A subgenre of Slice of Life, Schoolgirl Series tend to revolve around a group of female classmates and their antics and adventures during and after school. Depending on how comedic they are, such series may feature a rather unusual school where highly unrealistic things happen. Expect a very immature teacher in control of a Wacky Homeroom, though a Straight Man educator may also be thrown in, both to add a friendly adult perspective and act as a foil to the childish antics of the heroines or their teacher.
Schoolgirl Series can also have more serious or romantic elements, but are similar in how their main focuses are on the day-to-day activities of a group of girls in school and the friendships that grow through them. Sometimes there is a main heroine in the story and if that is the case, the series may have some Coming of Age elements.
Male characters may appear, but they rarely enter into the main cast and if they do they are outnumbered by female ones. Occasionally, this element is used to such a degree that one may wonder why Everybody Is Single and yet people rarely mention relationships or dating in many of the more comedy-centered Schoolgirl Series.
In Japan, these kinds of series almost always have men as their target demographic. They generally focus more on moe than outright fanservice. The Genre Popularizer is the shonen series Azumanga Daioh, which featured many of the tropes that later examples would follow. Though the anime-centric language may lead you to believe otherwise, the schoolgirl genre is also present in the West, with 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform the Ur-Example.
Tropes commonly associated with Schoolgirl Series:
- A-Cup Angst
- Aloof Darkhaired Girl: Virtually guaranteed to either be part of the main cast, or the supporting cast.
- Beach Episode: Almost mandatory for any self-respecting Schoolgirl Series.
- Bespectacled Cutie: There's often at least one girl who wears glasses, which typically add to her cuteness.
- Bishoujo Series
- Boob-Based Gag: For when big boobs are used more as a source of comedy than "tit"illation.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Will overlap with Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! if the character is a Genki Girl.
- The Comically Serious: At least one of the girls will fill this role, likely to double as 'the sensible' one.
- Cute Clumsy Girl
- "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: It's very common for the opening themes to be performed by the main characters' voice actresses, and on some occasions the voice actresses tend to form groups from the series as a result.
- D-Cup Distress: There's usually one who's well endowed and self-conscious because of it.
- Even the Girls Want Her: There's bound to be at least one such character in a schoolgirl series, especially at an All Girl School.
- Everybody Is Single
- Festival Episode: Equally obligatory in Japanese High School settings as the Beach Episode (see above).
- Four / Five-Girl Ensemble: May also overlap with Five-Woman Band.
- Generic Cuteness
- Genki Girl
- Girlish Pigtails
- The Glomp
- Inside Shoes: Often are Color-Coded for Your Convenience to tell upperclassmen from lowerclassmen.
- Iyashikei: Some series can qualify for this trope.
- Joshikousei: The entire point of this subgenre is to see high school girls in cute uniforms doing cute, low-key things together.
- Karaoke Box: Not as often as the Beach Episode, usually with the Hollywood Tone-Deaf.
- Les Yay: Often, but not always, but may go so far to overlap with a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
- Manchild: Often overlaps with Sensei-chan if the character is a teacher. If female, they're often an Old Maid.
- Moe
- Nice Guy: Well, Girl: Expect at least one character in the main cast or secondary characters to fall into this trope, usually the Token Mini-Moe.
- No Antagonist: There is usually no antagonist in a schoolgirl series and even if there is one, the said antagonist will most likely be played for comedic purposes or as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
- Non-Uniform Uniform: It's common for some characters to wear their uniforms differently as a way to express their individual personalities, especially if the show has Only Six Faces and there needs to be a way to tell the characters apart more easily.
- Ojou: Often has a Big Fancy House, sometimes more than one and is a ditzy character as well. Expect Type 1 if she is a main character, Type 2 if she is a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis (although this is less common).
- The One Guy: Often the only guy in the series.
- One-Gender School: Quite a few series take place at all-girl's schools, so the number of male characters can be limited as much as possible. If it's not this, than there usually seem to be a lot more girls around than guys (which is sometimes justified by letting the series take place in an art club or something similarly "girly").
- Proper Tights with a Skirt
- Puni Plush: Often, but mostly dependent on the art style.
- Sailor Fuku
- School Festival
- Sensei-chan: If there's a teacher in the main cast, she's almost always just as immature as her students.
- Shrinking Violet: Often an Aloof Darkhaired Girl as well. Will often have a Hime Cut and be well endowed, but self-conscious. May overlap with Bespectacled Cutie / Tsundere characters.
- Skinship Grope: Often the primary basis for the Les Yay elements.
- Tareme Eyes: Often the Cloudcuckoolander and Genki Girl characters.
- Token Mini-Moe: Expect at least one character to fit this bill.
