Hello,
Here we are to talk a bit about one of the most popular and common setting in the recent days anime world. This post is part of the series of posts made while waiting in this holiday week for the winter season to properly start on thursday 05/01/2012 in order to resume episodics.
The setting we will talk about today is a rather new phenomenon that started to appear en-masse during the first years of the 21th century and developed to a point where pretty much all seasons have at least one major TV series feature these elements.
I'm talking about the story setting limiting itself to group of all-female cast either in an exclusive way (no male shown during the whole series like K-On) or non-exclusive way (all main characters and most of the side-characters are female, but you can still see some males from time to time in less relevant roles like Hyakko or Lucky Star) while keeping the "male-oriented" target.
When we try to discover the origin and the turning point of this genre we need to go back in the years to the 2001 when the first Galaxy Angel anime got released. This series that can be considered the first very successful anime series focusing on a all-female cast (in a non-exclusive way).
The story was a plain "action"-comedy featuring 5 girls adventures as a special space team named Galaxy Angel bound to find lost and dangerous artifacts in the vast universe under the guidance of an old Volcott O`Huey. The focus of the story was anyway more about their normal life than their missions!
It was a truly marvelous series, pretty original for the time filled with hilarious scenes each and every episode and was probably the first series with this kind of cast to become really popular in both Japan and the rest of the world (mostly U.S. though...)
This genre slowly evolved during time adding many new possible elements of diversity between series in the same setting creating the vast landscape we see today. One of the series who introduced new life to this genre was the masterpiece named Azumanga Dai-Oh and his comedy elements we all probably know.
The most recurring new element in this setting is definitely the Yuri theme that is based over love relationship between some of the girls present in the story. This theme got introduced to the masses with the two anime series that are the symbol for all yuri fans.
Yes, I'm talking about Simoun and Strawberry Panic, both series have different takes to the Yuri genre in an all-female cast setting (one in a sci-fi world, the other in the more classic all-girls school), but definitely both are masterpiece and landmarks in this genre.
The yuri theme isn't always as explicit as what we can see in Simoun or Strawberry Panic (where the love relationship between girls it the core focus for the series), but sometimes (and is the type I most like) is something a lot more subtle and unconscious.
The most popular example of this genre is definitely Saki with all the Nodoka X Saki scenes that seems to be indicating to Yuri relationship, but at the same time denying it by not letting anything bloom. (till this point in the story at least...:))
The complete lack of males in important roles of the story also open up to new possibilities and new way of telling a story as we can see in Hidamari Sketch and K-On powering up the friendship emotion between the girls and making it the main focus of the story.
Sometimes I start to wonder about WHAT exactly is the series who gave the initial idea around this concept. While Galaxy Angel was definitely the first "famous" one, I'm not sure about just who was the one who really start this phenomenon?!
What we now consider as "obvious and extremely popular" was something incredibly original and scarce only 10 years ago and created the base to get what we have now.
Yes, a landscape with numerous series developed around this simple, but effective concept ranging from action (To Aru Kagaku no Railgun) to comedy (Yuruyuri) passing through slice of life (K-On) and supernatural (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica).
And you? What do you think about all-female cast in an anime series? Do you like the yuri theme (explicit or undertones) that often is present in these series?
What is the series based on this setting that you liked best?
See you soon,
feal87