'Wasteful Days of High School Girls' Is Delightfully Hysterical

Wasteful Days of High School Girls (also alternatively titled in the singular form Girl) is a slice-of-life comedy series that follows a freshman class of an all-girls high school.  Each one of them has their own distinctive quirky personality, and at the start of the school year, Nozomu Tanaka gives teasing nicknames to her classmates which are based on their respective quirks.  These end up sticking on them.

So, the aspiring manga artist Akane Kikuchi becomes “Wota”; the deadpan, biology geek Shiori Saginomiya becomes “Robo”; the petite, childlike, naïve Saku Momoi becomes “Loli”; the chunibyo–afflicted Minami Yamamoto becomes “Yamai”; the tomboy-ish, studious, socially inept Kanade Ninomae becomes “Majime”; the bashful, occult-obsessed Hisui Kujo becomes “Majo”; and the pretty, boy-allergic, yuri–loving Lily Someya becomes, well, “Lily” (the only one whose actual name is apparently already a fitting nickname).  In turn, the girls get back at Tanaka by nicknaming her “Baka” (Japanese for “idiot”), since she’s exceptionally stupid and indolent.

Meanwhile, their homeroom teacher is Masataka “Waseda” Sawatari, who also has his own eccentricities.  He is only attracted to girls who are in college, and is awkwardly outspoken about it.  He’s also secretly the Vocaloid artist Teishotoku-P, whom Wota is an avid fan of (she’s unaware that Teishotoku-P and Waseda are the same person).  Baka and Yamai are constant headaches to him.

The characters’ goofy personalities are simply apt ingredients for some hysterical, outrageous situational comedy.   From the dumbass Baka alone, tons of material can be mined.

A lot of the hardest-hitting gags come out of the central trio of Baka, Wota, and Robo, but the focus is never stagnant on them.  The other girls are also given quality opportunities to have their own shticks and bits, and thus, they can come off just as memorable to the audience as those three (for the record, my favorite is Loli).  Moreover, the potency of the comedy the girls generate is due to the terrific chemistry that they share with each other.  Regardless of who is or are interacting with whom, it can be expected from the resulting jokes to hit more than miss.

In relation to this, a winsome aspect of the girls’ dynamic is that there’s somewhat a sense of relatability going for it.  They savagely roast or even borderline bully each other a lot.  But regardless of whatever hurt feelings and irritation that come out of this, they still would choose to hang out with each other.  Isn’t that how a high school clique works in real life?  This anime doesn’t have much to offer in the depth department.  But the girls’ amiable, rough friendship – on top of a few uncharacteristically thoughtful moments peppered across the series – serves an adequate amount of that end for the kind of show it is.

In the end, although Wasteful Days of High School Girls is a very funny show, it’s not really as hilarious as I hoped it would be when I checked it out at the start of the summer season.  It made me chuckle a lot, sure, but I wanted a full-blown laugh riot like Grand Blue of last year’s summer season (it was for the same reason I picked up Hensuki).  It was able to bring me to the brink of exploding into hearty guffaws, but it was unable to deliver the extra push that would have finally tipped me over the edge.

Nevertheless, this fact remains: it’s an absolute delight of an anime comedy.