Fanservice and the Blinder Effect, or Why you should read Happy World! et al.
I’ve just completed Happy World! and am very, very impressed with what it did. Incoherent commentary/thoughts to follow.
Who said 'