YMMV / Azumanga Daioh

• Adaptation Displacement: Initially in the series' heyday among Western audiences, the anime was more well known than the manga it was based on. This is likely due to ADV Films, the original English licensor, promoting the anime much more than the manga, to the extent that they titled their translation of the manga Azumanga Daioh: The Manga. Nowadays, the manga is at least on equal popularity with the anime, mostly due to licensing issues. When ADV went bust in 2009, the manga license was transferred to Yen Press, who put out their own omnibus the same year; meanwhile, the anime went without a rerelease until 2016, making the manga the more readily accessible way to consume the series for several years.
• Adorkable:
  • Although Sakaki tends to be considered cool and sexy by her classmates and her fans, even she gets her own moments of awkward cuteness, namely whenever it involves seeing and/or petting cats (unless, that is, the cat in question is Kamineko).
  • Osaka is spacey, slow and just straight-up weird. It's all part of her unique charm.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are Kaorin's feelings towards Sakaki really Single-Target Sexuality like she claims or is she just in denial about being a lesbian? Or, to Take a Third Option, is she actually bisexual or pansexual and doesn't realize it?
  • One semi-popular interpretation of Kimura, mainly to get around the huge amounts of Values Dissonance surrounding him, is that he isn't actually a pervert, but instead just a massive troll who is amused by the girls' reactions to his disturbing antics. The fact that he's already married and implied to be in a surprisingly sturdy relationship with his wife amplifies this theory. Another common interpretation is that he's meant to be a surrogate for adult readers who only read the series for the fanservice, making him an example of This Loser Is You.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: In one manga strip set during the first sports festival, Yukari slides up to Kagura (who, at this point, is still in Nyamo's class) and offers her a loaf of bread. Nyamo stops Yukari before she can reveal what her intention is. Fans are split on whether the joke is supposed to be that Yukari's bribing Kagura with food, or if she laced it with something to take Kagura out.
• Awesome Art: The Very Short Movie was created for theatres and it shows, with more detailed art and smooth, fluid animation compared to the regular anime.
• Awesome Music: The opening and closing themes, as well as many of the image songs. In particular, Kagura's "I Won't Be Defeated Tomorrow. Go! Friend!" and Sakaki's "The Heart is a Girl's Parachute".
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Depending on who you ask, Tomo and Yukari are either two of the funniest or two of the most annoying characters in the series. Some fans enjoy their hyperactive antics, while others don't enjoy how mean-spirited they can be towards the other characters at times, especially towards Chiyo.
  • Kimura is either hilarious and over the top, or creepy and unsettling. Differing values come into play here: Japanese audiences generally see him as a harmless buffoon, while western audiences are more likely to see him as a creep who overstays his welcome. Over time, his perception has evolved for western viewers to see him as an outright Scrappy rather than a character who's widely loved or hated.
  • People have mixed feelings about Chiyo. Many find her Adorably Precocious Child schtick to be funny and cute, while others believe she doesn't add anything worthwhile and exists solely for other characters to either fawn over her or bully her relentlessly. Since she's the closest the series has to a "main character", she gets a lot of screentime compared to other characters, so it can get grating pretty fast.
• Broken Base:
  • Some fans who started out with the manga have mixed feelings on the anime adaptation. On one hand, the anime adds some extra content to the series, including an entire episode that's completely original, and led to the series getting more exposure in the West than it initially did. On the other hand, some of the manga's fans have criticized the anime for dragging out some jokes that had much quicker pacing in the manga. Opinions on said extra content are mixed as well, especially since the anime also removed a lot of content that's in the manga, such as most of Sakaki and Osaka's interactions together, or a lot of Yukari and Nyamo's scenes together outside of the school. The anime also gives increased focus to Kimura, already a Base-Breaking Character, with several extra scenes of him harassing Kaorin. While Kiyohiko Azuma debunked rumors that Creative Differences with the anime's staff led to the No Adaptations Allowed status of Yotsuba&!, he did imply that he wasn't fond of his lack of creative control over the anime, which doesn't help this situation.
