Stella Jogakuin Koutou-ka C³-bu

Command, control, and communication: the three pillars to successfully execute missions in modern military combat. They are also the source of inspiration behind Stella Women's Academy airsoft club, aptly named the C3 Club. Due to the club's nature, the members have trouble finding newcomers, but, as the school year starts, they hope to find their next sharpshooter among a new crop of students.

Yura Yamato is a freshman at Stella; she sports an unassertive personality that makes it difficult to make friends. She soon discovers her absent roommate owns a massive collection of military memorabilia and movies, including a replica Desert Eagle. When one of the C3 Club's members catches Yura re-enacting an action movie, she drags her into the Club's airsoft practice match. Despite being on the losing side, Yura is unexpectedly drawn to the excitement of the game.

Upon her return, Yura's roommate—Sonora Kashima—reveals herself to be the C3 Club's president and invites her to join. Now with Sonora by her side, one more exhilarating match convinces Yura to sign up. Thanks to her new teammates, Yura discovers a hidden side to herself and an unexpected love for airsoft. However, as her dedication to the game slowly takes over her life, Yura finds herself on the path of great change and success—one that may easily lead to self-destruction.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kirishima, Rento Main

Nishizaki, Rima Japanese

Yamato, Yura Main

Makino, Yui Japanese

Kashima, Sonora Main

Sawashiro, Miyuki Japanese

Hatsuse, Karila Main

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Hinata, Yachiyo Main

Yonezawa, Madoka Japanese

Mutsu, Honoka Main

Saitou, Chiwa Japanese

Haruna, Rin Supporting

Seto, Asami Japanese

Hatsuse, Aira Supporting

Kayano, Ai Japanese

Seto, Midori Supporting

Hasumi, Erina Japanese

Choujirou Supporting

Hatano, Wataru Japanese

Hayashi, Youhei Producer

Takatori, Masashi Producer

Yoshikawa, Atsushi Producer

Takahashi, Yuuichi Producer

Reviews

May 2, 2016

TheBrainintheJar

Recommended

It’s so easy to write this off based on appearance. Then again, a lot of people are fooled by realistic design that an anime is deep. Stella’s Women Academy is simple and doesn’t aspire to much, but hits every target it aims for.

In truth, it’s not just an anime about cute girls who play with guns. The cuteness factor is there (since we in the West are still impressed by macho bullshit, it’s a plus). What drives the series, though, are the characters.

The story is simple because it’s a very humane one. It puts a bunch of personalities and examine them, using the theme of ... competition. What dominates is the characters’ reaction to every situation. Although external events pop once in a while like competitions, it’s not noticeable. They only happen to develop the characters. Feeling like you’re not enough or being narrow-minded or being laid-back are more crucial to the story’s progress.

It draws comparison to Ping Pong. There are even pseudo-artistic moments where the anime tries hard to be taken seriously. Thankfully they vanish quickly. Moments of confrontation, where we see the relationships change are more meaningful and profound than any weird-psychedelic-vision-thing.

The anime is full of such moments. Every episode is a clear progression of Yura’s personality. It is such tight pacing. Even the best anime don’t have pacing that is this focused. The series catches you off-guard when it moves from the cuteness of the first episode to the serious conflicts. It does it only in 6 episodes.

The tonal shift isn’t jarring. It adds depth. Life isn’t monotonous except in some circumstances. It’s mostly ups and downs. These tonal shift add realism to an anime that at first seemed only comic. It makes all the drama later believable and engrossing.

It’s an impressive feat. The characters shouldn’t work. They’re neither psychological portraits nor exaggerated oddballs. They still manage to feel real. This thanks to the work of the voice-actors. Most of the attributes – Ren’s gentleness, Honoko’s mother-figure, Karila’s toughness is expressed by these voices. Even when the characters all react positively to something, the voice-actors add their little touch to create distinction.

