Not Your Average Anime about Cute Girls Doing Cute Things

Of all the tropes and genres to repeat themselves over the years in anime, perhaps none have garnered as controversial a reputation yet passionate a following as Cute Girls Doing Cute Things (CGDCT). Well, besides isekai perhaps, but I'm not talking about isekai in-depth today. I'm talking about soft doe-eyed girls in anime brought together by a shared (and maybe somewhat out-there) interest and having a good time with it and each other. K-ON! is this trope's most popular example. The girls are part of their school's light music club and they put a school concert on in the end, but the content of K-ON! is less about the music the girls make and more about them being friends and doing things together.

CGDCT shows can be popular with female audiences, though without going into the weeds on any specific show, many have been at least initially marketed towards boys and men, and that demographic still makes up much of their primary audience today. Now I'm not judging anyone solely because they enjoy some CFDCT. I've seen and enjoyed some too, like Hidarimari Sketch – a story about cute girls doing cute things together in an art school – and they, like Hidarimari Sketch, don't all lean toward being suggestive. Shows with this trope do set up expectations though for the kinds of content you're generally meant to get from them: innocence, simplicity, comfy, relaxing. They call it iyashikei in Japanese, or “healing.” They are low-stakes and not terribly thought-provoking content meant to relax you after a long and stressful day, like cute cat videos, but it's CGDCT anime.

With any popular trope or genre like isekai (alright, I'll discuss isekai a little more), eventually creators will produce works that will comment on, parody, twist, and subvert the standard formula that initially brought them so much popularity. KONOSUBA is an isekai parody. The Devil Is a Part-Timer! is a reverse-isekai. So I'm a Spider, So What?, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime twist its isekai protagonists into monsters instead of humans. Re:Zero is arguably a dark isekai subversion if we're comparing it to the earlier power isekai fantasy, Sword Art Online, the show that really kicked off the anime isekai craze. So that's isekai… how about some less standard CGDCT shows then?

Starting with an anime-inspired in part by K-ON!, Bocchi the Rock! is an example of a show that uses CGDCT to illustrate social anxiety while being a little more serious about exploring its musical element. Hitori “Bocchi” Goto is a lonely girl who desperately wants friends and others to like her, yet has no idea how to interact with people beyond her family. She is terrified of even trying, lest she only makes others dislike her. She gets inspired in middle school after watching a rock band get good at the electric guitar, hoping people will just come to her and overlook her social deficiencies because music and guitars are cool. Years later, now in high school but with no friends still, she begins carrying her guitar around to class, hoping that alone will get her noticed. It works and it doesn't, as her plan absolutely flops at school and her efforts are only salvaged when a girl from another school, Nijika Ichiji, asks her to fill in her band after their previous guitarist ghosted.

The whole event demonstrates a social truth about hobby groups, especially the more niche ones, whether it's a rock band or an anime Discord. They're not only places where people with shared interests can find and chat with each other. They are also spaces where the lonely and anxious can find friends and a sense of belonging and validation. That connection to a shared passion can be the first foot someone needs to start a relationship. It can also be what makes them realize people can have other similarities besides a common interest, even if they seem so different and impressive in other ways. Bocchi's bandmate Kita Ikuyo is a social butterfly who is also very anxious about how others see her. Her mentor figure Hiroi Kikuri is an amazing bassist who still suffers from anxiety as an adult and copes with it with alcohol. They might not be handling their social anxieties very healthily, but their struggles show Bocchi that she isn't alone in hers either.

A shared passion can only kick the door down to a relationship. Whether it continues and deepens depends on other things. Nijika might have only asked Bocchi first into her band despite her social anxiety due to her guitar talents. She then grows to like Bocchi beyond what she can provide musically. Finally, she begins considering her a good friend after she realizes the earnest lengths Bocchi will go on stage to see Nijika's rock band dreams come true. That dynamic goes for the rest of the band: Bocchi works hard to not let her bandmates down, which pushes her band friends to work hard to not let Bocchi down.

Where Bocchi the Rock! shows how a shared passion can bring people together, CGDCT shows Stella Women's Academy, High School Division Class C3 (C3-bu) demonstrates how the same interest can alienate a person from others when taken to extreme lengths. Similarly anxious like Bocchi, Yura Yamato is a friendless girl in high school who is invited and ends up joining the school airsoft club to connect with the other girls and have fun with them. With her new friends being initially more skilled at airsoft than her, and her club competing in a match she ends up flopping in, Yura resolves to get better at airsoft to avoid being judged and not let her clubmates down. That resolution becomes an obsession as she strives not just to catch up in skill, but to exceed theirs and push them into taking future competitions just as seriously. That seriousness turns into ruthlessness as Yura pushes the club to prioritize victory over the members' feelings.

It all turns C3-bu into something like the Evangelion of CGDCT airsoft anime, with scenes of a lonely and alienated Yura sitting in vacant moving trains. Yura's desperation to keep her friends leads her to obsess with getting good at airsoft, which along the way leads to her prioritizing the sport above her friends, which then leads to her leaving them for a more hardcore airsoft club, and finally ends with even the head of that club being so repulsed by her prioritizing her dub over helping an injured teammate that she kicks her off it. Having lost the belonging she once felt with her previous friends and even the validation of others respecting her airsoft skills, she spirals into depression. She mires in it until her old friends approach her to make up and have a friendly match. They reconnect, and Yura arrives at a less existential and healthier relationship with airsoft: just one interest among many that brings people together, one that she and her friends all share and enjoy.

