Over the past few days I’ve been rewatching “Onimai: I am Now your Sister”.  It’s one of my favorite anime, even though it kind of got a bad rap because people tend to comment on things without understanding them.

It’s kind of a “Cute Girls doing Cute Things” anime, of course, with a twist.  The twist is that the main character is a man who got turned into a (rather cute) middle school girl.  I know that many would hear that and get all panty-twisty, but in reality, it’s a really cute and rather sweet anime (that does get ecchi-adjacent in places, admittedly).  I really mean that – other than a bit of double entendre, there’s nothing at all inappropriate about it.  It’s exactly what it says and no more.

The thing about “cute girls doing cute things” anime is that that label actually very clearly describes what the anime is.  It’s a bunch of really cute girls doing really cute things, and there’s usually not a whole lot more to it.  Some anime play a little fast and loose with it (like Onimai) and have a little more plot than just cute girls doing cute things, but that’s essentially what it is.  Cute girls, doing cute things. (Other anime hew to the trope so closely it gets boring…)

I mentioned before that, when i first started writing Lily, I had only seen, I think, one anime in my life, and I have absolutely no idea what a CGDCT (as it’s often abbreviated) anime actually was.  I just knew that I wanted to write a story that had cute girls, doing cute things – in a deep way.

My story is about cute girls doing cute things, I guess, but I never actually shied away from rather important topics.  In fact, I kind of leaned into them.  In this story, I address:  abortion, adoption, sexual assault, just plain assault, karens (yes, they get their own category), older men with younger girls, abuse, neglect, suicide, mental illness, onlyfans-like streaming, teen sex and pregnancy, and a few other things as well.  I didn’t shy away from that.  I didn’t want to shy away from that.  If I’d written a story that just had shallow, cute girls doing absolutely nothing useful, I don’t think I could have lived with myself.

But, on the other hand, it has some really beautiful things, too.  A loving nuclear family, sisters and friends that truly love each other, a fairly healthy teen relationship (as these things to), spirituality, redemption, pregnancy and marriage seen in a positive light, healing, lots of crying but lots of comfort.  Oh, and a few pillow fights too.  It’s a story that didn’t just lean into cute girls doing cute things, it leaned into cute girls doing human things in a cute way.

There’s clearly an appeal to cute girls doing cute things.  Clearly.  If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted to write one without even knowing about the genre.  It speaks to something very deep in the male, but also in the human heart.  It speaks to innocence, to friendship, to love, to sisterly bonds, to fun… it speaks to everything good about femininity and humanity.  After all, for most men, cute girls are something we want to protect (and the fact that many women don’t and don’t want to understand this is currently one of their greatest flaws).  We want nothing more than to make a world where cute girls can do cute things, and feel absolutely safe doing so.  But if you write about cute girls without making them human girls, it just gets… boring, kind of.  And “Onimai” actually did fall into that trap, just a little bit.  The girls ended up so cute they kind of stopped being human and started becoming an idealized version of human.  So cute that you almost forget that girls that cute just don’t exist.  Much escapist media has this problem – you end up with an idealized story that satisfies something very deep inside, but also stirs up a longing as well, a longing that this kind of world could actually exist.  And doesn’t.

And maybe that’s one reason why I wanted to dive into deeper things with Lily.  I wanted girls that could exist.  And I feel, just a little, that I succeeded at that.

At the end of the story (or nearly so), Lily got letters from a few of her friends, and they all told her, in different ways and with different depth of feeling, how much they loved her.  That’s not cute girls doing cute things.  That’s something a little different than cute girls doing cute things.  That’s…  cute sisters loving each other.

And at the end of the day, that’s what I hope Lily’s legacy will be.  Throughout the story, that’s the thing that held everything together.  Lily’s love, and her family’s (adopted or otherwise) love for her in return.  And if they showed that love in a cute way, well, more’s the better, right?

And just as an aside – I don’t understand yuri.  I mean, I understand why it exists, but I don’t understand it.  This is not a yuri story and I actively avoided anything yuri.  Crystal even wanted to get yuri sometimes and I shut it down hard.  This is because if I’d had any of those girls get into that kind of relationship with each other, it would have stopped being cute girls doing cute things and started being, well, something else.  These girls loved each other, deeply.  But yuri would have, in my view, corrupted that love and added complications that would have ruined the story.  Even at the end, when Crystal ended up with a girl for a little while, Lily was kind of caught by surprise.  It never even occurred to her.  And… in my view, anyway, that’s kind of how it should be.  She accepted Crystal, but…  it’s still not that kind of story.  I might say more about that later.

People can do what they want, but I owe no one representation, especially in my story, with characters that I created..

(I’ll be a little fair, though, one of Lily’s flaws is that she is amazingly gullible.  Remember that birthday party where Liz all but told her about the surprise party and she still didn’t figure it out?  Crystal was sending a whole bunch of signals, like on.. I think, August 16, the night before the big idol concert in Houston.  Lily did not pick up on them.  Likely at least one of her other sisters did.  I have no idea who, but if I’d have to guess, it was…  Diana.  Who is, frankly, more interested in tacos than girls, so…)