Yura is the highlight of the series though, and part of what prevents it from being brilliant. Going back to the comparison with Ping Pong, that anime explored every character it had. It wasn’t satisfied with just giving them distinct personalities. They each had their own journey.

Stella’s Women Academy is more narrow. Yura is the only one who goes through a major change. She’s a more believable and realistic character than Ping Pong‘s Tsukimoto, even if she’s less psychological. The changes in her are more apparent and clearer. The anime doesn’t rely on inner-monologues or visions (Okay, there are a few of them but not too many) to show us who Yura is. It’s the constant interaction with the cast.

Why make the decision to have such a narrow focus? Knowing your limitations is important, but great characters were the strength of the show. Everyone was flawed in a way and could be improve. The writers know how to develop a simple character, and using their talent only for one character is a waste.

Since there are guns in the anime, there are also action scenes. They’re the least flashiest action you will see, but somehow they work. Again, the simple and low-key approach is an advantage. The scenes are clear and easy to follow. They’re made of set-pieces which progress to a conclusion. Some tactics and strategy are involved, but they’re complex enough to be interesting and simple enough not to drag the anime down.

The overall message of ‘real winning is having fun’ may seem simplistic, but it actually goes deeper than that. It doesn’t pretend the world doesn’t have conflict. The message is that we need to understand when we’re in a serious conflict where we must win, and when we’re in a fun activity.

That’s the fault of both Rin and Sonora. Sonora just wants to have fun, so she doesn’t fight when she has to. She lets people leave freely even though it harms both the club and themselves. Rin sees everything in terms of conflict. For all her victories, her existence is joyless. She can win all she wants but what does she has in the end?

is not a huge anime. It’s a simple story about a person with no confidence getting drunk with power and then waking up. It works. Its focus may be narrow but nothing is missed, no idea is undeveloped and no moment is wasted. The only thing that prevents it from being a classic is that it never tried to be. Still, even the greatest of anime don’t hit their target dead-center like this one does.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jul 27, 2025

HoneyBees91

Mixed Feelings

I think people should watch this , especially who are new into airsoft.

At first I didn't expect to see this but as myself who has played airsoft for at least 4-6 years. I can confirm this is a good Anime to watch. Sure it may just be cute anime girls doing cute things by shooting and like military stuff. But honestly you don't see something like this everyday. There are funny moments and the characters are great too, I don't get it why this wouldn't get a second season tho.

MY EXPERIENCE
Honestly from my experience I played airsoft when I was somewhere 12-14 years old ... at my friends birthday party. Some of my friends did their parties at a airsoft place, in inside you could only use pistols and you had limited ammo. Somewhere about 10-14 shots in the mag. Outside you could use G36's and have a much larger area because it was outdoors + there were some buildings too.

As time went on I joined a club in that same place where my friends did their birthday parties at. There were only few members and I learned all of the military stuff. For example I had to learn how to say my name on the walkie-talkie in NATO phonetic alphabet. Learn how to not hold your finger on the trigger at all times because of safety. Later I joined a bigger group with the other people, there were people from ages 12-16 years old and the total amount of member was about 9-16. Recently I left the group in 2025 in spring because the "spark" was missing. It didn't just feel fun anymore, not just because time went on but because most of the members left, because the leader said that if you are not participating in the group then it is better to leave then not coming in this group. Also the leaders changed who lead the group once a week. The start was at 6pm and at the end was 7:30pm.

The training took place once a week at thursdays. Later I and the other members had to start going in wednesdays because there weren't enough people in it. Also that is when the old members had to leave because the leader said that if you are not participating in the group then it is better to leave then come. I wasn't accepted in the military because of my ADHD discord but then I thought of joining. Later I decided not to join because if I aren't accepted then I shouldn't go too. "It is best to stay citizen than go there for a year and maybe lose my mind or kill myself afterwards because of the stress and dark feelings."