  • The English dub. Fans either like it for how well it manages to localize the jokes, or dislike it due to the performances of the cast.
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • Mr. Kimura had been a Base-Breaking Character outside of Japan from the get-go as a result of his characterization as an over-the-top ephebophile who openly creeps on the female student body (both figuratively and literally). However, during the anime's heyday in the west, his reception skewed mostly in the direction of "he's a creep, but an entertaining creep," being played up as a Memetic Molester and being the source of the term "waifu," one of the most enduring pieces of fandom jargon to this day. However, once the series' popularity dwindled into cult status, his reputation became much more divisive as a result of changing times that brought greater awareness to real-world sexual misconduct in school settings, making characters like him seem overly flippant and insensitive. Nowadays, while some still hold onto his Memetic Molester image, a significant chunk of readers/viewers see Mr. Kimura as, at best, an off-putting relic of the early 2000s' emphasis on bawdy comedy.
  • While she was never outright disliked, Kaorin was frequently overshadowed by the rest of the cast in the anime adaptation's heyday in the early 2000s, in large part due to her being Demoted to Extra as the series progressed. However, in The New '20s, she would garner a much bigger following once the series' LGBT Fanbase rose to the forefront of the fandom, owed to her being seen as a positively-portrayed queer character who's never mocked or demeaned for her crush on Sakaki.
• Common Knowledge: It's a common belief that Osaka eventually forgets that her real name is Ayumu Kasuga. This doesn't actually happen in the series. Quite the opposite; she panics at one point because she doesn't see her name on Yukari's list of students. She was looking for "Ayumu Kasuga", but the school put her down as "Osaka".
• Crossover Shipping: Chiyo is sometimes shipped with Honey from Ouran High School Host Club. Likewise, Sakaki is shipped with Mori from the same show.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • While much of her characterization is emblematic of the Cloudcuckoolander trope, Osaka is commonly headcanoned by fans as autistic and/or having inattentive type ADHD as a result of how many traits of hers parallel the condition. Among other things, she tends to space out and get lost in odd trains of thought, displays sensory sensitivities (both seeking out and avoiding various stimuli), repeats phrases she likes, infodumps without regard for appropriateness, has odd but deep interests, and displays an unconventional perception of language (shown by her knack with wordplay and subtleties in kanji, as well as her occasional struggles with distinguishing similar verbal concepts). She also tends to catastrophize about herself and her peers and approaches basic tasks in out-of-the-box and oftentimes counterintuitive ways.
  • Sakaki is popularly considered autistic by the manga's neurodivergent fanbase. Much of it revolves around her obsessive interest in animals and/or cute things, which can be easily interpreted as a special interest: it forms a large part of her daily life, tends to define her left-field trains of thought, and ties into her tendency to worldbuild on the spot, whether it be for stuffed animals or real creatures that she encounters. Outside her interest in animals, she displays difficulty with socializing, which her peers initially misconstrue as being aloof and prickly, yet counters this with an unusually strong sense of empathy, even if it's for a cat that actively antagonizes her.
  • It's a common headcanon among the fanbase that Tomo has hyperactive-impulsive type ADHD, based on how manic her behavior is even by typical Genki Girl standards. Aside from embodying the words "hyperactive" and "impulsive" to a T, she often does things solely because she feels like it, or to gain attention, without regard for consequences. She also appears to be a compulsive liar (i.e. she lies out of habit with no clear goal or benefit to doing so), struggles to pick up on nonverbal social cues, and tends to speak her mind regardless of whether it's appropriate or not.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Chiyo's father only appears in a select few scenes, but is a Fountain of Memes and is fondly remembered for being so unusual even by the series' standards.
  • Despite being Demoted to Extra early in the manga's run, Kaorin gained a surge in popularity on social media during the turn of the 2020s, thanks to a mix of her being seen as positive LGBTQ+ representation and the humorously blatant presentation of her sexuality.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Tod" (That One Dude) for the lone unnamed male student who shows up every now and then.
  • "Rachel Handlebarz" for the unnamed female student with distinct braided twintails.
• Fanon:
  • A fairly commonly held one is that Kaorin's last name is "Aida" and Chihiro's last name is "Inoue", based on an early strip in the manga. Azuma debunked this on his personal site, but it persists for lack of a canon answer.
  • There are many theories about regarding what the love letter Nyamo wrote in high school was about, but a popular interpretation is that it was addressed to Yukari.
  • It's fairly common for fan works to depict this series as sharing the same universe as Yotsuba&!, despite nothing in the latter directly hinting at this beyond some minor Continuity Overlap.
  • A common fandom joke-turned-theory is that Ayumu Kasuga (the more grounded and tired-looking Osaka from the early chapters) and Osaka (the more well-known wide-eyed cloudcuckoolander established later on) are entirely separate characters, akin to the "Santiago" meme in the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom. How seriously it's taken depends on the person, ranging from the two simply swapping places to Osaka killing and replacing Ayumu.
• Fountain of Memes: Osaka in general, due to her strange behavior and serene, vacant expression. She herself has become a meme "character" disconnected from the rest of the series, akin to Hatsune Miku or Cirno.
• Friendly Fandoms: Thanks to the two works sharing the same author and brand of eccentric humor, you'll find a good amount of Azumanga Daioh fans who are also fond of Yotsuba&!, and vice-versa.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the manga, Chiyo gets a part-time job at Magnetron Burger, an in-universe knockoff of McDonald's, with her first summer there featuring the manager commenting on how strange it is to be hiring a ten-year-old to work at a fast food joint. Just over 20 years after the manga ended, an actual McDonald's location in Louisville, Kentucky was busted for hiring two ten-year-olds to do various jobs around the restaurant.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In one of Osaka's dreams, Chiyo's dad spouts out the iconic line "I wish I were a bird". Several years later, said wish would come true in the form of Oko San.
  • When the girls go out for karaoke, all of them are surprised at how well Sakaki can sing. Yuu Asakawa, Sakaki's Japanese voice actress, would later go on to voice Megurine Luka, a virtual singer who is similar to Sakaki in looks and personality (tall, busty, "cool and somewhat mysterious").
• Hollywood Pudgy: Yomi is insecure about her weight and gets teased about being fat by her friend Tomo, even though she's no less thin than the other girls on the show. The liner notes in one of the DVDs notes that her obsession with her weight was given to her to give her a slightly more "normal" quirk than the other girls, which implies that this is more in Yomi's head than an actual problem.
• Iron Woobie: No matter how hard the world tramples on her, Sakaki never gives up trying to be a good person.
• Jerkass Woobie: If her dreams are any indication, Tomo has massive insecurities, which leads to her being such a Jerkass.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A lot of the show's fans as of The New '20s only watch it for Osaka.
• LGBT Fanbase: While not primarily known for it in its heyday, the series has always had a small but notable LGBT fanbase, which became more prominent as the original series fell into cult status. This is owed to its relatively progressive values for the time; with its majority-female cast, it doesn't objectify or demean the girls, and even features a positively-portrayed LGBT character in Kaorin (who openly has a crush on Sakaki, to the point of a Transparent Closet in the "Supplementary Lessons" chapters, and isn't treated any lesser or differently for it). This is in addition to the ever-present shipping between the cast, with plenty of lesbian undertones to go around.
