The Anime Staple: Time for School!

I thought I'd put together a set of features called 'The Anime Staple' in order to look at the ideas and features that anime creators love to inject into their shows.  While anime varies wildly from program to program, you can usually find a few common bonds in the majority of content out there.  For the first article, I'm going to take a look at the focus on schooling in anime.

There are a lot of things that anime fans get teased about, but this is one topic that anime fans themselves tease the industry about! If you had to take a guess at the most prevalent aspect of most anime out there, what would you say it is? Personally, I'd have to pick the focus on school.

It's no secret that a lot of anime features focus in on school life of the main characters. That can be any type of schooling, but usually we're thrown into the high school lives of the main characters. It truly is amazing to look at just how many anime series' and films feature school as the major location for the stories that they tell.

While some fans rag on how much school is a focus in anime, why shouldn't it be? School is the perfect location for characters to come together and bond. I mean, where did you meet most of your friends? Where did you learn about the friends that you love? We definitely build important relationships within the confines of a school, and some would say that those relationship building skills are just as important as the classes that are taught.

While school anime may be a bit played out as an overall theme, I still think interesting situations can occur within the setting. School acts as a common theme that everyone can understand, which always gives the anime creators a nice base to build off of. You have to have your audience grounded in something they understand and can relate to before you take them on an amazing, out-of-this-world journey.