Apprentice magician at Luna Nova Witchcraft Academy.
Preface: Many months later, when Little A once again heard that teasing “Ano sa”—“Hey, you know”—he would surely recall the distant night when the promotional video for Wasteful Days of High School Girls appeared, and he exhausted every search engine only to discover that there was not a single Chinese-subtitled version anywhere on the Chinese internet. Back then, the PV was a video that drew attention with its voice cast. Waseda’s questionable remarks echoed in his ears: excruciatingly embarrassing. Further along came a jumble of clips, each screenshot just about right, recalling so very many comedies suited to July.
Yes, in recent years July has almost invariably come attached to descriptions like “a weak season” or “comedy carrying the whole thing.” Yet July’s anime, like July’s scorching air, always seem to offer a breath of cool wind, a few patches of shade tucked into the little things amid the anxiety and exhaustion—some sheer exhilaration amid the general dead silence. This time last year, perhaps it was the wild, uninhibited pleasure of Asobi Asobase, burning like a mouthful of hotpot broth. Perhaps it was Revue Starlight, which did not quite live up to its reputation but had raised boundless expectations. Or perhaps it was the tearful nostalgia and hazy romance hidden inside the awkward 3D of Hi Score Girl…
This July, for me, that role belonged to Wasteful Days of High School Girls. Under its comic exterior, the force of its jokes and its emotional resonance are outright home runs. But there is also the reality that comes between the laughs, the successive breakthroughs as the gears of its scattered main storylines begin to turn, and all those character types and relationships that, though rather overstuffed with familiar ingredients, still make me want to yell, “Hurry up! Give us more!” Its laughter and tears really did bring a smile to this dreary, sorrowful, nerve-frayed season, along with the long-lost flavor of high-school life, its people and its memories.
Comedy at Work, in All Its Varieties
If I had to describe Wasteful Days in one word, it would probably be “richness.” Almost everything takes place at Sakura High1 (why are there so many Sakura Highs? That abbreviation is asking for confusion), yet across these twelve episodes, the way the series constructs and delivers its comedy never becomes so repetitive that a strong start gradually peters out. That alone gives the show a powerful hold on its audience in an age when so many anime with proper storylines—even shows treated as serious drama—repeat themselves mechanically, as though cast from a mold. Apart from the art style and the title, the only variation is how skillfully each copy is released from it. (To some extent, this also explains how a show that began with practically no profile or publicity went on to become the season’s fourth most-followed anime on Bilibili.)
Compared with the explosive performances and “problematic” remarks that Asobi Asobase sends careening along the edge, Wasteful Days usually takes another approach. The portrayal of Tanaka—Baka, the idiot—is the exception: particularly in Loli’s spotlight episode, her erratic, disconnected antics sometimes seem almost deliberately milked for their stupidity. For the other characters, the comedy relies less on immediate shock. Instead, it gets its laughs by planting setups and delivering payoffs in the manner of speech-driven performances such as Chinese comic sketches and Japanese manzai, or double-act comedy.
Take the cursed gas mask in episode seven, the spotlight episode for Yamai, our resident chuuni fantasist. The production keeps the actual effects of Majo the witch’s magic hidden, leaving viewers at an informational disadvantage. In the first half, Tanaka’s irrationality does two jobs. Built into her character, it drives the story forward; it also further loosens the apparent logic of the setup, encouraging viewers to locate the joke in this off-the-wall pair’s uncanny rapport. Then, when the curse gag pays off in the second half, the biggest laughs do not come from the succession of people getting stuck in wooden boards. They come from the all-too-familiar selfie that emerges from the running board gag, the clapping that stirs memories and recognition, and the school song, which solemnly recounts the school’s history while being completely deranged in practically every line.
Once these hard-hitting jokes are over, think back to the curse Majo mentioned, to who wore the mask, and to their connection with the later board incidents. That Hitchcockian effect of letting our own imaginations generate fear and the faint connective traces running through the episode—the “grass-snake and ash-thread” technique2—give its comedy more flavor and make it linger longer.
