Friendship Dynamics in Cute Girls Anime

Something that bothered me while watching Azumanga Daioh is the way that its main characters always seemed to contrive ways to all hang out together, even when it didn't make sense for them to be there. Azumanga Daioh has a large ensemble cast of entertaining personalities, each with their own sets of relationships and friendships among each other. While all of them are in the same class together and generally get along with each other, not all of them are actually friends with each other. Tomo and Koyomi were friends before the series started and generally have the closest relationship of the bunch. Osaka and Chiyo are basically outcasts who stand out from everyone else (the former for being from Osaka, and the latter for being a child prodigy, plus they're both generally adorable weirdos), so they quickly formed a close bond. Kaori has a crush on Sakaki so they're together on occasion, and Yukari-sensei and Minamo-sensei were also friends before the start of the series so they're together a lot of the time. While all of these characters have good chemistry with each other, and others in the group like Kagura are outgoing and friendly to the point of getting along with anyone, most of them are merely acquaintances and classmates. Chiyo and Sakaki basically don't have any relationship, nor do Koyomi and Osaka. And Kaori is basically completely isolated from every other character, only wanting anything to do with Sakaki, and Sakaki herself is widely considered to be unapproachable at first and usually finds herself alone. So why do these characters all invite each other on group trips?

There isn't really a good answer from the perspective of the characters in-universe, but the meta answer is because it would theoretically be entertaining to see all of the main cast interact with each other in a setting completely isolated from the classroom. And indeed, it is always a fun time to watch all the girls on group outings to a beach house or to an amusement park. But I just don't think that most of these characters would think or care about each other enough to invite everyone else on such outings. Why would Tomo invite the 10 year old on an overnight trip? Why would literally anyone allow Kaori to come with them? These characters don't dislike each other, but they also don't share the kind of close relationship that you'd expect to be shared among people who invite each other to hang out over the weekends. It's not like these characters are joining the trip through friends of friends either, it often comes down to one person inviting the whole cast. If the series had taken place in the modern age, I wouldn't even expect half of these characters to be a part of the inevitable group chat, let alone invite each other on trips. 

When I was in school, I was friendly with a lot of different people, but there were only a select few that I would ever think to invite out to hang on the weekend. And likewise, I was only ever invited on such outings with the people I was particularly close with. As far as I can tell, this is generally the norm. Everyone has those people who are just the guys they know from school or work, but those people aren't "friends," they're just nice people who you get along with. Maybe they can become friends one day, but that is going to take a level of closeness that many of the characters in Azumanga Daioh never get a chance to foster naturally. Now, Azumanga Daioh is among the earliest works of its genre, and later Cute Girls Doing Cute Things (CGDCT) anime would refine the formula. And while other, more modern genre contemporaries do occasionally suffer from similar issues (I'd list Kiniro Mosaic as another example), most of them get around this problem in a pretty understandable and natural way: all of the characters are friends roughly equally. Instead of separating the cast into separate groups, the four or five girls that comprise the main cast are all friends of relatively equal standing, who can all hang out with each other in any pairing without it feeling unnatural. 

The show that I think best embodies this tactic is Is the Order a Rabbit. In this show, each of the five main girls are friends of roughly equal standing, with very little variation. Cocoa, Chino, and Rize are all work buddies and so are close for obvious reasons. Likewise, Chiya and Syaro have a history together as childhood friends, so their close relationship is very natural. But their dynamics quickly blend into each others groups. Cocoa and Chiya end up being classmates, and both are such dumb dorks with such instant chemistry that they become fast friends who confide in each other immediately. Although Chiya works at at rival coffee house, she always ends up working with Cocoa, Chino, and Rize to lift both of each others cafes to greater heights. Syaro is connected to both cafes through her friendship with Chiya and her crush on Rize, and she ends up being someone the others can ask for help with various things due to the competent rich girl persona she puts up.

