Ask John: Why All the Girl Bands Lately?

Question:
We’ve seen it in K-On. We’ve seen it in Angel Beats. We’ve seen it in Haruhi. What do otaku find so appealing about all-girl bands?

Answer:
If the 2006 Suzumiya Haruhi television series can be said to have literally influenced anything in anime, it could be the introduction of the girl band cameo. Rock bands have been long present in anime. Single characters in anime including Bubblegum Crisis, Mospeada, and Tokyo Vice have moonlighted in rock bands. The casts of anime including Borgman, Zillion, and Kimagure Orange Road have formed rock bands in omake and alternate continuity appearances. Anime including Kaikan Phrase, Beck, and Gravitation have revolved around boy bands. But all girl bands have never been common in anime prior to 2006. However, since the June 18, 2006, broadcast of Suzumiya Haruhi episode 12 all girl rock bands have had appeared in anime including Manabi Straight, K-On, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, Angel Beats!, Loups Gal, and Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru.

I’m neither Japanese nor a member of Japan’s otaku community, so, honestly, I don’t know exactly what Japanese otaku find fascinating about girl groups, but I can speculate. Simply put, rock bands are cool. Cute anime girls are cool. Combining the two concepts is doubly cool. A bit more interpretatively, rock & roll music, unlike chirpy pop music, innately includes a tone of aggression and rebellion. Anime including Pink Lady Monogatari, Okubyo na Venus, Macross, Megazone 23, Legendary Idol Eriko, Hoshikuzu Paradise, Chou Kuseni Narisou, and Lemon Angel Project, just to name a few, have traditionally portrayed female idol singers as harmless and adorable. Idol Defense Force Hummingbirds seemingly tried to play with the idea of giving idol singers an aggressive side, but its success at doing so is debatable. However, putting a guitar into a cute girl’s hands suddenly changes the girl’s persona entirely. From 1971’s Sasurai no Taiyo to the current ending animation of “SoreMachi,” an anime girl with a guitar isn’t clothed in frills and ribbons; she’s taken more seriously. She’s equiped with hardware. An anime girl with a guitar, or who beats drums, may not be quite formidable as a girl with a gun or sword, but she’s also cuter and less threatening without becoming a porcelain doll-like idol singer. FLCL may take this concept to its extreme with Haruko Haruhara using her guitar as a literal weapon. Angel Beats! more subtely illustrates the dynamic by paralleling the weapon weilding members of the Shinda Sekai Sensen with the instrument weilding members of Girls Dead Monster.

Yuki Nagato in 2006’s Suzumiya Haruhi was already a fan favorite character, but the striking depiction of her masterfully playing guitar while dressed in a witch costume, and the fetishistic detail animation studio KyoAni used to realistically depict he fingers moving across the frets, struck a chord in the otaku subconscious. The anime girl that plays guitar is motivated and skilled, feminine with just a bit of cool masculinity. We can almost imagine the hybrid appeal of Mio Akiyama handling a power drill, but a bass guitar is cooler. The instrument is also a sort of amplifier for the character’s voice. Yuki Nagato is silent until she takes center stage with her guitar playing. K-On’s Mio Akiyama is the shy girl who comes alive while playing her beloved bass. Yui Hirasawa is directionless until she takes up “Giitaa.” Angel Beats!’ Masami Iwasawa literally used her guitar to express herself. Anime girls are simply fascinating and expressive when combined with rock music instruments, as formal or classical instruments like a violin or piano do little more than represent personality traits their female performers already exhibit. If giving one anime girl a guitar immediately makes her more interesting, creating an all girl band can be exponentially more appealing, as K-On as amply demonstrated. Finally, if mention alone isn’t emphasis enough, the “God Knows” sequence from Suzumiya Haruhi is simply so exceptionally rendered that it alone literally made anime girl bands cool.