• Memetic Molester: Kimura, due to his insane obsession with high school girls, his generally creepy behavior, and his status as the character who coined the phrase "waifu". During the height of the anime's international popularity, it was common to see fans depicting him as even more overtly lecherous than he already was.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Waifu^ExplanationA Gratuitous English rendering of "wife" used by Mr. Kimura when revealing his longtime marriage to the main cast. The silly nature of the word instantly caught on among fans as a way of referring to fictional female characters who inspire Perverse Sexual Lust, received a Distaff Counterpart in the form of "husbando," and eventually exploded into the wider English lexicon, being invoked even among those who never heard of Azumanga Daioh.
  • "OH MY GAH!" ^ExplanationOne of the most famous and memorable scenes in the show, where Osaka has a surreal daydream with Chiyo-chichi in it. It became notable due to capturing the bizarre nature of the series and is widely known around the Internet, with its opening exchange between Osaka and Chiyo-chichi in Gratuitous English being especially popular subjects for quotation and parody.
  • Caipirinha^ExplanationA video of Tomo taunting Chiyo from episode 20, set to a nightcore remix of "Caipirinha" by Carinho (a song about the national cocktail of Brazil). Since its release, the video has been a popular subject for remixes and edits, incorporating other songs and transplanting Tomo's dance into other situations.
  • Osaka's shoe toss.^ExplanationA scene where Osaka attempts to predict the weather by throwing her shoe in the air and seeing how it lands... only for it to fall into the back of a passing truck. This spawned many parodies of what other things could've taken away poor Ayumu's shoe, instead (or sometimes, making it look like the shoe destroyed something it did land on).
  • Yomi the furry hunter^ExplanationDuring the show's western heyday, various Image Boards adopted Yomi as their mascot for their "war on furries," based on her voicing the most negative response to Tomo's antics in the mascot costume during the culture festival.
  • Osakaphone^ExplanationA text drawing of Osaka used in a short viral flash video, set to a sped-up version of Raffi's "Bananaphone". It later became the mascot for AMV Hell, after being used in a parody of the infamous Ellen Feiss Apple commercial.
  • Rachel Handlebarz^ExplanationA Fan Nickname for a nameless background character with long, braided pigtails, often subjected to a number of jokes among fans for her distinctive appearance and how it contrasts with her incredibly minor role in the show.
  • Sata andagi!^ExplanationOsaka repeats this term ad infinitum during one scene in the Okinawa arc. Fans took to this instantly, depicting sata andagi as Osaka's Trademark Favorite Food and parodying her repetition of its name.
  • Dead Cat emoticons^ExplanationA series of animated emoticons (some of them NSFW) based around Chiyo's Dad, which caught on among fans for their over-the-top nature.
  • Don't take the swine flu vaccine!^ExplanationA reference to an infamous upload of the anime adaptation's opening that edits this message onto Yukari's chalkboard in the shot of her dozing off, with other anti-vax messages tucked in at various other points. To this day, the video is one of the highest-quality uploads of the opening available, which combined with the jarring nature of the messages has made it a popular subject of parodies over the years, frequently depicting Yukari as being an anti-vaxxer.
  • "Soramimi Cake" parodies ^ExplanationParodies, mashups, and remixes of the opening theme, "Ear-Playing-Tricks Cake" (often referred to by its Japanese title, "Soramimi Cake"), are popular on the Japanese web, especially on Nico Nico Douga.
  • osaker/saker ^ExplanationRecent fan art of the characters, particularly Osaka, will have comical manglings of their names as titles.
  • as shrimple as that ^ExplanationA piece of fan art with Osaka watching a tank of shrimp, captioned "as shrimple as that" after an existing meme, went viral after being used in a 4chan greentext about "stakened eggs" (a mishearing of "steak and eggs"). The art became a popular subject for redraws, many of which replace Osaka with characters from various other works.
  • Kill him.^ExplanationA panel from a widely circulated fan translation of the Extra Lessons chapters, in which Yukari bluntly responds to Nyamo's question of what she would do if a prince on a white horse showed up to whisk her away. The panel became a popular reaction image as a way of hyperbolically expressing disgust at people.
