Feel the Sprouting #2: The Ever-Convenient Childhood Friend
If you’ve watched enough anime, you may get the feeling that every young man in Japan is required to grow up next to a girl of equal age and disproportionately high attractiveness. It’s like the Sprouting version of a chicken in every bucket. This is the wildly popular osananajimi (”childhood friend”) archetype at work, and this is my subject for today.
It’s not hard to figure out why the osananajimi character is so valued by Sprouting circles. She works on many of the same principles as the classic “girl next door” - someone the main character feels instantly comfortable around, someone who the main character can’t possibly imagine living without - and also the person he’s least likely to consider when Old Man Biology decides that it’s time for things to get all awkward in a boy’s life.
It’s easy to root for such a friendly and familiar character, and those of us who didn’t grow up next door to an attractive member of the opposite gender can easily buy into the uncomplicated fantasy of your best friend gradually becoming your girlfriend. As mentioned before, no story with more than one possible love interest can go without an osananajimi. From Shiori in Tokimeki Memorial (1994) to Yurika in Martian Successor Nadesico (1997) to Saki in Genshiken (2002) and other countless other characters over the years, osananajimi are a staple of the genre - some would even say they’re a necessity.
I don’t have a problem with that, myself - my problem is when “we grew up together” and “we played together when we were kids” become a crutch for lazy writers, and that’s cropping up more and more often these days (please note that these crutches also exist for the little sister/big sister archetypes, but a childhood friend involves less justification, because of that whole incest taboo thing).
Making an osananajimi involves very little effort in terms of writing character histories and motivations, so it’s a great fallback for the unmotivated author. Want to justify a stunning goddess falling in love with some random schmuck? It’s because he was nice to her a few times when they were kids and she never forgot. How does Shuffle! account for nubile demigods converging on the same random schmuck? Why, the girls played with the random schmuck once and never forgot him, of course. A wealthy heiress devotes her life to a man she hasn’t seen in years - and is, in fact, expressly forbidden to marry - because he was nice to her when she was young and (you know what’s coming, right?) she never forgot him.
The list of osananajimi connections that test the limits of suspension of disbelief goes on and on. It’s getting dangerously close to the “God, not again” status that amnesiac protagonists have earned in American cinema, in my opinion.
But hey, I’m just one guy, and the osananajimi juggernaut will continue with or without me, so all I can do is pick out stories where the characters’ childhoods actually make sense. If you’re like me and are a sucker for a well-written osananajimi, Myself;Yourself has a cast made up mostly of people who grew up together and act accordingly, or you can pick up Genshiken in its many excellent forms and see how it pokes fun at the genre archetypes.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a long-overdue appointment with my copy of Tokimeki Memorial 2, where pretty much everyone is an osananajimi who meets you maybe once or twice when they’re young and (c’mon, you know I had to say it at least once more) never forgets.
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