This post will be a rant, of sort, kinda like what normal bloggers do. It does not contain any links so skip this if you came here for downloading; you strange person. It's also about anime so you might as well skip it if you aren't into it or if you hate it then read it because it will supply you munition for insulting nerds like me.
During my short summer break I did some experimenting. My anime taste (yes this is relevant to the subject) is somewhat centered to shows that are usually focused on adult audience or so called
seinen series. So for that reason I tried to watch just the opposite of the usual things that would interest me. I started watching series that are more focused on younger ages and ones that are more light hearted. In short I watched comedy/slice of life type of things. From what I observed this seems to be the mainstream flow of series currently in USA and Japan (I'm a bit oblivious about the rest of the anime fan world outside the netsphere so excuse my bold statements). Watching these, to me new, shows made me notice one interesting thing. They all have the same female characters.
Now let us observe this statement. For starters let us take one of the paragons of mainstream anime which is of course Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya. The plot is focused around several high school students who are a part of an SOS club. For the purposes of the discussion I will not dig deep in the plot because I'm here more interested in the behavior of characters.
The have the following three main female characters:
HaruhiMikuruYukiNow these three characters have distinct personalities.
Haruhi is a tomboy character that is not exactly the brightest of the three but not completely idiotic either. Always energetic, molests other characters and has a fiery personality packed with a stubborn attitude.
Mikuru is what I usually call
"let's be friends" slut. An innocent and shy person that will always accept everything that is thrown at her. Usually in hentai they are the ones that do all the weird shit. She is also insecure of her abilities, always apologizes and is always voice acted by someone who has a high pitched voice. She also blushes a lot.
Yuki (which means snow if I remember right) is a cold and calm person. Doesn't talk a lot and usually acts very rational and is the common sense of the group. She isn't very social but is dragged along by her friends which she met mostly by accident.
So these three characters along with Kyon and that other guy that I always forget the name have adventures and they have their own club etc. I took this anime as the main example because I believe that by now pretty much everyone who visit the net more than three times a week have heard of this show.
Now let us take another anime of similar if not the same genre if we exclude the supernatural. It's not as popular as is Haruhi but it's something along those lines.
It's called Minami-Ke. The story is focused on three sisters who live in one apartment alone. They are all in schools. One is in elementary, one in middle school and one in high school.
The three characters are:
Kana
Haruka
ChiakiKana is a tomboy character that is not exactly the brightest of the three but not completely idiotic either. Always energetic, molests other characters and has a fiery personality packed with a stubborn attitude.
Haruka is an innocent and shy person that will always accept everything that is thrown at her. She is also insecure of her abilities, always apologizes and she also blushes a lot.
Chiaki is a cold and calm person. Doesn't talk a lot and usually acts very rational and is the common sense of the group. She isn't very social but is dragged along by her friends which she met mostly by accident.
As you can see I pretty much did a copy paste job and if you watched these shows I'm positive you would agree with me that these character are similar and perhaps even the same. They have, very similar patterns of behavior. These three also have adventures along with some other random characters but let's face it they are the ones who drive the story just like in Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya with the exception of Kyon and supernatural elements. But I don't see Kyon that much on the net compared to the female characters from the show so I guess fans don't really drool about him.
So is minami-ke just a ripoff? Well let's take another show,
K-ON!.
K-ON! is a story focused on four high school girls that have a band and lead some sort of music club.
The characters are:
Ritsu
Yui
Mio
TsumugiRitsu is a tomboy character that is not exactly the brightest of the three but not completely idiotic either. Always energetic, molests other characters and has a fiery personality packed with a stubborn attitude.
Yui is an innocent and shy person that will always accept everything that is thrown at her. She is also insecure of her abilities, always apologizes and she blushes a lot.
Mio is a cold and calm person. Doesn't talk a lot and usually acts very rational and is the common sense of the group. She isn't very social but is dragged along by her friends which she met mostly by accident.
Tsumugi is the fourth part and it seems like she's some sort of Lucky Star mutation of multiple side characters from what I saw from watching both of the shows.
Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature. ;D
I think three examples are enough to state my point. These three types of characters seem to appear in so far all the animes that I watched from this genre (comedy/slice of life). I'm not mentioning Lucky Star because I haven't watched it except for only a couple of episodes but I have a feeling that I'll recognize such characters there as well. I also believe Kannagi has such character patterns as well. It seems to me that every time they make an anime such as this they make one fetish object for each type of fan. You can clearly see this when browsing anime and related forums. Every one of these characters will have a fan because those three types of females are the most common types that attract the masses. Some like calm ones, some like naive and innocent ones and some like the ones that are in control. To cater such needs people make animes like these. All this is great but the fact is people like these characters in reality can't nor do not exist.
It would be ok if the stories are good and everything but the more I watch such shows the more I have the feeling is that stories only serve as something like "HEY LOOK AT YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTER IN THIS SITUATION. LOOK HOW CUTE SHE IS AT WHAT SHE DOES. MOEMOEMOE". This reason is possibly why I like Azumanga Daioh the most from this bunch. It has all the mentioned above characters. Sasaki the calm one, Chiyo the cute and innocent and Tomo the wild one. There are more characters which are fractured into more smaller personalities. Osaka the confused one, Kagura the more serious version of Tomo and Koyomi the childish version of Sasaki. But there isn't any fanservice, the characters provide neat little fun and aren't portrayed as some fetish objects. They just are; dumb and plain for your entertainment. If you would combine all Azumanga Daioh characters into one you would get a normal whole person. :S It's like they take each personality that one person has and then make a character out of it.
In seinen shows things are a bit different. Observe:
Teenager in K-On!:
Teenager in Legend Of The Galactic Heroes:
Now which one of these two look like a 10 year old child? :D
Do you see the difference?
Katerose von Kreutzer has all the personalities a person has AND SHE ALSO HAPPENS TO HAVE A FUCKING NOSE. She is calm and rational but at the same time she is also shy and playful when the situation for such emotions arise. She isn't cold and she isn't playful all the time, there is a balance. Something which characters from K-On, Minami Ke and so on seem to lack, for me they are not complete persons and I'm unable to understand nor relate to them. Another good example of a proper female complete character would be Faye from Cowboy Bebop. She is the femme fatale of the show but she also has her cold and playful side. There's a balance, she isn't always the same which helps people to relate with the character and make her more real and not just a fetish object.
So in conclusion I find characters from such comedy shows very shallow and I'm under the impression that they are made with the same formula. It seems like they only serve to fill in the imagination of the fans. I don't like that. It's not cute at all. ;( Or am I just watching the wrong shows?
In any case:
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