  • If gayness was a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is "would go gay for a celebrity" and 10 is "only thinks about stuff that's gay"... Why, I'd be... a lesbillion!^ExplanationA popular pair of edited panels◊ from the Extra Lessons strip where Kaorin attempts to deny that she's gay so that she's instead humorously blatant about it, commonly used by lesbians when asserting their sexuality.
  • Who can it be now?^ExplanationA viral video of Osaka dancing to "Who Can It Be Now?" by Men at Work in Roblox.
  • "America ya!" "Hallo! Hallo! Hallo!" ^ExplanationA scene from the anime's 20th episode where Osaka imagines herself landing in the United States, saying the first line as she leaves the plane, and being greeted by a large group of "Americans" (which are actually just chibi versions of Chiyo), all repeating "Hallo!", a Gratuitous English typing of "Hello". It became a Running Gag on several sites, mainly TikTok, for one person to say "America ya" and everyone else to reply with "Hallo".
• Memetic Personality Change: It's very popular for fan works to have Tomo's cheerful, hyperactive personality be an act she uses to hide serious emotional problems.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Thanks to the scene where she tries to wake Yukari by Banging Pots and Pans but walks into her bedroom with a knife instead, some fans like to jokingly portray Osaka as a cold-blooded killer.
  • Due to a scene where Tomo freaks Yomi out by charging at her in a mascot costume before being escorted back with the head removed, a significant portion of fans from the anime's heyday jokingly portray Yomi as having a violent vendetta against furries.
• Moe: The series itself is something you can curl up with, but Chiyo-chan is Moe to the nth degree (especially when she's in the penguin suit), and Osaka and Kaorin are also incredibly cute. Osaka may actually be at least partially responsible for the popularization of the concept, placing second in the 2002 Saimoe Tournament. This series is sort of proto-moe itself, as it codified a lot of tropes related to the "genre" (even though there's more focus on comedy than cuteness, and Chiyo is really the only character whose cuteness is emphasized).
• Never Live It Down: Osaka walking into Yukari's bedroom with a knife and looming over her while gripping it. This, among a few other moments, led to fans frequently portraying Osaka as a cold-blooded killer in some fanworks. In canon, she's probably the sweetest and most harmless member of the cast.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Mr. Kimura can be this for those who have dealt with sexual harassment from teachers.
  • It may be Played for Laughs in this series, but imagine riding with Yukari or someone with a similar level of craziness behind the wheel. Someone with a .2 BAC would make a far safer driver^note okay, don't actually drive while intoxicated, but you get the point.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • It's difficult to overstate how influential the series was on pop culture in general, especially in Japan. When the series first became popular, the concept of a manga/anime that focused solely on the ennui of everyday high school life was a novel one. It crystallized basically every single Schoolgirl Series trope, featuring a varied cast with distinct, realistic personalities, and with more focus on the female characters' various quirks than on Fanservice. These days however, when nearly every schoolgirl comedy has hit the same beats as Azumanga with increasingly quirkier settings or situations, it can be difficult to see how a series about the ordinary lives of ordinary girls was such a landmark.
  • Likewise, its western fandom in its heyday was massively influential on online culture, most notably bringing "waifu" into popular jargon singlehandedly. Osaka in particular was omnipresent on imageboards, and the series' fanbase and fan content helped integrate anime into the broader internet community and laid the groundwork for how many later fandoms operated. From a modern perspective however, it can be hard to understand what was so important about its following when its most distinctive traits are now considered the bare minimum for a sizable fandom.
• One-Scene Wonder: Chiyo's dad shows up in maybe five skits total. Nonetheless, everyone that knows this show will remember him without fail thanks to his ostentatious presence and surreal nature in an already quirky series.
