Eriko is disgusted with her daily life in her co-ed junior high, and so she sees her admittance into a prestigious, all girls high school with a mix of delight and hope, believing that it will allow her to enter a world of dignity, order, cleanliness, and beauty.
Oh, how wrong she is.
High School Girls (also known as Girls' High, and originally titled Joshikousei) is a manga by Towa Oshima, which was serialized from 2001 to 2006 (running from 2001 to 2004 in Manga Action before moving to Comic High! for the rest of its run). It focuses on a group of normal, average high school girls and the dilemmas they face involving teachers, boys and themselves, and features nice drawings, abundant raunchy humor and some nice lessons about life. It was adapted into a 12-Episode Anime series in 2006. One of the most disturbing facts about this series is that the original manga was closely based on the author's experiences going to an all girls school, so go figure.
Not to be confused with Joshi Kausei, another manga series whose name means the same thing, but is written with different kana.
This series shows examples of:
- Afraid of Needles; Eriko turns out to be deathly afraid of injections, as revealed in Episode 2. It’s normal as in, she’s a completely normal human girl. Then again, she’s also a high-schooler, so her panicking is still a bit overwrought.
- Berserk Button: The normally mild Himeji is pissed when some sleazy guy tries messing with Ogawa, to the extent that she punches her boyfriend when she learns he helped arrange the whole thing.
- Butt-Monkey: Ayano is usually on the receiving end of physical slapstick from Yuma and sometimes Kouda, mostly for being annoying.
- Guys are Slobs: Gender inverted. First lesson learned at the all girl high school: Without guys to impress, girls are actually bigger slobs than boys.
- Informed Attractiveness: For some reason, a lot of characters comment on how pretty and cute looking Momoka is, despite her having a pretty similar character design to everyone else.
- Karaoke Box: Used for a date in one episode, also the location where Ayano meets Shimotakatani.
- Parodied, or something. While Yuma sings the opening theme, Akari raps the stations along the Toubu Toujou Line (in order!) and Eriko recites pi to 100 digits.
- Love Hotels: Ogawa is lured into one, but nothing actually happens. She ends up putting her would be assaulter to sleep. Shimotakatani ends up exposing more of himself than he probably wanted to. Poor guy had his clothes torn off by three of the girls. The whole incident ends up being played for laughs.
- Manipulative Bastard: Momoka, who after meeting her sister Yuma's friends, started spreading rumours that Ayano was cheating on Shimotakatani, in order to try and break up the friendship group, all just because she's jealous of not having any female friends herself.
- Older Than They Look: Ogawa is one of the older students, but looks younger than the freshmen.
- One-Gender School: The series mainly takes place at Yamasaki Academy, an all-girls' school. While at first Eriko assumes that a girls' school like Yamasaki will be dignified and proper without the presence of boys, she and her friends quickly find out that isn't the case.
- Poor Communication Kills: The entire reasoning behind the girls thinking Kouda has a terminal illness when she's staying in-character for an audition.
- Running Gag: Kouda appearing in a ridiculously tacky, over the top costume, only to re-appear in normal clothes a second later. Also, Himeji looking like Ogawa's mother.
- Teacher/Student Romance: There are a few scenes with Eriko and her teacher, Odagiri, that end up being a little too awkward for the both of them.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Eriko and Yuma used to hate each other, now they're pretty much inseparable.
