Seriously, it feels like we get one every season.
Summary:
- We get many romantic comedy anime, and fans wonder what prompted the rise of the genre’s popularity.
- They were always popular, but not this popular.
- They’re easily accessible for new otaku, and they’re here to stay if anime continues to go mainstream.
If you look at the past few years, you’d see romantic comedy anime being among the most popular in nearly every season. Some of the major hits belong to this genre — series like My Dress-Up Darling (Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru), The Dangers in My Heart (Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu) and Kaguya-sama: Love is War (Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen).
So, at this point, many fans are wondering — are romcoms more liked now than they were in the earlier days of anime? And, if so, what’s the reason for that?
The History of the Genre
To be fair, romantic comedy as a genre has always been somewhat popular in anime. Older fans remember series like Urusei Yatsura (the original adaptation aired in 1981), which largely created the formula for romantic comedies that came later.
While the genre experienced a short downfall in the 90s, it came back very prominently in the 00s. Many fans consider the series responsible for the comeback to be Toradora! (aired in 2008), which, to this day, remains one of the most acclaimed and popular romcoms. An earlier example that was important for the genre was Love Hina (2000) — a predecessor of modern harems.
Still, we’ve got many romcoms — usually combined with the harem genre — in the 00s and first half of the 10s. The difference from now is that back then, most of them were seen as forgettable. Now, there’s at least one that is memorable in almost every season, as well as a couple of others.
It’s Popular Because It’s Accessible to Non-Otaku Viewers
It’s really hard to pinpoint when exactly the modern romcom formula started. Most of them follow the “popular girl, unpopular guy” formula (and it’s the opposite in the case of shoujo series). The formula certainly works, though, otherwise we wouldn’t be getting so many of them.
Many older fans feel that this resurgence in the genre can be related to anime reaching a more mainstream audience. A genre like romantic comedy is easy to intuitively understand, and is quite popular in live-action movies and TV series. It has much more mainstream appeal than, say, mecha.
If anime continues to become more and more mainstream — and it almost certainly will — romantic comedies are with us to stay. However, that’s probably fine: we don’t get as many of them as we get isekai, and there are quite a lot of good series. There’s no problem with receiving a couple of these every season.