• Periphery Demographic: Alongside its LGBT Fanbase, the series picked up a sizeable neurodivergent following in the years since its initial heyday, owed in large part to both Osaka and Sakaki displaying a lot of characteristics reminiscent of autism yet simultaneously being depicted as people who can find an accepting peer group whose friendship with them is genuinely sincere, contrary to most depictions of autistic and autistic-coded characters (which tend to be more harmful).
• Popularity Polynomial: While not quite at the same heights as it was in the early-to-mid-2000s, the series picked up a greater following on social media at the start of the 2020s after undergoing a slump in the 2010s due to it being overshadowed by other slice-of-life series, as well as ADV Films' bankruptcy rendering the anime legally inaccessible outside of Japan for a long while^note the manga was still in print thanks to a new translation by Yen Press, but anime has a much stronger grip on the public consciousness in the Anglosphere. In particular, a TikTok account dedicated to the series, azumemes, quickly became popular and gained over ten thousand followers. This can partially be attributed to nostalgia, but many of the series' new fans are people too young to have experienced its heyday, who instead appreciate how relaxed and refreshingly low-key the series is compared to its modern day counterparts.
• Quirky Work: A Slice of Life Schoolgirl Series— debuting at a time when those weren't particularly common— with copious amounts of Surreal Humor and Japanese cultural references that wouldn't make much sense to a Western audience.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Jason Douglas, the dub voice actor for Chiyo's dad, would later go on to voice Beerus the Destroyer a decade later. This is especially noticeable during his final scene in this show, where Chiyo's Dad sounds eerily similar to Beerus as he yells at Osaka for comparing him to Bill Clinton.
  • Luci Christian, Yukari's voice actress in the dub would later go on to voice Nami, the 2003 versions of Wrath and Truth, Hungary, and Ochaco "Uravity" Uraraka.
  • Christine Auten, the voice actress who played Sakaki in the dub, will probably be best known to Fullmetal Alchemist fans as Izumi Curtis.
• Sacred Cow: Out of all the Schoolgirl Series out there, Azumanga Daioh is the most fondly remembered overall. Past the series' time in the spotlight, its genre was often accused of being oversaturated in the mid-to-late 2000s due to how influential the series was for establishing that very genre to begin with. Despite this, people can and will often complain about the comedy or moe in everything else except Azumanga. Being the Trope Codifier for most of the tropes and character types common to the genre helps, as does the fact that it manages to come off as refreshingly more subdued and character-driven compared to the increased focus on Moe appeal and escalating zaniness of its successors.
• The Scrappy: Kimura, post-Character Perception Evolution, is widely seen as the one blemish on a series that's otherwise stood the test of time. His entire joke is that he's an ephebophile who regularly harasses the main cast and otherwise makes them uncomfortable, something which is harder to see as harmless comedy two decades later.
• Ship Mates:
  • Due to the series' most popular couple being split between Sakaki/Kaorin and Sakaki/Kagura, people who ship Sakaki/Kaorin occasionally pair Kagura with Tomo or Osaka instead, due to their connection as the Knuckleheads (with Tomo and Osaka both being fixated on Kagura in different ways). If they also ship the second most popular couple Tomo/Yomi, then Kagura/Osaka basically invokes Pair the Spares.
  • Inversely, people who ship Sakaki/Kagura will usually ship Kaorin with Chihiro, with the dynamic usually being that Chihiro silently pines for Kaorin but supports her crush on Sakaki anyway.
• Shipping: Despite the series' lack of canonical romance, or maybe because of it, shipping is one of the major tenets of the Azumanga Daioh fanbase, which was especially true in its formative years as the whole concept was beginning to take shape.
  • Sakaki was the fandom's "go-to" girl for shipping fics, where she was usually paired off with Kagura, playing off from the latter being an Unknown Rival to the former. After the anime's heyday, Kaorin became the go-to character to ship Sakaki with, thanks to the former canonically having a crush on the latter.
  • Yomi seemed to be their second favorite and was almost exclusively paired with Tomo. They are canonically best friends, after all.