- Token Rich Student: There's often at least one character who's an Ojou from a rich family, but she still somehow attends the same middle-class public school as everyone else.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Almost always included among the main cast and likely to be best friends.
- Tsundere: May often be the Only Sane Woman, but also can be Not So Above It All.
- Tsurime Eyes: A trademark of the Tsundere, moreso for Kuudere types like the Aloof Darkhaired Girl, and Bifauxnens.
- Two-Teacher School: One of them will be the main Sensei-chan, while the other will often be her friend.
- Unlimited Wardrobe
- Vitriolic Best Buds, often between the Tsundere character and the Genki Girl. Often, but not always a Childhood Friends and Tomboy and Girly Girl / Red Oni, Blue Oni relationship, especially if the Tsundere in question is the Straight Woman / Only Sane Woman.
- Weight Woe: At least one character will be sensitive about her weight gain.
- Yonkoma: Almost a rule, if the series in question is a manga.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- A Channel is such, plus a few Les Yay overtones.
- Afterschool Dice Club focuses on a group of girls and the board games they play at a specialty game shop after school.
- Aiura focuses on a group of three high school girls and their antics whenever they have free time.
- Akebi's Sailor Uniform is about Komichi Akebi and her life after starting middle school, where she hopes to make lots of friends since she's from the country and doesn't know a lot of people her age. She also stands out for wearing a Sailor Fuku even though the school's uniform has changed to blazers.
- Amanchu! focuses on schoolgirls at a high school in Shizuoka, as they join the school's scuba diving club and enjoy the wonders of underwater exploration.
- Anima Yell! is a yonkoma series that is about a high school cheerleading team.
- Anne Happy is about a group of schoolgirls who have all been deemed "unfortunate" in some way. Hilarity ensues as they all try to deal with this.
- Asobi Asobase is an absurd Parody of this subgenre, as while it focuses on three girls at an all-girls' middle school and their antics in the Pastimer's Club, said antics can be rather over-the-top and the girls are often moronic jerks towards each other and other people. It may look like a typical "cute girls doing cute things" series, but the girls frequently do and say things that are decidedly not cute.
- Asteroid in Love is a yonkoma about a high school geology-cum-astronomy club, and two of their new members that has some common history.
- Azumanga Daioh is generally considered the biggest Trope Codifier for schoolgirl series, following the enormous success of the both the manga and anime, and it established many of the character tropes commonly associated with this subgenre. It mainly focuses on an ensemble cast of high school girls and their teachers, with the only named male characters being the creepy Mr. Kimura and Chiyo's father, who only seems to appear in daydreams as a giant catlike creature. It tends to focus on comedic side of things. Many series that came after Azumanga Daioh follow its formula pretty closely, along with the elements above, drawing comparisons such as "Like Azumanga Daioh, but in/with X". It became so popular that Doki Doki School Hours is considered to be a copycat, even though its manga came out two years earlier.
- BanG Dream! focuses on high school girls who form a band called Poppin' Party.
- A Certain Scientific Railgun has undertones of this, especially in its Filler arcs.
- Chronicles of the Going Home Club
- Daily Lives of High School Boys is a gender-inverted example.
- Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater follows four girls in a school club focused on fishing.
- Do It Yourself!! is about a group of schoolgirls in a home improvement club.
- Doki Doki School Hours is the earliest example on this list and as such is seen as the Trope Maker of some of the most widely used tropes. However, the series itself is more of a downplayed example, since there are an equal amount of male characters.
- Encouragement of Climb follows the experiences of a group of school-aged girls who do mountain climbing.
- FullMaPla is about the Odd Couple of a Genki Girl and a Silent Snarker who talks with numbered signs.
- GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class focuses on a group of girls (and a couple of boys) at Ayanoi High School, most of whom are enrolled in G.A., a class that specializes in arts.
- Gals! is about a trio of kogals and their adventures in and out of high school. Unlike most anime/manga examples, both the manga and anime are actually aimed at girls.
- Girl Friends (2006): A classic of the Yuri Genre, which features a realistic portrayal of a Coming Of Age Queer Romance, which the central pair being very confused about their feelings and featuring large amounts of Gayngst and Will They or Won't They?.
- Hanayamata
- Harukana Receive follows a group of high school girls and their aspirations to compete in the junior beach volleyball tournament.
- Hidamari Sketch features a group of girls who live in the Hidamari Apartments and attend a nearby art school together. One of their teachers at their school, Yoshinoya, sometimes seems much less mature than they do. In some ways the series tells the story of how the main heroine, Yuno, matures from being a naive freshman to being more of an adult.
- High School Girls, also known as Girl's High.
- Hinako Note focuses on cute girls and their theater club.