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Feb 19, 2015

Fear_the_Reefer

Not Recommended

Yura Yamato is on cloud nine, seeing the campus of her high school for the first time. She’s been admitted into Stella Women's Academy, a prestigious all girls school populated by students with families far more affluent than hers. When she checks into her dorm, she finds out that her roommate is away, visiting some of her family in America... But that doesn’t stop her from rolling around in her dorm mate’s bed, where she happens upon a curious item hidden under her pillow. It’s not a diary... It’s not a photo of a boy... It’s a very ... realistic looking hand gun. And not only that, this girl has enough firearm paraphernalia in her dresser, closet, and God knows where else to make even Charlton Heston feel a little nervous.

Assuming it’s a bunch of theater props... Because Japan doesn’t have gun safety PSAs like we do... Yura decides to start playing with the guns, acting out scenes from one of her dorm mate’s Rambo DVDs, when a friend of that girl walks in on her, calls her a freak, and immediately recruits her into her odd school club... Command, Control, and Communications, or just C3 for short. And what does this club do, you may ask? Why, they play survival games where they run around the nearby abandoned school house, shooting each other with BB guns! As the newest member of this eclectic little group, will Yura finally be able to overcome her crippling social ineptitude?

While the slice of life genre has been around for decades, the new millennium has seen it become fused with the moe genre, giving birth to a sub-genre that has been a dominant force in the industry... School clubs. And they’re never big successful school clubs, either. They’re always offbeat, struggling school clubs with very small membership counts and an entire student body that really doesn’t want to get involved with them. Since this sub-genre is clearly not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s little wonder that Studio Gainax would eventually try to throw their hat into the ring. But where other anime have featured such simple club concepts as music, amusement, love advice, and hunting down/researching paranormal entities, Gainax has decided to take it a step farther with a air-soft gun-worship club. How did they fair?

Well, first things first, you can tell immediately that this isn’t the work of somebody like Kyoto Animation, the kings of that sub-genre. While Gainax is well-renowned for it’s art style and visual direction, their animation itself would best be described as ‘inconsistent at best,’ and C3 is the perfect example of that. The first episode, on it’s own, looks fantastic, with great CG effects on the school’s waterfall(Hey, I said it was a rich school, didn’t I?), and fluid movements from all the characters. There are some key frames, but they’re mostly used comedically. But including this episode, only about forty percent of the series looks this good. This is especially true during the gritty, decently executed battle scenes, as well as during the main character’s... um... Fantasies. But as for the other sixty percent, this is some stiff, cheap looking crap.

C3 looks great when it really needs to, but when it doesn’t, the on-screen movement is minimal, and the talking heads tend to drag on far longer than they should. It’s passable, overall, but when a running character looks like an animated icon being dragged across the screen, you tend to notice it. As far as the artwork goes, I said earlier that Gainax had a flair for art design, and I meant it, but C3 must be the exception that proves the rule, because this is one generic looking puppy. The characters look like they could have been copied and pasted from ANY other School Club show, with little change in design whatsoever. The backgrounds look impressive during fight scenes, but outside of them... Yeah, generic is definitely the word of the day.

The characters looking generic wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if they had personalities to help them stand out from the archetypes they’ve been drawn as, but sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The girl who looks like a hyper legal-loli is exactly that, and nothing more. The pig tailed glasses-wearing girl manages the finances of the club, and... That’s it, nothing more. The only thing she really does for the story is exploit the bodies of her club-mates at the culture festival for cash, which results in some very awkward fanservice. The blonde girl is... I’ll be honest, I don’t know. I know so little about her that I can’t even tell what archetype she represents. She’s initially the second best player in the group, and she has a twin brother who dresses like a girl, because of course he does... But that’s it. And the soft-spoken girl who discovers Yura playing around does nothing else of any note for the rest of the series. Keep in mind, all four of them are at least SLIGHTLY more characterized in the manga.