At first glance, this looks like the standard “July-season dumbass comedy special.” But its varied comic workings do more than reveal, through its choice of jokes, different schools’ ideas of what is comic and what defines comedy. They also keep this everyday manzai, with its rather limited room to maneuver, alive across twelve episodes. Its comic energy rises and falls, yet its unpredictable, seemingly inexhaustible inventions keep giving us something to anticipate. Even the rather respectable, safe final episode finds something genuinely amusing in those disconnected snippets during the ending credits. In a summer short on fun, that at least leaves some possibilities open.
Let’s Cut In with Something to “Spoil the Mood”
For a work explicitly billed as a comedy, being funny is of course indispensable. But a smile is not a response produced in a vacuum, nor does comedy amount to grotesque clowning or gags detached from reality. Even leaving satire aside, comedy remains inseparable from life and the real world. In Wasteful Days, though, reality—usually a source of identification and material for jokes—becomes part of the work in its own right.
This grounding in reality goes beyond the manga’s origins as promotion for the real-life music producer TeishotokuP, whose Twitter following doubled in an instant after episode eleven featured those two Vocaloid covers. Within the work itself, there are many places where it would rather depart from its own atmosphere, passing up any number of opportunities for comedy, to deal with things and resolve them in earnest.
Look back at episodes ten, eleven, and twelve, the three with the strongest emphasis on the main storylines. There is no question that both the density of the jokes and the emphasis placed on them are greatly reduced compared with the other episodes. They differ from Yamai’s episode, packed with ridiculous gags, and from episodes eight and nine, whose titles alone announce that they mean to sell us on the characters, relying on “Aah, I’m dead!” as the primary productive force.3 The final three episodes have no shortage of potential jokes of their own: the origins of the central trio’s friendship, Wota the otaku’s fateful re-encounter with Waseda, and the pig-farm storyline. After all, unraveling a mystery is itself a familiar way of setting up comic conflict.
Yet the author and the production team ultimately chose what may be the least fitting approach for this kind of show: playing it straight. (In adapting the trio’s reunion, the anime team even replaced the slightly odd location—a supermarket’s free-sample counter—with somewhere more normal.) These narrative choices are like a succession of slow buses, far too normal and even excessively sentimental, cutting into the fast-moving traffic of jokes and comic rejoinders. They pay so little heed to the intended audience’s expectations that they feel abrupt, wrong, even liable to cause a fatal crash. (The later episodes’ reception did indeed suffer a few scrapes in certain quarters. Even episode eleven, which was so right in its own way and so extraordinarily bold in its execution—even with the considerable boost of drawing on the author’s own experience—still attracted plenty of comments about how badly it fitted the mood.)
For me, though, noisy as these collisions may be, this is not a life-or-death highway. It is more like the bumper cars at an amusement park. Without those collisions, the series would lose much of what distinguishes it from so many similar works: its close fit with reality, and that tangible, convincing sense of being placed in real circumstances and having to “ask for an answer.”
The story of the trio’s early meeting, separation, and reunion, used as a contrasting setup for comedy in episode ten, is hardly a cheerful arrangement. It puts things on the table: the inevitable separations of growing up, relationships divided by grades, isolation and rejection by little cliques, and the crucial choices that have to be faced. Here, Tanaka’s rare flashes of seriousness (most of her other serious moments seem to happen in flashbacks too—this amphibian’s a bit of a liability!) combine with Robo’s “I decide what to do with my life.” For all the sheer willpower and chuuni grandiosity, this offers a way toward resolving those real-world difficulties—not always a reliable one, but a real direction nonetheless. It does not use the freedom of gag manga to duck the issue, even if the immediate purpose of this passage is still to set up a contrast.
The same goes for episode eleven’s thoroughly shōjo-manga turn. Of the several manga chapters combined into this episode, only the earliest, chapter thirteen, has so far appeared in Chinese fan translation. (Chapter thirteen contains the episode’s first joke: Waseda’s mysterious premonition that Akane—Wota—is a high-school girl.) There is plenty of comic potential in the mismatch between their identities. Yet the anime adaptation directly faces these otaku-tinged feelings peculiar to the internet age: feelings that meet obstacles but ultimately receive a response and become a source of energy for living. Compared with stories that use mistaken identities to deliver punchlines, prolong themselves through endless evasions, and get a big laugh out of the embarrassment, this may be the less fitting choice for Wasteful Days.
