This is continuation of my silly anime idea. Part 1 can be found here. Again, links to TVTropes for clarity.
Now that we have our main character Yui Sato kinda sorta figured out, let’s go on to secondary characters!
I actually thought a lot about how to go about doing this (probably too much). I could just have new characters transfer in and have Yui react and interact with them, with some of them recurring in other episodes, but I also wanted Yui to have some friends to talk to about the random craziness. Maybe even have one of them befriend her on the first day and introduce her to the world that is their high school.The trick is deciding, since Yui’s the only “normal” person, what kind of characters would her friends be, and how to keep them from drawing focus away from the protagonist. I guess one way is to have them be more like characters from more “normal” high school anime, like schoolgirl series or sports anime. Or, if we still want them to have unique powers or abilities, we can have them near the end of their character development, shown via flashbacks of some kind.
In any case, I have some character ideas. I haven’t decided what relationships they’d have with our main character, but that can come later.
Also, I haven’t come up with names yet, so let me know if you have any good ones!
Yankee turned magical girl: This is the most fleshed-out character idea I have. She grew up without a mother and had to join a gang to support her father, who can’t work for some reason (I haven’t decided yet). As a yankee, she had to rely on being more masculine, beating people up and being an all-around tomboy, but when she reached puberty she learned that she had magical girl powers. It turns out her mother was a magical girl (magical woman?) who died protecting her husband and young child and either her mother’s powers transferred to her in death or everyone in her mom’s side of the family are magical girls. Something like that. Anyway, she learns that her new-found powers require femininity to work, which is something she’d definitely not used to. Sometimes she lapses, beating people up with a baseball bat instead of using some sort of sparkly pink attack with a frou-frou name. But she’s learning to embrace her feminine side, and learns that femininity can be just as powerful if not more powerful than masculinity (yay feminism); some enemies she faces are immune to physical attacks. I’m thinking of having her start off wearing a plain school uniform, but start to add feminine accessories to her wardrobe (hair ribbons, jewelry, etc.) as the show progresses.
Super kawaii monster trainer: This character emerged from a conversation I had with my boyfriend where I described a pack of wolves as an adorable puppies and envisioned a manga panel with an adorable girl going “Puppy pack attack!!!”, complete with shojo bubbles and sparkles, and the next panel being a gruesome illustration of the wolves tearing their enemies into pieces. The character is a super energetic girl who is super passionate about battling/dueling/whatever I end up calling it. I’m envisioning her with bouncy pink hair in giant curls. She claims to only use cute monsters, which might lead one to think that they’re going to be girly or weak, but she kind of views the world through cute lens, thinking of even monsters the stuff of nightmares as cute. Kind of like Hagrid from Harry Potter.
Magical boy: Let’s not forget about the guys. I want there to be a magical boy in the series, but I’m not sure what his personality would be. There are two that I’m deciding between and I’m not sure which is better: a boy who wants to become a magical girl because he was saved by one and is super serious about it even when his enemies aren’t, or a guy who becomes a magical boy via a contract of some kind because he has a weird thing for magical girls and thinks that becoming one will make him popular with them. The former I could see as a potential mentor for our yankee-to-magical-girl, as he would be well-versed in the magical girl arts and he doesn’t want them to be squandered or wasted. I can imagine him being deadpan most of the time, but gets super excited when using magical girl powers. The latter would be a Casanova wannabe, shameless flirting with every magical girl he sees except for yankee-girl.
There are some more character ideas floating about, but I’ll write them down some other time. I need more male characters. Also I think this parody anime is turning into a critique on gender roles and norms. Oh well.
I can't get this out of my head, so maybe writing about it would help. Also, I linked things to their relevant TVTropes page because of reasons.
This was an idea that sprouted from a conversation I had with some friends a while back about how main characters in anime sometimes have crazy hair colors while all the background characters usually had brown/black hair. We decided that it'll be fun to switch this and have a main protagonist with normal hair among a sea of multicolored heads. This then transformed into a story of a normal Japanese girl who goes to school with magical girls, pilots of giant robots, basically all the different kinds of characters that would normally be the subject of other anime. We decided that the show would be called Normal-chan and her name would be the most popular girl's name and the most common surname.
Since having this conversation, I've kind of solidified what Normal-chan would be like. Both the show and the character. I kept calling the girl Normal-chan in head since I never actually looked up what the most popular name and surname were for the longest time...until now: Yui Sato (Yui being the given name). Yay for less confusion!
Anyway, I imagine Normal-chan (the show) to be a kind of slice-of-life anime, focusing on how Yui reacts to and engages with her fellow students while poking fun at some common anime tropes. For example, one scene I had in mind was the first day of school, where Yui arrives early and is the first student to arrive. She takes a seat towards the middle of the classroom as opposed to a window seat and after a while hears a rumble. She glances out the window and sees a stampede of students running towards the school, each with crazy hair and a piece of toast dangling from their mouths. Another idea I had was to introduce new characters as transfer students and have Yui comment on the large number of them and why none of them thought to transfer at the beginning of the school year.
As for Yui herself, she is completely average in every way. Height, build, intelligence, athleticism, everything. She has medium-length black hair and brown eyes. As for her personality, Yui is more or less a quiet observer. Though she is often surprised by the antics of her classmates, I don't see her getting as riled up about the level of ridiculousness as, say, Shinpachi from Gintama. And...that's all I've got so far.
I have more ideas for episodes and characters, but I'll save that for later. This is too long (and possibly too uninteresting) as it is.
