Yuru Camp△ Season 3

After spending 2 cours and 1 movie with an anime, changes to the formula are hard to swallow. That's why my main concern like everyone else's going into this season was the new studio...

But I'm really happy to say that even though the new designs were admittedly distracting during episode 1, I felt that feeling gradually melt away over the course of this season. The pink haired girl still shows up and eats a ridiculous amount of food. The girl with the funny accent still says funny things, and the dog still dogs. It's just hard to stay mad at a show that is this ... wholesome and comfortable.

And this might be heresy, but I think the new designs have their own charm. Many of the changes are actually from the manga, not the new studio, such as Rin, Aki, and Ena's hairstyle changes that happen during a timeskip between season 2 and 3. I found myself getting used to the style as the season went on, to the point where I had the same distracting feeling going back to seasons 1 or 2 afterward.

That being said though, C-Station will definitely be missed. C-Station's season 2 had a sense of calm and emotional weight that was lacking in 3, and their backgrounds felt more polished. It was definitely some big shoes to fill for 8bit, but I think they did a good job.

Above all, Yuru Camp is better than no Yuru Camp at all. And with the way it ended I think chances for a season 4 are quite good, too. Hopefully I'll get to write another review for this show again!

Unfortunately, this installment of Yuru Camp further proves what’s generally accepted nowadays, namely that it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing.

After all, there’s only so much you can do with this premise. It’s a slice-of-life show, and a progressive narrative shouldn’t be expected, but this also entails that every episode should have something unique to portray. When the same characters, in the same setting, in the same part of their lives make up the bulk of a story, this much content is never warranted. There are simply not enough situations to illustrate these girls in, and room for growth ... is something we’ve already ruled out.

I find myself feeling that, if anything, it’s turned into a cooking show, more than a camping one. The themes of outdoor activities, connecting with nature, and finding kinship in shared interests are almost completely replaced by the same batch of characters (granted, in different constellations) simply exploring new recipes. In some cases, not even that. Some episodes are dedicated to them just eating, not going through the trouble of preparing the food themselves.

It doesn’t help that the studio change veered the visuals into an unfortunate direction, with almost photorealisticly detailed backgrounds, and what I believe to be inferiorly illustrated characters. Once again, more isn’t always better. The overly detailed environments adds nothing to the show and just comes off as… overly ambitious, if you will.

The saving grace here is that I still very much enjoy these characters. Simply watching them do stuff together is plenty as a selling point for this show, I just wish everything around them turned out better this time around.

5.5, thankfully doesn’t detract from the previous seasons, those are still pretty great.

It's painful to see what started as a promising series amongst the no-man's land of the CGDCT genre become so rancid, featuring the same incessant and insubstantive moeblob squeaks and giggles that Yuru Camp S2 had but worsened by poor compositing, mismatched CGI backdrops, and even computerizing the more active character animation in long shots or wider angles, including most of Rin and Ayano's biking scenes. The cast is also diluted further by expanding the roster of one-dimensional moeblobs. Despite the downgrade, most of the characters look okayish or not much different. In contrast, Rin is transformed into an obscene blueberryblob monster in what might ... be the worst character art change I've seen in a popular seasonal; you can't spell "amoeba" without "moe," and Rin is now so blobby that I imagine she corners her (likely all male) prey and liquidates them to absorb nutrients.

Although most who have seen both seasons will beg to differ because S2 seems about as well regarded as S1, the series should have been canned after S1 because they already told the only story worth telling: several extroverted girls bonding over their inexperience with camping, while slowly befriending a relatively seasoned camper who is more introverted. It was a simple story, but the loneliness of Rin's solo excursions contrasted well with the warm airheadedness and ineptitude of her soon-to-be camping buddies. There was a fitting lighthearted atmosphere and understated emotion that made the series feel more worthwhile than what I've come to expect from the genre. S1 strongly captures the joys (and the not so joyous aspects) of camping by presenting it from multiple perspectives and levels of experience, with much of the trial and error and learning being applicable to camping in real life. Although YC is not concerned with social commentary, the girls' (and Rin's grandfather's) interest in camping suggests there might be something a little off about society or that something is missing, not unlike Do It Yourself!!

