Ask John: Why Are High School Girls So Common in Anime?

Question:
I don’t understand why otaku love high school girls so much. Back when they were high school students, male otaku hated high school girls and were hated by them, right? So why it is that all dating sim and porn games revolve around high school girls. Shouldn’t otaku hate them?

Answer:
Urges, desires, and interests are an aspect of human psychology, so there are natural psychological reason behind these instincts. I theorize that there are two primary psychological motivations for the popularity of high school girls as anime characters. One is a hereditary masculine urge to sustain the human species. The other lies in a desire for happy nostalgia.

High school aged girls are instinctively attractive to males because girls in their teens are at their optimal primal fertility. Teenage girls have passed puberty and are physically able to bear healthy children. At the same time, teen girls have the youthful endurance, resiliency, and strength to face physical hardship, thereby making them the ideal generation to give birth to the next generation. Social development and morality, of course, deem teenage girls unsuitable to be mothers because they haven’t yet developed the emotional and rational fitness to raise children, but male humans are still unconsciously, instinctively influenced by the primitive animal instinct of propagating the species.

As most fans know, anime frequently serve as wish fulfillment. Critics may recognize that romance and comedy anime frequently provide male viewers with a vicarious sensation of being fawned over by attractive women, but most of these anime critics may not apprehend the full nuance of the wish fulfillment that anime provides. The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi has been tremendously successful partially because it’s the optimal example of the wish fulfillment anime that allows male viewers to have or relive the high school life that they wish they had. There are anime that star adult women, like Hataraki Man, You’re Under Arrest, Witchblade, Patlabor, Momoiro Sisters, and Seirei no Moribito, but very few outside of erotic anime that depict young men developing relationships with adult women – among them Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo and Onegai Teacher. This disparity suggests that male otaku don’t fantasize about the future; they don’t anticipate marriage and committed relationships with adult women. Rather, they seemingly prefer to indulge in imaginary recreations of their younger days, imagining that their high school days were more fun, exciting, and romantic than they probably were.

The reason for the absence of anime about marriage and relationships with adult women may have a variety of explanations. Maybe many male otaku do develop healthy, happy marriages, so they don’t need anticipatory fantasies. Perhaps male otaku are intimidated by adult women and therefore shy away from romantic anime about adult women. Considering that typical anime starring high school girls are targeted at teen and young adult otaku, the prevalence of high school girls as anime characters may be simply because viewers are more familiar and comfortable with girls of their own age, or younger girls than adult women.