Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Adorable Young Women Performing Lovable Activities
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mdo7
 Posts: 8242 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Nice to see This Week in Anime are now talking about cute girl doing cute thing genre even though it's not my flavor or genre that I liked, but once in a while you have something like this that doesn't really add anything to that. But kudo to you guys for mentioning Lucky Star.
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2568 Location: Online Terminal |
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I thought the thing with "moe" was that the cute girl did not do cute things, or in fact anything. She was just kind of there and existed primarily for the male audience to fawn over and project various hero complexes upon. Anything that resembled a personality or more than one or two character layers would disqualify a character from being "moe"
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4663 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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The Azumanga Daioh anime was really the template for the whole CGDCT anime genre, coming out in 2002, a whole five years before Lucky Star; so old, in fact, that it's still in 4:3. Another notable thing about Azumanga Daioh is that K-On! stole... I mean "paid homage" to one of its biggest jokes, three vacation episodes, one for each year of high school, where they're staying at the rich girl's impressively large summer house only for the rich girl to apologize and tell the other girls that it's their family's smallest summer house, and then they're at an even bigger summer house the second year, only for the rich girl to apologize again and say it's still not their biggest summer house, which, of course, you don't get to see until the third and final year of high school. I wish more semi-recent CGDCT anime would get Blu-Ray releases in North America. I've been pining for a physical release of the Gabriel DropOut anime for the past eight years and recently, I've watched enough clips from Asobi Asobase to want to own it as well. |
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EmperorBrandon
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 2248 Location: Springfield, MO |
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Those two series definitely stick out to me too among shows I'd really love to have on home video but seemingly are never going to get one. Getting the manga of GabDro from Crunchyroll is hard enough since they didn't even carry Vol. 13 for long and had to go elsewhere to buy it (I'm thankful on getting caught up on previous volumes just before it seems like they purged most of the series from their store). |
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Rogueywon
Posts: 309 |
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Yes, I was going to say, AzuDai was a lot earlier than Lucky Star and probably did a lot more to lay down the template. The funny thing with Lucky Star is that while it's often viewed with rose tinted glasses now, it was hardly universally loved at the time. Expectations for it were sky high, as KyoAni went into it with the tailwind of the first season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya behind them, but the early episodes of the show are pretty awful (as in, just plain boring) and were recognised as such at the time. It found its groove eventually, but the shadow of Chocolate Cornet-gate hung over it for years. |
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SlimeDrawsNear
Posts: 15 |
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Azumanga Daioh appears to be on HIDive in NA at least. I even started up an episode to make sure it was there.
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prime_pm
 Posts: 2496 Location: Your Mother's Bedroom |
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Exactly. I hate how much Azumanga Diaoh has been overshadowed by Lucky Star's popularity. Just because LS piggybacked on the Haruhi craze, people misremember it more fondly than AD. Lucky Star was boring and static compared to Azumanga's more dynamic style. The dead mom watching over her deadbeat husband and daughter ain't got shit on Sakaki's struggles to find a cat that likes her. Maybe if AZ had fifty Goddamn colors of hair? |
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Tenchi
Posts: 4663 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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Another CGDCT (but with more male supporting characters than the average CGDCT show) that I've been waiting for a North American DVD or Blu-Ray release for nearly a decade longer than even Gabriel Dropout is Minami-ke but that one never got licensed for physical even during the Gold Rush days of anime home video licensing of the 2000s (and only the fourth season has ever been licensed for streaming) so I can only presume the reason it never got one is that the licensor was asking for too much. The plus side is that, with the announcement of a fifth season last summer, perhaps there will be enough renewed interest in Minami-ke for a company like Discotek to give a physical release of at least the first season a shot. |
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meiam
Posts: 3687 |
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I mean, it found its groove by replacing a bunch of people (iirc) mid production, there's a reason there's a massive swing in quality after episode 3. I'd also second Azumanga as the template CGDCT, but I'd say K-ON is the standard bearer for it, more than lucky star. Lucky star was massive, but only in the hardcore anime community (trough constant reference), K-ON actually broke out of the niche community. Its strange that there's no recognized male equivalent "Handsome boy being handsome", when there's plenty of example of it, like Free. On this season crops, Mono has been pretty disappointing without being terrible. It lean way too much into the travel advertisement, which really brought down laid back camp S3 (they gotta be getting money at this point). As a results, it discard everything about its premise, last episode saw a bunch of teenager go to a wine tasting, they didn't even bother to try and shoe horn the picture aspect, they just hanged out in stores... The character just aren't strong enough to carry the show on their own when the premise fall flat like this. |
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quoss
Posts: 132 |