Then S2 came along, turning into your typical slime of life moerot, where they wander to random locations like obnoxious tourists, chatter about nothing, and deliver loads of badly timed or subpar comedy, with every season adding 1-2 new moeblobs or mainlining those who were previously secondary support. Yep, a new grill here, an added doge there! Might as well roll out a toy line. Contrary to surface-level perceptions, slice of life does not mean inane dialogue with zero substance, but that's almost always what we get in CGDCT. The dialogue of almost every scene starting with S2 is heavily told through visual language to the point that you might as well not even read, as you won't miss anything: the girls are eating food and it looks tasty, and they're enjoying it, so the dialogue is some moemoe variant of "Mmmmm... So SUGOI! OISHI! Food so yummy in my tummy." The logistics of their trips are tackled via text messages with super-kawaii emoji heads, which felt more acceptable in S1 because of how withdrawn Rin was, but now it's pure budget-saving tedium. On each excursion, our moeblobs wander around like cute, know-nothing tour guides for the viewer, commenting about how cool x is, the steep price of the gift shop, or how they can't wait to inhale all the pastries and desserts in sight. This series takes the typical fatty (Nadeshiko used to be fat even!) with wanderlust and foodie hashtags, then gives them liposuction and an overdose of moe. The most deceptive thing about Yuru Camp S2 is that camp is still in the title, when it should be called Yuru Tourist, because they barely camp at all!

Probably the only notable change of S3 outside of the visuals are a few segments where the girls more or less break the fourth wall for comedic purposes by zanily revealing the artificiality of the scene by playing with memory; it's so seldom used—maybe 2-3 times—and out of place as to be baffling. I'm also aware that many fans feel S2 had stronger moments and scenes and was typically a bit better written and directed compared to S3, but S1 and S2 were like night and day to me and completely different animals (with the latter one needing to be euthanized), so it's difficult for me to perceive the distinction, but, hey, I'm sure it's there.

This series revels in the inauthenticity so common to the CGDCT genre. There are, of course, no men, like a catcall-free feminist utopia—well, that's not quite true. There are fathers, little tykes influenced by the joys of camping, and many helpful ojisans along the way, but there is never a male around who is roughly the age of our plucky moeblobs, aside from maybe one random scene with a dweeb making a John Wick reference (why?). The series even makes a few self-aware nods to this reality in S1, likely making a number of weebish hearts surely skip a beat when Chiaki is flipping out over Aoi mentioning that she has a boyfriend, the latter quickly backtracking and making amends for her presumed infidelity by saying she was just joking. Rejoice, guys, Aoi is still single! There's another part where their teacher Minami's "brother" steps in to help Rin and Nadeshiko, to which you can imagine a few people might self-insert, delivering pickup lines like, "How about I stuff my hot, thick log into your tight stove, Rin-chan?" Halt, not so fast! Minami's "brother" is revealed at the end of the first season to be her reverse trap sister! Sorry, but if you really want to self-insert, the best you can probably get away with are the dogs (Hanpen is pretty alpha at least)!

One cannot get to the heart of what I'm describing here by only discussing YC. YC is a carbon copy of the standard CGDCT formula, so we must look at the CGDCT genre as a whole, as well as a few industry trends. CGDCT is a fascinating genre from a sociological perspective because it's truly unique, and there isn't a clear parallel that I've been able to find in the media of other countries. Anime has gone through many changes over the decades, and waifu culture and moe eventually became more prominent and transformed manga and anime in various ways. Female characters are often more popular than male characters because of these two developments, but that wasn't always the case. Heroic male characters seemed more popular in the 1970s and 1980s, though there were shows with an FMC or an all-girl group that weren't shojo or josei that were geared toward men, like Dirty Pair and some others. The heroines tended to be a bit closer to a cross between noir femme fatales and superheroes in these types of series, often focusing a bit more on being sexy rather than cute. The lolicon movement started in 1979 with Hideo Azuma's manga and became popular and controversial in the 1980s. Moe can be seen as a (more) commercial sanitization of lolicon. The main difference here is that lolicon was typically explicitly sexual whereas moe is about cuteness rather than sexuality (and the age of the moelita in question is more variable), but there is, nevertheless, a latent or implicit sexuality often buried or not so well-hidden in these scenarios as well. Moe is sometimes said to entail an endearment so deep as to convey the feeling that something blooms inside one's heart (or one's pants).

When it comes to sexuality in CGDCT moeblob series, there's a difference in presentation. Let's say you're looking for a mate at the bar: she shakes her ass, pulls off her bra and lets you see her bare breasts, and invites you to her room. That outward sexual behavior is a means of selecting a mate as it signals she is dtf. Granted, this is bimboized one-night-stand behavior rather than how you'd hope to end up in a relationship. In CGDCT the girls have a more prim and proper presentation and are cute. They are presented as ideal waifus, and neotenous features are highly desirable in mate selection, so moe in no way is divorced from sexuality in the sense of mate selection, it's just that the girls are not (usually) doing anything explicitly sexual. Their desirability is flaunted without any men around to select for, of course. That's where the viewer comes in. The other aspect would be societal shifts. Birth rates and marriage are in decline. Incel has become a common term. Even femcel has. I don't need to get into the specifics but as relationships become more difficult to navigate, consumerist media that emphasizes these elements will have a chance to fill the gap without any potential headache. If relationships aren't going well, then portrayals of romance could seem undesirable in fiction for many, but enticing moeblobs presenting themselves as cute, fun, single, and not hounded by any males that could be competition is much less intimidating. Imagine a lonely male high schooler looking for a club to join and he stumbles upon Yuru Camp, which has a bunch of A+ moeblobs; he'd join in an instant. I'm sure he'll pitch a tent in excitement once he realizes they're all single as well!