  • Yukari and Nyamo are often treated as the Beta Couple to most other couples, due to their Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic and implied history making them great foils to the others.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: Back in the series' heyday, Sakaki/Kaorin and Sakaki/Kagura were the main competing ships in the fanbase; Sakaki/Kagura fics would usually have a crack at Kaorin's expense, though interestingly the reverse was rarely true. This has settled down a lot in later years, however.
• Signature Scene: Osaka's dream about Chiyo-chichi during her senior year, particularly the pair's initial Gratuitous English exchange, became the most well-known moment in Azumanga Daioh among international audiences as a result of how effectively it captures the series' offbeat tone while also being a prime example of It Makes Sense in Context. A number of fans were even introduced to Azumanga Daioh specifically because of this scene.
• Sweetness Aversion: Chiyo's cuteness is sometimes too much to handle, both in and out-of-universe. Yomi is the first to notice this conundrum, saying "Aaa shit, you're so cute!" to Chiyo with a rather exasperated expression.
• Unintentional Period Piece: While still fully enjoyable in the modern day, several elements readily date the series to its initial 1999-2002 serialization period.
  • This is especially the case in the manga's first volume, which includes moments like Chiyo, a Child Prodigy, having no knowledge on how to use a computer (itself sporting a boxy 4:3 monitor and treated as an unusual addition to a classroom), a reference to the Virtual Pet craze, and a jab at the Yomiuri Giants' losing streak, which was broken shortly after that specific strip's publication.
  • Even after the first volume, there's still a few period-reliant moments like Osaka making a reference to Yoshiro Mori, a prime minister whose controversial tenure was still in recent memory at the time (the strip was published after his resignation and refers to him as the former prime minister, but it still relies on one having a fresh recollection of his time in office).
  • What's perhaps most noticeable is the near-total absence of cell phones throughout the series, Tomo being the only character indicated to own one, with a very blocky late 90s/early 2000s design, to boot.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Sakaki's lack of self-esteem, especially when comparing herself to Chiyo, may seem downright ludicrous to Western viewers — Japanese beauty standards for women place emphasis on being small, cute, and subservient, aspects which Chiyo embodies but Sakaki does not. Japanese culture also places more value on conformity than individuality, so Sakaki's insecurity stems from feeling isolated from her peers. Even then, her height and bust — while larger than average for sure — are much less extreme in the west than in Japan, where she's taller than most fully-grown men.
  • One aspect that's meant to indicate Yukari's lack of maturity is the fact that she still lives with her mother. In 1999, this would be an obvious flaw from a Japanese perspective, as well as in several western countries. After global recession and changing societal standards, it's become increasingly common and acceptable for younger generations to keep living with their parents well into adulthood, thus making Yukari's situation more understandable.
  • Everything about Kimura. His self-proclaimed love for high school girls is rightfully considered creepy and weird by the other characters and the narrative, but he's still largely portrayed as harmless since he never actually does anything beyond staring and making off-putting comments. While he's supposed to be a comedically unrealistic teacher in the same way Yukari is, it's very unlikely his behavior would be treated so harmlessly and Played for Laughs in manga and anime from later decades. It seems that Azuma himself was aware of this, since Kimura was outright omitted from the "Supplementary Lesson" chapters that he drew for the manga's 10th anniversary.
• Values Resonance: Responsible for the series' LGBT Fanbase; as previously stated, this is a series with a majority-female cast that is not objectified or mistreated by the narrative and there is a positively-portrayed sapphic character. Additionally, Kaorin's insistence that she's not gay just because she has a crush on a girl, she likes her for the person she is, and that she wouldn't mind if her crush was a guy is incredibly progressive for the early 2000s, resonating with similarly-minded bi/pan individuals to this day.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Out of the cast, Sakaki and Nyamo are probably the least funny and entertaining, given one is a Huge Schoolgirl Shrinking Violet whose insecurities are there to make you feel sympathetic as opposed to Played for Laughs, while Nyamo is basically the Straight Man to Yukari with few quirks of her own, barring her insecurities about being single and implications that her personal life is surprisingly wild (which is only ever alluded to after she gets smashed specifically to keep Yukari from getting drunk).
