In anime and manga, CGDCT stands for Cute Girls Doing Cute Things. It's a genre of anime where all or most characters are cute girls, and all they do are cute things.
Definition
A CGDCT anime is one primarily focused in having a varied cast of cute girls, and zero or almost zero boys. If there are boys, they're either unnamed background characters, or side-characters that have little screentime and very few lines.
- Context: the mostly female cast of Non Non Biyori, the sole male character being Koshigaya Suguru 越谷卓, the older brother of Koshigaya Natsumi 越谷夏海.
- As you can see, he's not important enough to be completely in frame, and he gets to have a desk in front of him covering his face, like he's being partially censored somehow.
Whether the series is an action, adventure, or comedy barely matters, although, since the series must be focused on the cuteness of the characters, rather than on the plot, series with conflicts to be resolved or objectives to be achieved tend not to be CGDCT.
The most CGDCT CGDCT are those that are only about girls interacting with each other, talking, or doing trivial things.
A CGDCT is a moe anime and its characters are "varied" in the sense that they have different moe attributes: different hair colors, hair styles, quirks, and personalities, and speech mannerisms.
Often, you'll have:
- Girls of varying breast sizes, always one flat as a board, hin'nyuu 貧乳, who probably has a complex about it, and one with "large breasts," kyonyuu 巨乳, whom the other characters envy.
- One rich girl (ojousama お嬢様) character that ends her sentences with wa わ, like desu wa, ~masu wa, and uses watakushi ワタクシ as first person pronoun.
- One quiet, smart girl character, that probably wears glasses, a meganekko メガネっ娘.
- One girl that's into manga or anime, an otaku オタク, possibly into magical girls, or a fujoshi 腐女子.
- One tomboyish girl that uses a masculine first person pronoun like boku 僕 or ore 俺, a bokukko ボクっ娘 or orekko オレっ娘, respectively.
- One slow, thoughtless girl that uses her own name as first person pronoun.
- A girl that speaks in an accent, typically from kansai 関西.
- A girl that really, really loves another girl.
- A girl that's a tsundere ツンデレ.
And so on.
- Context: the index of the first volume of Yuru Yuri, describing its characters with different hair colors, different hair styles, and different personalities.
- There are zero male characters in this volume.
- yurui
緩い
Loose. Relaxed. - yuri
百合
Fictional genre featuring lesbian relationships.
What cute things the cute girls do, exactly, varies.
In some series, they don't really do anything specific. They just go to school. Such series can become extremely boring since there's nothing special about them: they're just girls in school. To make a series interesting, the author needs to add something for the characters to do.
Typically, this means creating some sort of school club with a random theme, which often doesn't actually do anything at all, and sometimes isn't even officially a real club because it lacks enough members.
- Context: K-on! is a CGDCT about a music school club, that spends most of its time eating cake and being adorable.
- negao
寝顔
Sleeping face.
Some series have more concrete goals for the characters, like saving the world, or murdering a magical girl to lift a curse from one's family, or playing a weird combat sport in which you fight using only your butt and breasts, etc.
vs. Harem
The CGDCT genre if very similar to the harem genre, in the sense that you have a varied cast of cute girls, and they're both generally moe anime.
One difference is that harem anime have the guy.
The guy, the protagonist, I suppose, is male, but the selling point of the series are its female characters. This creates a contradiction: why is the most important character, the protagonist, the sort of character you least want to see?
On top of that, many harem series have an extremely bland self-insert protagonist, which makes them basically a waste of screentime and two-dimensional space.
Remove the guy and you have a CGDCT, and the lack of a male character means:
- No more forced romantic development. The guy doesn't need to fall in love with anyone, and nobody needs to fall in love with the guy, if the guy doesn't exist in first place.
- No more love triangle. No more two girls fighting for one guy, which makes you think "why are these two girls fighting for this guy, he's extremely bland, choose someone better," because the guy doesn't exist.
- No more barging into locker rooms, bathrooms, etc. and seeing girls changing clothes or naked and getting kicked out. Now fanservice scenes are candid, because there are only girls around,
and the concept of lesbians apparently doesn't exist in-universe, they can just trivially change clothes. - No more falling over and groping a girl's boob by accident.
- No more beach episodes in which girls waste time choosing the best swimsuit to seduce the guy and fight over him just for the guy to be as indecisive as ever.
- No more guys trying to peek into the girls bath in hot springs episodes, now the scene is entirely from the girls side of the bath.
CGDCT SOL
The term CGDCT SOL anime refers to a CGDCT slice of life anime.
Middle: Takimoto Hifumi 滝本ひふみ
Top right: Tooyama Rin 遠山りん
Right: Iijima Yun 飯島ゆん
Bottom right: Suzukaze Aoba 涼風青葉
Anime: New Game! (Episode 1)
- Context: New Game! is a series about the daily life of an OL employed in the game development industry.
In Japanese
The term CGDCT is something that the west made up on its own. There's are some similar terms in Japanese, but no exact equivalent.
You could translate CGDCT literally as:
Similar terms include:
- iyashikei
癒し系
Healing type.
A relaxing, soothing genre, like Non Non Biyori のんのんびより, Yuru Camp ゆるキャン△. - nichijoukei
日常系
Daily life type.
Slice of life genre. - moe anime
萌えアニメ
Any series that's mainly about having overtly cute, quirky characters.
Most of the time someone says CGDCT, they think of iyashikei.
However, there are some CGDCT that aren't iyashikei, but comedies instead, like Sabagebu' さばげぶっ
There are also some iyashikei with male characters, so they aren't CGDCT, like UchiTama うちタマ and Kobayashi-san chi no Maidragon 小林さんちのメイドラゴン.
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