But Akane, heart fluttering, bravely chooses to cross the digital barrier and express her affection with a certain boldness and fervor. Waseda, with just a little prompting, chooses to drop his disguise and respond. Finally, in the last two episodes, that response becomes an answer to questions of dreams and the future. I really cannot help exclaiming, “What a thoroughly decent comedy!”
This earnestness, this decency mixed in among all the work’s other ingredients, really does give its laughter more dimensions. It also makes my affection for the series more than an appreciation of verbal comedy: perhaps it’s a little surge of renewed energy, accompanied by the thought, “These are other people’s lives…”
The Ingredients May Be Familiar, but If They Taste Good, What’s the Problem?
“Pandering to otaku” is hardly a new phrase these days. The anime, comics, games, and light-novel industry seems to have exhausted every possible female character trait, producing a mass of character concepts as if on an assembly line: stick an eyepatch or a plaster on her face and she is chuuni; give her a delinquent-girl persona and she will invariably turn out to be innocently shy underneath. When we look at Wasteful Days, the déjà vu of recognizing these ingredients really is overwhelming: the blond chuuni loser (not really), all that unspoken business between a solemn face and a pair of Audio-Technica headphones, the petite Loli’s cuteness outside and warmth within… Honestly, before reading the interview with the author, I wondered whether the cast had been designed specifically around market preferences. (Which is also why, when the interview said that every character except Robo bore some trace of the author herself, Bino briefly became, in my eyes, a real-life magical girl who drew manga. Runs away.)
The characters’ traits are so blatant that they become nicknames, to the point where I can barely remember anyone’s real name. And beyond that, the story’s ingredients—the endless yuri fanservice centered on Majime, Miss Dead Serious and her Unlimited Pairing Works; the habitual trick of using Tanaka’s erratic behavior to bring characters together—still feel rather too densely piled up according to formula, once I set aside my overflowing love for practically everyone except Baka.
But as the heading and everything above suggest, why should I have to suppress my love for the characters when I watch an anime? (Going straight for it…) Even when the character types and the situations built around them follow a fixed formula, whenever I see Wota lazing around in bed just like me, whenever I see Majime radiating handsome, boyfriend-material appeal at every moment, whenever I see Lily thoroughly stuffed on another helping of yuri, a creepy grin promptly spreads across my face and my arms and legs start flailing at random. (LMAO.) Characters with interesting exteriors as well as interesting souls, who hit my sweet spot and strike an emotional chord—the more the better. (Currently cackling irrationally.)
Now, for some analysis—read: making excuses—back to reason. These ingredients do more than appeal to us. Not that I think making something appealing is easy: even here, without the credit she earns in later episodes, Tanaka’s reputation might well have been beyond saving. At least the author does not let the ingredients drive the plot. She builds the story around a logic that makes sense, then inserts those ingredients into a plot that makes sense. This may sound elementary, but in an age when ingredients are everything, it is far from a given. Some works abandon all logic for yuri fanservice, which can even become meme material in turn.
Even the swimsuit episode, which in most series would be there to lay the groundwork for little plastic figurines, plays with horror-film suspense. An episode born to deliver familiar attractions thus acquires a real lingering kick. The yuri elements in earlier episodes, though relatively dense, also broadly follow the restraint director Hijiri Sanpei spoke of. (Even if Passione’s previous yuri-overloaded production was precisely the citrus I just took a swipe at.) Small yuri moments, stopping at bashfulness, enter the friendships and episodic stories. They remain expressive without overstating themselves, and so avoid becoming irritating. (Or maybe my tolerance has just gone up, lol.)
