in the later episodes starts to capitalize more effectively on it.

The freedom to do these stories helps keep the series from feeling stale or stuck in a rut, unlike some shows I could name that had to cram in two visits to the exact same beach house. The Mane Six’s independence, the fact that they’re leading their own lives somewhat freely instead of being constrained to a school or a training program, also helps open up the story possibilities. Rainbow Dash can run off and join the Wonderbolts for a few episodes, while Rarity opens a boutique in the city and Pinkie Pie clones herself in a magical lake, because they’re all autonomous quasi-adults in a magical fantasy world instead of human teenagers in the real world who have to be doing things that human teenagers do in the real world.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has achieved something that feels like a combination of mainstream cute girls doing cute things with the potential for worldbuilding and story variety that we get from a fantasy slice of life story like a Haibane Renmei or a Flying Witch, to the great benefit of both genres. I’d love to see some great fantasy cute girls doing cute things anime along the same lines, perhaps something like Komorebi no Kuni but with the deeper writing of MLP. But even more than that, I’d love for the people making these anime to learn to take more risks, try new things, expand the genre, instead of immediately locking themselves in a school in a goofing off club without taking the time to explore the options. I don’t believe we’ve seen everything this genre can give us yet.

Why it's so Hard to Deconstruct Cute Girls Doing Cute Things

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.

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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.

Why it's so hard to write Cute Girls doing Cute Things

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?)

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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...