Two of the characters have backstories, but since they share the same backstory and it’s only told from one of their perspectives, it’s arguable that only one character actually has a backstory. These two are Yura’s room mate, Sonora, an older girl big-sister type who becomes a mentor for her, and the “antagonist,” Rin, her old friend from America. The only one who has any sort of arc or development is the main character, Yura, who takes on the role of untrained savant, who joins the club as a novice only to quickly become it’s strongest member. She becomes an expert marksmen after hearing a few pretentious phrases like “Squeeze without really squeezing” and “Fire without really firing,” and it isn’t long before she’s able to pull off difficult acrobatic maneuvres and take out entire enemy teams by herself. Her rise to the top makes little to no sense, even compared to Yui’s mastery of the guitar in K-On.

Having said that, there WAS an element to her development that I thought was written really well. In the latter half of the series, she has to learn some very hard lessons about arrogance, ego, and team work, and I have to say, the way this was all executed was surprisingly relatable and compelling. The circumstances that lead to this development were full of a ridiculous number of plot holes, but all the same, I’m glad they happened, because they made up some of the only scenes in the entire series that didn’t bore me half to sleep. I honestly do wish that the rest of the series could have had that much effort put into it.

I’ve seen Gainax be pretentious. I’ve seen Gainax be offensive. I’ve seen Gainax be balls-to-the-wall stupid. I’ve seen all of this, but until watching C3, I have never seen Gainax put this little effort into a product they were making. This anime is thoroughly a paycheck series for them, and they clearly chose to adapt the manga based on the strength of it’s ‘girls with guns’ gimmick, and because they thought a show about visually appealing teenage girls wielding firearms would push a lot of merchandise, ala Strike Witches and Gunslinger Girl. Oh, and if you don’t believe me, check out the ending theme, where all the characters are portrayed as the kind of chibis that you could easily see being turned into cell phone straps, so thank God those don’t exist. As a matter of fact, this is probably why they expanded two events from the manga... A squirt gun beach battle, and the culture festival story... To maximize the fanservice content in both stories. Yeah, surprise surprise, the leaf and shell bikinis were a Gainax invention.

From what I understand after reading 26 manga chapters that I was able to find, Gainax did take steps to improve the material by fleshing out the main character and the circumstances surrounding her entrance to the club. They gave it a new and much more interesting ending, involving the very lessons I was raving about earlier. Unfortunately, to make room for this ending, they had to condense the story down to 12 episodes by omitting any sort of personality or backstory from the other girls, then slashed the story to pieces and fit it back together with the events out of their original order. And here’s where my ‘little effort’ complaint comes in... They didn’t seem to put any thought into whether or not the changes they were making fit the story.

To examine the plot holes that these changes create, I’m going to have to go into some light spoilers, so don’t read this paragraph... Or the next one... unless you’ve already seen the series, or are just reading this review for entertainment’s sake, and have no intention of seeing the show at all. Ahem. In the manga, Sonora has to stay home from an important event because she was injured protecting Yura from a sniper. The sniper turns out to be a participant from the event, and after being defeated and confronted, she apologizes. Gainax sought to expand this concept, so the sniper was changed to a random pervert targeting teenage girls, despite having no connection to the story in any other way. Rin is revealed to have apprehended this villain while unarmed, and no, we never find out how. Because of her ability to do this, and the news that her team defeated a team of marines, she is simply not the same character as the Rin we meet later, who is not only defeated by another team of students during a casual match, but that’s WITH Yura’s help. And at that point in the series, she doesn’t seem nearly as cut-throat or intimidating, actually valuing teamwork and fun over victory for the sake of Yura’s development.

And this change is started because Yura cheats to beat her at the aforementioned event. When Yura brings up this fact to her team mates, NONE OF THEM care, and are more concerned with whether or not their victory will be revoked, and they consider her a traitor for calling the contest officials and reporting it herself. That’s already bad enough, as it paints nearly the entire main cast in a negative light, but what makes even less sense is that when she reports it, the event committee don’t listen, because Rin said it didn't happen. How the hell does that matter? If you have one person confessing that they cheated, who’s to say the cheated party would even be aware of it? If you have the confession, what more would you need? Also, I get that Yura has a vivid imagination... Hell, some might even call them troublingly lucid hallucinations... But what really confuses me is the fact that her friends can apparently get sucked into these fantasies and see them with her.

