I know a lot of people look back on their high school lives with a certain fondness, and, to an extent, so do I. There are a lot of good memories from those days, a lot of friends, a lack of responsibility, but… nonetheless, I’ve recently reached an important milestone where I’ve spent more of my life out of school than in it. It’s been over a decade since I graduated, and I’m pleased that school is no longer the pre-eminent memory of my life.

And yet… and yet, I find myself having to constantly relive high school over and over and over again almost every time I watch anime. My friend, “T”, has made me watch three separate shows in the past week, and all three of them are high school-based anime: Chuunibyou Ren, Noragami, and Kannagi. All in one week. And that’s just the beginning, Bakemonogatari, Chaos;Head, Lucky Star, Azumangah Daioh, School Days, Yuyushiki, K-on, half of Clannad, Chobits, The Daily Lives of High School Boys… the list goes on and on. That’s barely a fraction of the school-based anime I’ve seen (in all fairness, in nearly half of those shows, while they feature high school students, school does not feature prominently in the story, but the point remains).

Granted, it’s not as if I don’t know what I’m getting into a lot of the time. Many of these are openly about school, so I can’t really be surprised by it. It is one of the cliches, however, that wears me out with anime, and makes it hard for me to enjoy even some of the better shows. Noragami, for instance, a show about a minor god in human form fighting “Phantoms” and trying to gain followers, actually looks pretty good, but the high school aspect of it makes it less appealing than it might otherwise be. Chuunibyou is a great show, funny with likeable characters, but there’s only so many school festivals and clubs that I can take.

It’s strange, actually, when you think about it, because anime, as compared to Western animation, is usually more serious, more graphic, more sexual and violent, and, contradictorily, it seems fixated on teenagers and even relatively mundane teenage life. They may be fighting monsters or going into cyberspace or dealing with insane psychological issues, but they still wake up every morning, walk to school with their friends, interact with that one perverted classmate and the teacher in the eternal mid-life crisis, and go home. I suppose the sheer repetition and similarities between shows is what grinds on me the most about these anime.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that anime needs to change or the culture around it needs to change, because it certainly is a cultural thing, some part of the psyche that appeals to them and to us, I just wish that every show that came down the pike didn’t feature some teen sitting near the back of the class by the windows (and they almost always do). It makes me more aware that a lot of my favorite anime break that trend and show something beyond school: Steins;Gate, Ergo Proxy, Spice and Wolf, Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne… it’s actually such a relief when I start a show and it’s in some fantasy or sci-fi world because the cliché is less apt to show up.

I guess this is a bit of a rant, and I don’t mean to detract from high school-based shows at all. There are a lot of them I had quite a bit of fun with. It’s just hard to watch that day after day. When you sit down and pay attention with a bunch of other kids in a classroom, it starts to feel like being back in school.

And that’s exactly what I want to avoid.