- His Coool Seha Girls is about Moe Anthropomorphism versions of Sega consoles attending high school.
- Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu
- Hyakko
- Hyakuen!
- Is the Order a Rabbit? is a downplayed example; the main characters are schoolgirls, but there's more focus on how they work at various coffee houses and scenes set at school are rare (especially since they all go to different schools).
- Joshi Kausei (the title literally means "high school girl")
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War spin-off We Want to Talk About Kaguya is part this, part Innocent Bystander Series.
- Kamichu! is about a group of schoolgirls, one of whom happens to be a god.
- Kiniro Mosaic, the plot point being an English New Transfer Student.
- Komori-san Can't Decline! is a series about a schoolgirl who can't deny requests and her classmates.
- K-On! fits the Schoolgirl Series template to the T, telling the story of a group of girls who are members of a light music club at an all-girls high school with the spunky "Sawa-chan" playing the role of club sponsor. There is really only one named male character that reappears in the anime and he is the brother of a club member. He never appears in the original source material.
- Laid-Back Camp is about a group of high school girls in the camping club, and their camping trips to idyllic places in Japan.
- Let's Make a Mug Too is about the girls of a high school pottery club.
- Liz and the Blue Bird is a spinoff of Sound! Euphonium, focusing on the side characters Mizore and Nozomi in a Coming of Age story as they prepare to graduate and struggle with their feelings about each other.
- Lucky Star mainly focuses on the core group of friends of Konata, the twins Kagami and Tsukasa, and Miyuki along with a few of their classmates and relatives. This series hangs a lampshade on the Everybody Is Single part of a good many Schoolgirl Series when the group wonders why Miyuki does not yet have a boyfriend. It also only has two named male characters that appear for more than a couple of minutes (aside from Anime Tenchou), Konata's dad, Soujirou, and Minoru Shiraishi. What sets this series apart from other examples is its many references to Otaku culture, and the anime adds a lot of Shout Outs.
- Magic of Stella overlaps with School Club Stories, all the cast are schools are four of them involves making a doujin game.
- Manabi Straight! combines this with 20 Minutes into the Future.
- Minami Kamakura High School Girls Cycling Club is about girls in a bicycle club.
- Mitsuboshi Colors
- Natsuiro Kiseki is all about four childhood friends, spending their last summer together before one of them moves away.
- Nichijou is this with the wackiness turned up. However, the "schoolgirl" part is actually downplayed; while the main characters are schoolgirls, there are also several male characters who get their own focus and there are plenty of scenes that take place outside of school (particularly with Nano and the Professor).
- Non Non Biyori follows four schoolgirls of different ages who, along with one boy, are the only students in their whole town.
- Pan de Peace! focuses on a group of schoolgirls who form a friendship based on their shared love of bread.
- Pani Poni Dash! revolves around an eleven-year-old girl teaching a crazy high school class.
- Please Tell Me! Galko-chan
- Sakura Trick: Stretching Pseudo-Romantic Friendship into main-text Yuri Genre.
- School-Live! is what happens when the character archetypes of a Schoolgirl Series are dropped into an altogether different genre and circumstances, in this case a Zombie Apocalypse. The series itself is a subversion, since it only pretends to be a typical Schoolgirl Series for the first chapter/episode until the First-Episode Twist is revealed.
- School Rumble downplays this, as there's an equal amount of male characters to balance out the cast. It's squarely on the more comedic end, focusing on the romantic hijinks that occur between the characters.
- Seishun Kouryakuhon is a schoolboy series that's taking place in the last year of their high school days. It has a bittersweet feeling to it because of that.
- Sketchbook revolves around the mostly female members of an art club and their chicken-obsessed, energetic teacher Ms. Kasugano. Well at least the Full Color'S anime does. The manga allows a lot more focus for the male characters of the Art Club and keeps it as more of an ensemble series.
- Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight
- Soul Eater Not!
- Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C³
- Sweet Magic Syndrome, Characters from a Magical Land go to school in the real world and talk about food, mostly sweets.
- Tamayura can be considered as one. The girls may not spend much time at school, but they are often depicted in their uniforms.
- Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono
- Thigh High: Reiwa Hanamaru Academy parodies this genre; while the story is set at a school and goes through many of the associated tropes, the "schoolgirls" are actually crossdressing men.
- Three Leaves, Three Colors
- Variable Geo is a 3-episode OVA adaptation of the Advanced V.G. fighting game series that centers around an all-women's MMA competition for teenaged waitesses. Most of whom, are between their sophomore - senior years in highschool and nearly all of them are still single, despite their looks. Reimi is the lone exception, being in a Secret Relationship with her personal aide.
