This Week in Anime

Adorable Young Women Performing Lovable Activities

Steve
Whoa, Lucas, those are some weighty concepts right there, especially when you smash them together. We might want to repackage that into something a little catchier for the general audience. Zhuzh it up a bit. I'm thinking maybe "Adorable Young Women Performing Lovable Activities."

So it goes when we have serious discussions about anime. Or not-so-serious ones! Despite the "This Week" part of our column title, there's no immediately relevant news prompting this topic. I was literally just taking my post-lunch walk the other day and thought, "Huh, isn't it interesting that we're still using CGDCT as a genre/descriptor for a whole class of series?" And now we're here! To keep things timely, there are a handful of currently airing anime in that milieu that we will get to, don't you fear. But we should probably start at the beginning, which, as far as I can tell, is about two decades ago in the halcyon days of the mid-2000s.

I don't think it did—at least not initially. From what I can remember of online spaces at the time, the two terms existed in tandem. Like, people were talking about K-On! and moe for a while, and that would have been several years after CGDCT would have entered the vernacular. Nowadays, though, I'd agree anecdotally that I don't see moe used as frequently in English-speaking forums. I also think it's interesting that the moniker grew out of a bunch of four-panel gag manga adaptations—Lucky Star, Azumanga, Nichijou, Hidamari Sketch, etc. It could be that, in anime format, the need to flesh out the cast's lives in between the panels may have organically led to the easygoing vibe, which led to the CGDCT term.

And now manga/anime are made with this genre in mind, even if creators may not name it directly. And I think that's another point of interest. CGDCT is, obviously, an English term. People in Japan aren't using it. The closest equivalents I could find are in Wikipedia. You've got kuuki-kei, which I'd translate to "vibes," and Nichijou-kei, which is more "slice-of-life." And with the caveat that this is just a Wikipedia page, the intro to the article does mention CGDCT by name as a foreign equivalent (and it goes on to bring up a bunch of the examples we just mentioned). It also explains why nobody in Japan would want to use it, because the literal translation "かわいい女の子たちがかわいいことをする" is way too many characters for a genre name.

All genre descriptors are, by their nature, reductive. They map stuff onto a big picture, and when you do that, you lose the details that define an individual work. It's a trade-off our pattern-seeking brains make all the time. Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, however, is a more contentious example than most, and I think there are good reasons for that. One is that it has all the hallmarks of a fandom invention: the unwieldy name, the weird specificity of it, and a tendency for it to be overzealously applied. We have to talk about how explicitly gendered it is.

Things always get tricky when we try to talk about an "intended" audience. I mean, many modern shows people would describe as CGDCT are based on manga published in seinen magazines, i.e., targeted to young adult men. But it's also not like a woman will spontaneously combust if she picks up one of those off the rack. There's always more nuance. What I think is interesting is that it's Western fans who are putting "cute girls" in the genre, while the Japanese equivalents I linked to earlier don't mention gender at all. We're talking about the same shows, so the gender balance is also the same—these are overwhelmingly all-female main casts—but we're the only ones calling attention to that. That may be where the CGDCT moniker rubs me the wrong way. It feels tongue-in-cheek. It feels defensive.

Exactly! It sounds dismissive. As if you could only ironically enjoy watching a cute girl doing a cute thing. That's a narrative that has plagued anime fandom since well before CGDCT was coined, but in a small way, I think this jokey phrase helps perpetuate that. I mean, not even ANN is exempt. Now, I'm not criticizing this article's author—and in fact they talk up a lot of anime I love—but the framing of this article is what I'm talking about. The general attitude that CGDCT is a disposable genre...unless you do something ~a little different~ with it. Circling back, it's very similar to the conversations about K-On! and moe-poisoning in the early 2010s, before the critical consensus came around to realizing that Naoko Yamada is a genius, and before girl band anime came to rule the world.

Getting too in-the-weeds about any genre debate is a losing battle. It's all arbitrary nonsense. But that doesn't stop it from being annoying. Like when you end up with the third season of Sound! Euphonium being nominated for "Best Slice-of-Life" at the Anime Awards. The show is a drama. It's one of the most dramatic dramas. And its third season is more drama than ever.

My suspicion is, ironically, that the character designs are too CGDCT-adjacent, so it doesn't register as a drama to the wider audience. Which is another whole can of worms.

I also try not to use CGDCT in either my professional or personal writing. "Slice of life" is a perfectly cromulent genre, and if the show is specifically about high school girls in a club doing an activity, I might call it a hobby anime. But since it's the subject of this column, I would like to go on record as a fan of many CGDCT shows. My favorite go-to example is probably Laid-Back Camp. I think it just nails everything you could want in this genre space. It's cute, funny, gorgeous to look at, and poignant when it wants to be.

I'll allow it! Spiritually, I'd say Girls' Last Tour also counts, especially if you go by the Hidamari Sketch wideness rubric.

I cannot tell you how excited I am for City. But in the meantime, we've got some CGDCT anime airing! See, I told you we'd eventually make this discussion contemporary. Might as well start with mono, which is based on another manga from Laid-Back Camp author afro. You can tell by the eyebrows.

I appreciate all the ways the Laid-Back Camp sensibilities seep into it (because, like I said, I love Laid-Back Camp). But the photography angle is great—another thing I like about afro's works is the way they use and highlight technology's beneficial possibilities—and the adaptation is also very lively. I respect afro's decision to write in a self-insert mangaka fail girl as well.

That's the slice-of-life genre's bread and butter: taking time to find and depict the artistry in the mundane. That's why there's so much overlap with iyashikei. On that subject, we have the appropriately titled Food for the Soul. You could use that as the name of this genre.

I didn't like its premiere quite as much as mono's, but it's solid. Good food porn, relatably neurotic main character, and the "twist" ending made me laugh. [Dracula voice] Perhaps the same could be said of all CGDCT anime.
The last one from this season is Zatsu Tabi, which is Rural Tourism: The Anime. And fair enough, because it definitely made me want to revisit Japan, hop on the Shinkansen, and see more places off the beaten path.

One interesting thing about both Food for the Soul and Zatsu Tabi is that their casts are college-age, so these aren't high school shows. It's too early to say if that's the sign of a trend or not, but I support it. Full-grown adults deserve to be cute and cozy, too.

That's news to me, too. As clunky as the phrase may be, it stuck. It might not stick around forever, but it's here now. I just hope we can strive to use it productively and not derisively. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got another anime about wholesome high school girls bonding over their mutual passions to watch.