Sure, a few of the characters are split off to a noticeable degree, but this is almost always for plot related reasons and they never get in the way of the larger group dynamic. Cocoa specifically wants Chino to recognize her as an older sister, because Cocoa respects her own older sister and sees Chino's approval of her in that role to be a sign of her living up to the mature person she wants to be. Chiya and Syaro are childhood friends and Chiya is the only one who knows the truth about Syaro being poor, so their relationship is just a little more intimate than everyone else's. But despite that, the characters all share relationships with each other for their own reasons, and it feels completely natural to see, say, Syaro call up Cocoa to go shopping. The only exception is maybe between Chino and Syaro, but even they occasionally get episodes together where their relationship can grow. And when GochiUsa later introduces Maya and Megu as main characters and coin the "ChiMaMe" trio with Chino, they still quickly get integrated with the entire group, and individually get episodes with characters other than Chino. 

This approach gets around the issue set by Azumanga Daioh, and it makes for an extremely entertaining series where any combination of characters has instant chemistry and a natural relationship I can invest in. But it's also just not true to how friendships work. In real friend groups, there is some amount of separation between the members. It's rare to have a large friend group of 5 or more people where everyone in the group is on equal standing with everyone else. Speaking for my own friend group, while I love literally everyone in it to death and back, there is only one person who I actually hang out with one on one. There are also a few others who I can easily have one on one conversations with via voice chat as well, but who I don't or very rarely hang out with alone in person. My friend group is centered around basically one person. When we plan outings, if this person can't come, the plans almost always fall to the wayside. When we're in voice call, people are far more likely to join the chat when this person is there. I hang out alone with them, and each of my other friends will also hang out alone with him, but it's rare for us to hang out alone without this person. It's not that we can't, or that we don't want to, or that it wouldn't be fun to, we just kind of don't. And this might be a bit more exaggerated than a lot of larger friend groups (which may have two or three people who play the same role as the one in my group), it does seem to me to be a pretty common arrangement among those who I've talked to. A more realistic GochiUsa would make Chiya and Syaro feel like they're much more of friends than Chiya and Cocoa, but instead they both feel like roughly equal standing of friends once they get past their introductions. Of course, that would be a less fun show, but what would it look like to have a show that matches this dynamic? 

The first show to come to my mind was K-On. In K-On, while all of the girls are close enough friends to hang out one on one, it's obvious that some of the girls are a bit closer than others. Mio and Ritsu are childhood friends, and share an extra special bond as compared to the ones they have with the others. Sure, Ritsu can hang out with Yui, Mugi, or Azusa alone, and she does do that at least once, but Ritsu can recognize Mio just from the sound of her footsteps, which is a level of intimacy not shared with the other characters. Likewise, Yui and Azusa have a particularly special bond. Although Yui is so friendly as to easily get along with just about anyone, Yui takes special pride in her relationship with Azusa. It starts out as her naively wanting to look like a good senpai, but eventually evolves into a more unique relationship in which both of them are mentors to each other in different ways. Azusa helps Yui to start taking her guitar and her future more seriously, and leads Yui to becoming a much more proficient musician and a much more mature and self-aware person. While Yui helps Azusa to work through more complicated personal feelings, teaching her that there's value in not always taking things seriously, and later on helping her to cope with her fear of being left behind after graduation. Yui is friends with everyone, but only Azusa gets constant hugs and Yui only truly wants to impress Azusa. Even though all of them enjoy hanging out with each other and love each other equally, not everyone would hang out one on one. Ritsu and Mugi get an entire episode dedicated to them, where they acknowledge how unusual it is to see them together one on one, but even though they don't call each other on the weekends, they can still have fun together if it ends up that way, and they both still wouldn't get as much out of the larger friend group without the other. 

In some ways, these relationships have parallels to what we see in GochiUsa, and I think the difference in approach shines through when you compare them. Ritsu and Mio, and Chiya and Syaro, are childhood friends with a particularly close bond, but while Chiya can also be the classroom class clown bosom buddy with Cocoa, neither Ritsu no Mio have a similar kind of relationship with anyone else. Both Yui and Azusa, and Cocoa and Chino, have relationships in which the older character wants to look mature for a younger character and be acknowledged as a good role model. But Cocoa is about as close to Rize as she is to Chiya, while Yui and Azusa share an extra special bond. 