Somewhere along the way, the all-girl or girls with guns style shows became more moeified. These had conventional romance plots and high school drama in the case of the former and action movie plots for the latter, and a bad script that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise could often be boosted by the girls being cute, ecchi content, etc. Although some shows like this are well-written, you definitely are going to get more mileage from a poorly written female-fronted show rather than a roughly equivalent male-fronted show. The girls with guns shows in particular usually had the male support characters rather emasculated because they tended to be impotent next to the skills, technology, or powers of the females; similarly, the male mains across a wide-range of genres gradually became less heroic so as to reflect the average otaku. After a while, it seems the plots kind of got in the way of the girls being cute, and the men so often inserted into these works were, like, so not cute, omg! Those men need to be sent to the Bijo no Yu hot spring to rejuvenate their skin and become lovely ladies. SoL became the perfect genre to insert moeblobs into because they could throw out anything resembling a plot or a well-thought-out script and focus on letting the moe fester like a pimple.

There also seems to be an ongoing feud between fans of harems and CGDCT. Harems have a gaggle of girls competing over some dude, so the main concern would be sexual dynamics. CGDCT subtracts the dude and sexual dynamics, leaving only the gaggle of girls, sucking out any conflict or tension. When I was becoming more acquainted with newer anime, I actually was puzzled over the apparent appeal of CGDCT series: "Why don't you watch K-On!?" "Isn't that for girls? It's like Powerpuff Girls or Sailor Moon or My Little Pony or something, right?" "No, mostly men watch it." "Oh, interesting..." However, not every story that has the possibility of sexual dynamics, by having similarly aged boys and girls, has anything resembling romance. So why is it that CGDCT often chooses to axe all young male characters instead of just pushing them to the periphery or having them naturally bumbling around as extras like any normal genre would do?

In fact, harems and CGDCT are probably closer than most would think, the latter suffering from broken harem syndrome and deprioritizing the possibility of self-insertion, giving it a more "cozy and wholesome" sexless vibe on the surface. Even if CGDCT series tend to ooze a kind of coy sexual charge. There are those talking about falling in love with these moeblobs, who just do cute things, getting teased or embarrassing themselves, always ending up with marshmallow slop on their faces, flashing a thigh or foot here and there like a few stray crumbs for the starving, dipping into a hot spring for a brief rack appraisal, and maybe even the much anticipated beach episode.

To better illustrate this, there's a trashy series called Aru Asa Dummy Head Mic ni Natteita Ore-kun no Jinsei, which is about a male reincarnating as a microphone that a bunch of unwitting moeblobs are using and abusing for ASMR... of all things... so while it resembles CGDCT, it's like a harem with a passive, deprioritized, and wholly objectified self-insert (with this knowledge in mind, the camping gear in Yuru Camp will never look the same again, as I imagine all the spirited away men were repurposed into lamps or tents to be sold at Caribou). You could say that series is a kind of "symbolic missing link" between harems and CGDCT. CGDCT moves one step ahead and evidently removes the self-insert altogether, except for the most imaginative. When the question comes up about what a man would do if he had the superpower of turning invisible, there's always the silly answer of sneaking into the girl's locker room, and watching CGDCT is the socially acceptable (ahem, tolerated) version of this.

CGDCT effectively becomes a less confined fantasy where the creators of this genre fine-tune a role for the viewer to become what I might call the Cautious Hero, who is something akin to that microphone the girls were fighting over for their ASMR performances, only the possibilities are even more boundless. There aren't any studs or dorks (better keep an eye on that dog, though) pining over our moeblobs. These males, instead of being seen as self-inserts, might be perceived as "sexual threats" or get in the way of the Cautious Hero who is overpowered but overly cautious. The Cautious Hero might think of asking Rin out but instead just sneaks around camp and watches her eat, read, and sleep. Likewise for the other rotating moeblobs, whom the Cautious Hero accompanies on suspension bridges (let's not forget the "suspension bridge effect," which has one mistaking excitement for romantic feelings) and gushes over trains with. The Cautious Hero forever gathers more intel to finally make his move. The Cautious Hero's fortuitous arrangement of not having to worry about any men approaching his moeblobs and cramping his style is equivalent to a decrepit tiger thinking he will finally get an opportunity to eat slabs of juicy meat because all of his young buck competitors were poached by hunters for his benefit. Yet the Cautious Hero is as cautious as the tiger is toothless.