Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

This is obviously related to harem, but isn’t quite the same. The harem usually involves the buffet of girls but you can have the buffet of girls without the harem.

This kind of show runs down the fetish list and makes sure you have one girl for each of the major categories. You have the dumb tanned athletic girl, the brainy glasses wearing class rep (iincho) type, the well-stacked ditz, the lolicon girl, the blue-eyed blonde haired foreign girl, the ‘weird’ girl, on and on. Each girl is more or less the objectified personification of her fetish. Probably the nadir of this is Negima! which makes sure you have 31 different fetishes taken care of like robot girls, witch girls, etc. [1]

The high school girl comedy genre is very prone to this: No central male character (or sometimes any at all) to make it a harem, but one of each girl for the viewers. It’s your harem! What makes Azumanga Daioh superior to similar series like Pani Poni Dash is the way the latter objectifies the girls (complete with cheesecake shots for their first appearances), who are no deeper than their stereotypes, and the former doesn’t. [2] And Pani Poni is still fairly mild as far as this goes – it just would have been much better without it.

Another well-known example is Lucky Star – the only character with any depth on the entire show is Kagami, and the template for Konata is about as coldly cynical as I can imagine.  But while it’s ruthlessly commercial it’s not as exploitative as something like Shuffle!.

Does this sound too cynical, like these series are factory production lines? Well it should, because that’s exactly the case. The doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it if it’s done well, but recognizing this really helps your up front crapfilter.

[1] To be fair, the execution is far better than his previous Love Hina, but the premise is still the ultimate example of buffet of girls.
[2] Azumanga even includes type overlap (‘redundant’ characters) which is usually anathema for this kind of show since it’s inefficient to have your fetishes doubled up.