This might seem like the final form of group dynamics. But it's actually still not a perfect match for my own friend group. See, while the five girls of K-On do share a similar kind of dynamic to the 5 people who I was also friends with initially in high school, my friend group is rather large at this point, and it only became that way because of many smaller groups all coming together over time. I was the youngest member of the group, and got added in to a group consisting of about 7 or 8 other people. Of that group, I really only became close with four of them. Eventually, one person's brother also ended up joining us more often and fully integrating, so I became close with 5 of them. Eventually, each individual member of the group added more and more people, until the group chat came to be much larger than your average CGDCT friend group, and I don't have the same relationship with all of them. I generally love everyone in the group, but some members can occasionally be frustrating and are most fun in small doses, while other people joined the group while I was away from home at college and so I missed out on all the interactions that ended up integrating them into the fold, and so we're a little more distant from each other than to everyone else. Each of us even have individual chats with each other and with smaller sub-groups, alongside the main group chat. Even so, it's not like I described in Azumanga Daioh. Even if I might be somewhat more distant I'm still friends with these people, and we met and interacted through friends of friends. Azumanga Daioh is more like if the distant friend invited me on the trip after meeting me once, even though our current friendship may have come from a mutual friend inviting both of us, or from us interacting via a group chat and getting close enough there to want to invite each other on outings. Friend groups are complicated, and people might be friends with people only peripherally, or even have complicated feelings about people despite generally liking them enough to want to interact with them. 

I think that the logical end point of realistic friendships in CGDCT anime is Yuru Camp. Yuru Camp is interesting because, even though it has a cast of 5 main characters, the actual group dynamics make up a huge web of relationships. This is unlike K-On, where all 5 members all share a similar dynamic despite having one relationship that's a bit more special. In Yuru Camp, Rin and Ena were already friends before the start of the series. Rin is an introvert, and Ena respects her personal space, so Rin lets her in and often confides in her. The two have a very trusting and intimate relationship built on mutual respect, but despite that, it's rare to see the two hanging out away from school, because Rin prefers to camp solo. Instead, the two keep in contact mostly by texting each other. Rin's relationship with Nadeshiko ends up becoming equally intimate, but in an extremely different way. While Ena generally doesn't intrude on Rin's personal space, Nadeshiko is the kind of bubbly, energetic person who breaks you out of your shell whether you're prepared or not. Nadeshiko also respects Rin's personal space, and even takes it upon herself to try and understand why Rin loves keeping to herself by going on her own solo camping venture, but she is a socializer at heart and is not afraid to ask Rin to hang out. While Rin is unenthused at first, Nadeshiko ends up making her more receptive to socializing, and Rin eventually opens herself up to Nadeshiko to form a very intimate friendship. Although Rin loves and confides in both Ena and Nadeshiko, and holds both in relatively equal standing, her actual relationship with each of them is extremely different. Rin talks to both of them individually and has different kinds of conversations with them, and confides in them about different things. Nadeshiko is also a friend who she can passionately share in her hobby with, where Ena is less interested in camping and Rin mostly just enjoys her company and how she will listen to her, be receptive to her interests, and give good advice. 