At the same time, within these characters assembled from assorted ingredients, Wasteful Days includes things that work against the stereotypes and make those ingredients a little less conventional. Take Wota, the author’s darling: her otaku excitement on seeing TeishotokuP upload a new song—“flashing her heart’s panties”—and her endless clicking of likes on Instagram and Pixiv certainly give me a strong sense of seeing myself in her. Yet she may also have the widest range of outfits in the cast, and she even alters her school uniform, a very normie sort of thing to do. Nor does the anime give Wota the gloomy hidden side that so many works attach to their female otaku characters. Instead, there is a genuine sense of warmth and anticipation. Piling up familiar ingredients can easily mean broadcasting the same stereotypes all over again. But through the adjustments and shifts of emphasis Wasteful Days brings to quite a few of its character types, those tasty ingredients become a little less rigid, acquiring a beauty with warmth to it.
Flowing or Standing Still? Wasting Time or Moving Forward? The Everyday Life of Youth!
When I first saw the title, my immediate impression was probably of something combining K-On!’s leisurely tea-drinking and chatting with the deadpan-joke sensibility of Daily Lives of High School Boys. By the time the anime ended, though, I felt that rather than simply being a gag anime, it might have much stronger ties than expected to those youth dramas with such poor reputations.
After all, amid its nonstop comedy, the anime takes up the relationship between friendship and reality during adolescence; how to cope with an uncertain identity between childhood and adulthood (Loli, for instance, has only her grandmother present as she grows up, and the children’s clothes her parents send back echo, to some extent, the way her identity is held at that point, while her attempts to act like a delinquent in her spotlight episode and her longing to be a “mature woman” in the makeup episode mark a transition); where one stands in matters of affection; and what dreams and the future actually feel like. These really are the perennial subjects of literature about youth.
There is no doubt that the work’s handling of these questions, and its conception of Sakura High, offer a utopian high school and a utopian youth, in keeping with its own carefree atmosphere. After all, there are not merely no bad people here; one could even say there is no dark side, only charming imperfections that serve to embellish the picture. (Perhaps this is also a wish running counter to Bino’s own tendency toward negative thinking.) Yet under these ideal conditions, with a title that baldly announces “doing nothing,” the series still does not offer merely a stagnant youth, or even a youth caught in a loop like the one at Ousai Academy. (Honestly, with Majo’s magic established as an actual thing, a spiraling time loop here would make far more sense to me than at Ousai.)4 Instead, it works according to that basic principle of dialectics: “Motion is absolute; rest is relative.”5
The anime’s timeline moves through the whole of the girls’ first year of high school. In that Christmas Eve sequence at the end of episode eleven, with “little bunny” playing, after seeing Wota’s eyes brim with tears, what has not changed is that Tanaka remains a genuine idiot. What has not changed is that Loli remains a very, very obedient good child. On the other hand, after episode nine, Majime—that hesitant, handsome girl whose wardrobe ≈ HLA, the Chinese menswear chain, and who does not know how to be like an ordinary girl—puts on a yukata. (Honestly, given her characterization in the manga, Majime really is such a hopeless case.) And Wota, who in episode two drew for a little while before reverting to useless-otaku mode, begins to turn the wish to become a manga artist, written in her elementary-school classmates’ keepsake book, into a real intention and the motivation to act on it. This mixture of change and constancy is precisely what we call “youth.” Just as in the ending sequence, what stays is the sparkle; what changes is everything, everything around it.
The muda—the “waste”—in the title may be all too conspicuous. And so much of what we spend our time on, so much of what we go through in life, is simply meaningless. Yet amid that canned laughter for no particular reason, amid everything turning, amid everything continually changing, perhaps the laughter within the muda, and the willingness to keep going after seeing reality clearly, are the value and usefulness of these wasted days.
春がぜんぶ連れ去ってしまう。
Spring will carry it all away.6
Perhaps comedy is not so well suited to heavy subjects, and youth certainly has no fixed pattern. But the resonance after the laughter, the envy of someone watching youth from the sidelines, the useless vows we cannot help making after being moved—perhaps these are the extra gift the series gives me, beyond rescuing my dull, dreary, miserable summer.