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The series' sizable Periphery Demographic and some of the bawdier jokes in it (including comments about the girls' breast sizes, Tomo's curiosity about her teachers' sex lives, and Mr. Kimura's portrayal as a Dirty Old Man) lead some people to believe it's a seinen series. However, it's actually a shonen series — i.e. aimed at teenage boys — and was originally serialized in the shonen magazine Dengeki Daioh.
• Woolseyism:
  • Osaka's Kansai dialect in the Japanese version is often translated into a Southern Belle-based dialect in English translations of the series. This idea originated from ADV's dub of the anime; they chose a Texas accent based on the stereotypes of both Osakans and Texans as loudmouthed, brash rednecks (a stereotype Osaka's character humorously subverts). While initially controversial (in part due to the Kansai dialect having a very large number of potential analogs across the US), it ultimately stuck, to the point where both official and fan-made newer translations incorporate it. She's given equivalent dialects in different countries, and the Korean translation outright renames her Busan (after a similar region in South Korea).
  • One strip in the June chapter of Volume 1 sees Tomo reveal that she gives her pets generic names; in Japanese she had a dog named Black (after its fur color) and a hamster named Ham-chan. While the later Yen Press translation carries this over directly, the ADV translation replaces them with a dog named Spot and a cat named Whiskers, referencing two pet names commonly seen in the US as generic.
  • Episode 2 has Osaka deliver a pun about soybeans: "That's not bean knowledge (a Japanese idiom meaning "trivia"), it's knowledge about beans." In the English dub, it's changed to rice: "That ain't no grain of truth, that's the truth about grain." The English translation by Yen Press changes the subject to be about mushrooms, and makes the pun "That's not a fun fact, that's a fungus fact." The ADV translation of the manga changes the punchline to "That's not trivia, that's just plain trivial."
  • Osaka compared Chiyo's dad with Prime Minister Yoshirou Mori. Since he's not a well-known politician in the west, the comparison is changed to Bill Clinton. The only real loss is the nuance of Mori being hugely unpopular and prone to gaffes, compared to Clinton's generally strong approval ratings at the end of his presidency and his reputation for being able to talk himself out of any situation. Had the dub been made a decade later, a comparison to George W. Bush would've been more apt.
  • The usages of Gratuitous English would become redundant if the characters are already speaking English in the dub. Therefore, two scenes were modified into speaking different languages that's not Japanese: Kimura speaks in Gratuitous German when saying the "Mai Waifu" line (into "Mein Wife"), whereas Chiyo's dad speaks in Gratuitous Spanish when he would've spoken the "HOW AH YOU?? FAIN SANKYUU!" line. The rest of the time he gets more normal English lines, but less broken.
• The Woobie:
  • You may feel sorry for Chiyo after all the abuse she cops from the two resident jerkasses, and how she sometimes has trouble being taken seriously due to being much younger than her classmates.
  • Animals seem to have it in for Sakaki despite the fact that she adores them. Her woobieness is rarely so highlighted as the time she lets Kamineko sink its fangs into her hand... and Sakaki doesn't pull her hand away so that she can finally pet him with the other one. Also noteworthy is the attempts Sakaki's friends make to please her. They try to be friendly and warm to her, but unintentionally end up hurting her feelings. Kagura is particularly guilty of this when the two first meet.
  • Although being a cloudcuckoolander is a part of her charm, it's sometimes hard not to feel bad for Osaka's inability to stay focused, let alone succeed.
  • Kimura likes Kaorin, much to her despair. You can't NOT feel bad for her, even though it's funny. This also being a punchline for their final scene in the anime doesn't help her matters, either.

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