Through Nadeshiko, Rin and Ena end up becoming acquainted with Chiaki and Aoi, and all of them have different feelings towards each other. Ena is much more willing than Rin to allow people into her life, and so quickly becomes friendly with Nadeshiko, Chiaki, and Aoi. Even so, they don't actually grow super close early on, and it takes until half way through the show's second season for them to become close enough to go on their own camping adventure, without Rin (and Nadeshiko in this case). Nadeshiko will gladly hang out with any member of the group one on one and make sure everyone has a great time, but she seems most likely to want to be with Rin in the case that she's looking to be with just one person, while she'll go to the out club if she wants a larger group. Of that larger group, Chiaki is the pillar through who all plans have to go through. She plans out all of the out club's camping ventures, and the group outings where everyone is together will never happen without her. Rin will hang out alone with Nadeshiko or Ena, but she will not hang out with Aoi or Chiaki unless Nadeshiko or Ena is there. It's not that she dislikes either of them, but they are friends of a friend, and Rin's personality and outlook fundamentally clash with Chiaki's, which occasionally makes interactions between them frustrating for each other, and it takes a while before Rin truly becomes comfortable with her, though never enough to have much of a one on one relationship. And even when they're on group trips, Rin has her own agenda and makes compromises to avoid making things awkward for her. When they go on the multi-day trip in season 2, Rin would rather ride her motorcycle than join the others in the car, and she plans activities separately from the others and meets up with them later, and no one takes offense to this and are all happy to let her have her space. 

One of my favorite things about Yuru Camp's presentation of friend dynamics is its integration of social media. Yuru Camp is perhaps one of the more modern series of this type, and is the only one I can think of in which the characters have a group chat. But they don't just have one big group chat for all five of them and then individual texts with each other, they have smaller chats between them. Chiaki, Aoi, and Ena plan a camping trip on their own, so the three of them have a group chat which Rin and Nadeshiko are not a part of. Likewise, Nadeshiko has group chats with both sets of friends, while Rin's only real group chat is the one with everyone in it, and she prefers individually talking to either Nadeshiko or Ena whenever she's in the mood. Again, this doesn't mean Rin doesn't like or isn't friendly with Chiaki or Aoi, but she is still integrating herself into that group, and is largely part of the group chat with everyone because her two closest friends are a part of it, and because she sometimes finds it a nice change of pace to understand Nadeshiko's more social outlook. By the end of season 2, Rin starts to grow a respect and fondness for Chiaki, and even though they will probably never have the kind of relationship that Rin shares with Nadeshiko and Ena, the growth of their relationship feels totally earned and natural. 

The complicated nature of Yuru Camp's friend group makes it one of the most genuine I've seen in fiction. While it makes sense that all of the characters are in a group together and go on trips together, and I can see and understand why they would all be friends and all roughly like each other to at least some extent, the nature of individual relationships between all of them varies wildly, and they even evolve throughout the story. To Rin, Ena is a steadfast rock of a friend, while Nadeshiko starts out as a mild nuisance but grows into a close partner who she can confide in about her hobbies and who both help each other to grow as people. And she mildly likes Aoi and is a bit frustrated by Chiaki but eventually grows more receptive to her. And every character's individual relationship with every other character varies in this way, and that even spreads to groups of characters who evolve stronger friendships through constantly meeting up with friends of friends. While a show like K-On shows its characters evolving from strangers to family at roughly the same rate, Yuru Camp has each character evolve into a different role at different speeds. It is exceptionally tightly crafted plotting, character writing, and relationship building, which takes into account each character's personality, history, and worldview, and crafts a constantly moving set of relationships that grow naturally. 

I want to make it clear that I am not necessarily saying that any of the methods I listed above is better than any other. Yuru Camp's approach leans into something a bit more realistic and complex, but the simplicity of seeing all the personalities of Azumanga Daioh interact in a variety of situations can be just as appealing in its own right. We don't get to see that in Yuru Camp, Rin and Aoi barely even have a relationship while you'll see any combination of characters together in fun ways in AzuDai or GochiUsa. It is indeed my personal preference for Yuru Camp's approach, as I said I found myself annoyed by Azumanga Daioh's style straining my suspension of disbelief, but rather than trying to explain why I think Yuru Camp or K-On is "better" in some sense, I really just wanted to reflect on the ways that CGDCT anime go about presenting friendship dynamics. CGDCT as a subgenre is often maligned for uniformity of approach and content, but even something as simple as the way that the dynamics of the group are conveyed can fundamentally change the experience of the show, and affect the ways I relate to the characters. I hope I've helped to make you more aware of the ways group dynamics can differ among these shows, and maybe started to get you thinking about the ways that friend groups are portrayed not only in CGDCT anime, but in all media starring friend groups.