- Wakaba Girl, a series of short 7-minute episodes about an Ojou who ends up going to an ordinary school and making ordinary friends.
- Waratte! Sotomura-san, is a series about a misunderstood girl who wishes to make friends with her smile, too bad her smile looks like she's about to viciously murder you.
- Wasteful Days of High School Girls has a tone not dissimilar to Daily Lives of High School Boys above, focusing on the inane and slapstick.
- You and Me is a rare gender-inverted example.
- YuruYuri is one of these, focusing more on humour and Yuri elements.
- Yuugai Shitei Doukyuusei focuses on only two schoolgirls, a straight-laced Class Rep and her perverted classmate.
- Yuyushiki, which shares some similarity to Yuru-Yuri, with slightly less yuri.
Comic Books
- Blue Monday is an American take on the genre, though it features at least two male main characters alongside the three female leads.
- The Four Marys, a long-running strip in the Bunty girls' comic paper in Britain. It's about four girls named Mary that attend a girls' boarding school, and have (usually) age-appropriate adventures. Named male characters come from outside the school and generally appear for one story arc only.
- Lumberjanes has many of the tropes and character archetypes typical of the genre, but is set at a girls' summer camp rather than a school.
- W.I.T.C.H. is a mix between this and the Magical Girl genre, as the comics focus as much on the five main characters' lives at home and school as their saving the world. The show focuses a little more on the "fighting evil" side while mixing in the Slice of Life elements as B-plots.
Fan Works
- A.A. Pessimal's Discworld fic:
- A series of works are set in the Assassins' Guild School, a boarding school with a reputation. They're not all about the girl pupils (Word of God is that the author finds girls are more fun to write). Several close pairings of best friends happen. Jocasta Wiggs and Millie Mountjoy-Standish; Mariella Smith-Rhodes and Rivka ben-Divorah; and most lately Johanna Smith-Rhodes Maaijande and Emma "Piles" Roydes. Intense animosities come into it too: Catherine Perry-Bowen and Deborah Rust; Rivka ben-Divorah and Pamela Eorle. The teaching staff manage this carefully. Fights and feuds of the intense sort that happen between teenage girls are not good in a school where the pupils have access to lethal weaponry.
- Elsewhere, the canonical setting of the Convent School of the Spiteful Sisterhood of Seven-Handed-Sek (SHS) is expanded upon and is revealed to have the Discworld's equivalent of Catholic Schoolgirls. Compared to the Assassins' School, SHS is more mainstream and typical of the sort of general education the Disc gives to its daughters. Who are tended by kindly and caring nuns with a deep commitment to educating their charges and turning out well-adjusted young ladies. It's not their fault they get girls like Shauna O'Hennigan and Rebecka Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons.
- Tokimeki PokéLive! and TwinBee is a series of crossover fanfics and one shots that takes place in an alternate version of the Love Live! universe that focuses on certain female characters from the Pokémon games, Love Live! School Idol Festival, Love Live! Perfect Dream Project, Tokimeki Memorial:Forever with You and Twinbee with occasional appearances from other female characters from other franchises and it also combines this with various Mon series tropes.
Film — Live-Action
- The St. Trinian's film series is about a group of delinquent British schoolgirls at a Boarding School of Horrors.
Literature
- Enid Blyton wrote several of these:
- The Gallagher Girls series is about girls going to a Spy School.
- Girls Kingdom takes place in a school for rich girls and the girls who want to be their maids.
- Here Comes the Three Angels is about gradeschoolers playing in a rock band.
- The Marlow Series Although only four out of the ten novels are set at the girls' boarding school Kingscote.
- Princess Holy Aura by Ryk Spoor, centered around Holly Owen's two slightly overlapping sets of friends and allies.
- The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School is a homage to the English boarding school variety of Schoolgirl Series, with the twist that it's set in a school where the students are all a bit unusual: Daddy's Little Villain, Fish People, superheroes, werewolves, ... and there's a sequel now, so it qualifies as a Schoolgirl Series in its own right.
- The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School is the sequel.
- Sound! Euphonium is about the ailing wind orchestra of a Japanese high school which steadily improves thanks to the guidance of an esteemed music director. It focuses more on the interpersonal drama between the band members (most of whom are girls) than humor, though it isn't entirely free of comedic moments.
- Super Cub is about a lonely schoolgirl who eventually makes friends and picks up a hobby of riding a Honda Super Cub.
Live-Action TV
Web Comics
- Destiny Fails Us revolves around a group of girls making their way through their final years of high school.
Western Animation
- My Little Pony Tales could essentially be described as this. It was a Slice of Life with Funny Animal ponies about characters who were regularly seen attending school. There were a couple of token guys, but most of them were girls.