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Didn't realize "cute girls doing cute things" was meant seriously as a genre. I'm still not totally convinced it is, actually.. It sounds like "girls with guns." They're both relevant and can grab attention but I assume innate silliness/tossing to the wind kind of attitude when I hear it. Idk. Am I being pedantic? What's more pedantic, discussing the wherefores of a genre name or doubting whether it's even actually a genre name and not just a nickname. ....Maybe both are about the same lol. <3
I couldn't follow the bit about the name being somehow derogatory/dismissive/tricky either. If someone took it to be, I'd think they were probably not a nice person to take issue with such a concept and leave it at that. No fault of the name or the idea. The comparison to "cool dudes doing cool things" said, moreover, that CGDCT implies the cool guys are the default. And it doesn't. There's no such implication. If thinking of CGDCT makes you think of CDDCT, then bam, you just have two different 'genres' that exist in a large pool. Where's the part that says one is the standard and the other one isn't? it is not there and that assumption that it is is whack. By the way, I compartmentalize anime with "little boys screaming" and "cool guy syndrome" all the time. I filter out for it and it is very effective. These names of mine are definitely negative in tone since that's how I use them; "cute girls doing cute things" has a totally different sound and yeah I'm a little skeeved at the idea of something so neutral being cause for men to think women need defending for it. Also want to reiterate as the reviewers kind of did at the start and throughout: Let men like cute girls. If someone created a fictional cute girl, she's probably designed to be lovable and the gender of an audience needn't invite immediate side-eyes. Doubting an audience of men for enjoying "cute girls doing cute things" is sexist as all hell and keeps men in a tiny box where they're only allowed to like cool dudes doing cool things and screw that, I'm sure we can all agree. It's cool when a cute girl is into a brawny dudes boxing anime but creepy when a cool dude is into a young girls reading manga anime? Outta here with that (And not sayin the reviewers said contrary; I just wanted to soapbox.)
The definition of moe I've had in mind for like 16 years is two-part. One: Feeling. A feeling of affection that may "burn" so to speak, where you want to protect and cherish the moe character. Two: Suiting particular established archetypes. Being tsundere is automatically moe. Meganekuu? moe. Genki girl? moe. |
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Cryssoberyl
 Posts: 273 |
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People going on and on about Azumanga and Lucky Star and completely forgetting the franchise that, with its multiple seasons spanning from 2007 to 2013, is the one that actually "set the template" for CGDCTs, or at least the particular subdivision of color-coded-four-girl-slice-of-life that is what most people think of when the term is used (unlike its broader application in this article):
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MiniMarps
 Posts: 188 |
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I do use it occasionally in certain contexts, but I’ve personally never appreciated the term “cute girls doing cute things.” I think comedies should be called comedies, iyashikei should be called iyashikei, etc., regardless of the cast’s genitalia. Justice for Daily Lives of High School Boys!
Also, quick clarification: Hidamari Sketch is the one that “got the ball rolling.” Its anime adaptation slightly predates Lucky Star’s, was a bigger deal in Japan (see: its four seasons to Lucky Star’s one), and played a much bigger role in establishing the template that its many, many successors from Kirara and elsewhere would come to follow. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1796 |
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One factor I find interesting is that the importance of the "doing cute things" part has increased over time, so the more recent shows put much more importance on the activity the girls are interested in, sometimes just as a backdrop but other times as the focus of the whole show. Earlier shows like Nichijou, Azumanga and Lucky Star didn't really have a specific activity as the focus (Lucky Star in particular seems determined to not be "about" anything) they just put a group of girls together in a school setting and let funny things happen to them. More recent shows really tend to focus on the "doing cute things" part of the title, picking an activity and having them explore it in depth.
Of course, some shows, like the aforementioned Food For the Soul, just use the activity as an excuse to get the characters together, but it seems like an unwritten rule that there has to be some sort of activity involved to set the show apart. |
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MiniMarps
Posts: 188 |
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It’s funny you phrase it like that, because it actually was an unwritten rule at Manga Time Kirara for a while. (We can almost certainly blame K-On’s runaway success with the formula for that.) Like I was just reading about how Stardust Telepath, for example, wasn’t initially pitched as a “club activities” story, but Kirara demanded the creator rework it as such. Thankfully, if some of the more recent Kirara serializations are any indication, they seem to be easing off on that approach somewhat (probably because nothing they’ve tried since K-On has been as successful as K-On), but at this point it'll probably always be deeply ingrained in the genre's fabric. |
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Piglet the Grate
 Posts: 1439 Location: North America |
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Yuru CampΔ was originally published in Manga Time Kirara Forward - I would be interested in how it compares to K-ON!/K-ON!! in sales. This is probably not right, but I find something hilarious in people getting triggered by K-ON!/K-ON!! - it is just light entertainment after all. And contrary to the fear mongering of the day, similar shows did not come to dominate anime (that of course was Narou-kei isekai).
Are we still in high school here? One would think that people in a group still near the social margins (i.e., anime watchers) would have a more tolerant viewpoint, or is it wanting to rule the roost in a niche to compensate for being denigrated by wider society (which in the USA is still Real Men™ watch and talk about stick and ball sports and Hollywood* action shows and movies)? *Well, not so much in recent years based on viewership, but that is another (and off-topic) discussion. |
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