Spoilers over. Well, there are other plot holes, but with a show this stupid, it would just be nitpicking if I took it any further. Those were the three most destructive ones, so for now, let’s move on to the two biggest problems that this series has... The ones even it’s fans have admitted to.

The first problem is the uneven tone and confusing story structure of the series. C3 doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a raunchy moe comedy or a gritty character drama, and it doesn’t blend the two ideas well. Ideally, if you were to run these two tones at the same time while keeping them a safe but respectable distance from each other, they could actually complement each other well, like in Fullmetal Alchemist. C3 instead changes tone seemingly from episode to episode, jumping into each one with reckless abandon as if the other tone didn’t even exist. It’s hard to take the tension between Yura, Rin and Sonora seriously when you just saw a modified wet t-shirt contest in the middle of a crowded classroom. The resolution of it’s main plot isn’t even the focus of the final episode, which turned out to be a truly awful piece of filler filth.

And the other problem is really the show’s biggest base breaker. There are several people out there who can’t get past the first episode of C3 because of it’s loose, casual trivialization of gun violence. They see high school kids enthusiastically playing around with a bunch of realistic looking toy guns, and it turns their stomach. Speaking as somebody who was head over heels in love with gun and sword battles from movies when he was a kid, and would act them out with just as much vigor, I don’t really feel that revulsion... But I would not for one solitary second blame them for feeling that way.

See, Japan doesn’t have the same relationship with guns that we do. Unless you have a job the requires you to carry a firearm... Such as a cop, for example... It is illegal to own one. As a result, they don’t have a lot of gun violence over there. They don’t have school shootings, they don’t have remotely as many accidental discharges, and because of this, they’re not as sensitive about the issue as we are. Now, I don’t feel offended by the fact that the girls are running around playing games with BB guns... I’ve done it myself, even though I’m absolute rubbish at it... But we’re talking about a show where right in the first episode, the club’s recruitment plan is to map out the school yard and ambush their fellow students with a mock shooting. They don’t carry through with this plan, but the very mention of it should be enough to get a respectable viewer to imagine tragedies like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Also, it really wouldn’t hurt if the guns were orange, or something. Some people will be offended by things like this, some people won’t... And based on that tidbit alone, you should know right off the bat whether or not this title is right for you.

Stella Women's Academy, High School Division Class C3 is available from Sentai Filmworks in both Blu-ray and DVD formats. You could find either format last year as part of Rightstuf.com’s year end sale for about twenty dollars each, but even with that sale over, you can find them on Amazon for just under thirty. You can also watch it on Crunchyroll, and whether or not you have a subscription will determine whether or not you’ll have to sit through a wall of commercials to view it. The manga entries have not been released stateside, but it’s pretty easy to find translated scans of it online. There’s no english dub, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be one in the future, but hey, I could be wrong.

Going into this show, I was warned by a few people that I was going to hate it. As it turns out, well, they were kind of wrong. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a good anime, but I’ve seen worse from Gainax, and I’m sure I’ll see worse from them in the future. It’s biggest problem isn’t the uneven tone, or even the potentially controversial subject matter... It’s biggest problem is the lack of characterization, which is a thing that would normally be the saving grace for a lot of similar plotless, melodramatic slice of life shows. Without good characters, I can’t really enjoy the humor or get invested in situations they find themselves in, and unfortunately, that lead to me getting bored a lot as I tried to get through it. That’s just my reaction to it, however, and I can see why other people would enjoy it more than I did. All the same, I would strongly prefer if Gainax kept it’s ambition up in the sky where it belongs, and left the plotless slice-of-life material to KyoAni. I give Stella Women's Academy a 4/10.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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