Unlike other military-hobby-adjacent-CGDCT shows like Sabagebu! – Survival Game Club! –, which at one point revels in gore-fake displays of girls pretending to kill each other with their firearm-simulated airsoft guns, C3-bu is subtly critical of militarism. C3-bu ties the reason the head of the hardcore airsoft club rejects Yura to her losing her airsoft mentor. He was also a soldier who later got killed during a military deployment. CGDCT-with-military-hardware-show Girls und Panzer (GuP) adopts a similar attitude to tanks as C3-bu adopts with guns. People can be enthusiasts of them without necessarily glorifying war.

GuP makes this point in the tankery sports match between Miho Nishizumi's school team of just several tanks and an American-themed competing school of very many –a nod to the US's reputation in WWII of being the mass-producing Arsenal of Democracy. To disable the other team's flagged tank to win the match, part of the American team tries to use a radio tapping tactic to pinpoint their opponents' positions. Miho's team soon turns the tactic against them, ultimately leading to their competitor's flag tank being taken out. Kay, the American team's captain, congratulates them for an enjoyable match, to which Miho responds with confusion. The match was intense the outcome at the end could have gone either way, using tactics that could arguably be called underhanded. Miho also has bad memories of playing for a different team that was ruthless about victory and would not have a defeat like Kay's well. Kay replies that tankery is not war but a sport, and with GuP's tanks specially designed not to blow up, tankery should be nothing else except good competitive fun with your passionate tank friends.

Using CGDCT expectations, C3-bu! and GuP especially reimagine military arms, gear that resembles or were once weapons of war, as enjoyable and peaceful sports equipment –which is not too far removed from Hayao Miyazaki's attempts in The Wind Rises to appreciate planes for the freedom and flight they offer through the skies over the war and terror they can also wreak on people from above. Puella Magia Madoka Magica does some reimagining itself. Its world is nowhere near as innocent as its CGDCT set-up had many viewers misleadingly believe.

While Madoka Magica may be primarily known as a magical girl show, the character designs of the same illustrator for Hidamari Sketch still had a similar effect of fooling audiences, even with Gen Urobuchi writing. Madoka Kaname and her friend are introduced to the existence of magical girls through a magical girl mentor who treats them to tea parties while showing them the job's ropes, a mysterious magical girl warns them not to join their ranks lest they regret it, and a cute mascot creature who wants them to become magical girls either way. Darkness lurks in the back before making its jump scare three episodes in as the mentor girl dies suddenly and violently and the surviving girls' cute faces are stricken with horror and despair. Betrayed expectations lead to shocking contrast as Madoka's sullied innocence opens her to a greater truth of a cruel and indifferent universe that turns and grinds to the suffering of cute magical girls. With this cursed knowledge, she is offered a wish in exchange for her life and death as yet another cute magical girl.

In the face of this cosmic nihilism to the suffering of magical girls, in the wake of the despairs and deaths of all the magical girls would want nothing more than Madoka Magica to become something closer to a CGDCT story – where fighting all the supernatural cursed things is closer to an afterschool activity that all the magical girls do together, bond over, and maybe even have some fun with – Madoka sacrifices herself and makes that wish. She rewrites the larger narrative of Madoka Magica to be closer to what she as the magical girl Madoka always imagined it to be: one that unfortunately can't release magical girls from all danger, but encourages them to fight together and suffer less for it.

The popular expectations of CGDCT stories can make them particularly effective material for horror. CGDCT shows are supposed to invoke sentiments of iyashikei and innocence, and to endanger, corrupt, and violate those feelings is horrific. Madoka Magica is a show that combines CGDCT expectations with that violating horror to devastating effect. Another show that does that related combination quite well – CGDCT slice of life and more traditional horror – is School-Live!, also known as Gakkō Gurashi!.

School-Live! unveils its horror in its first episode, pretending to be a cutesy comfy show about girls like Yuki Takeya having silly anime comedy chats and banter with each other while sleeping at school, eating club-cooked food, growing rooftop veggies, and starring solemnly out into the distance when Yuki's not in the room. The end of the episode reveals that a zombie apocalypse has struck, everyone except the members of Yuki's School Living Club is dead and turned, Yuki herself is suffering from a delusion where she thinks everything and everyone is fine, and the rest of her friends play along. They play along to protect Yuki from mentally breaking, thereby protecting themselves from mentally succumbing. Yuki is an innocent happy-go-lucky girl who cheers them up with reminders of simpler and happier times, and to lose her or her innocence means having nothing to distract them from the trauma of everything they lost and everything they could lose. They keep to as stereotypically comfy a CGDCT routine (with a survival theme) as they can manage in their situation.

Having a routine stressful time distracts the mind from the full reality and keeps everyone sane. Eventually, they have to graduate from the sanctuary and stasis of their artificial school life, as the dread of a zombie reality builds and culminates into zombies literally breaking into the school building they live in despite their best efforts to barricade all the openings. They must face a reality that can no longer be denied now that it's figuratively and literally staring at them while approaching with mouths wide.

What are your thoughts on these more unconventional shows about Cute Girls Doing Cute Things? The shows discussed here aren't meant to be an exhaustive list. Do you know of any other CGDCT shows that do something different and interesting? As of the time of the article's writing, Train to the End of the World seems like it could be a worthy addition to a list like this, and it's directed by the same person who directed GuP. Feel free to chime in your thoughts!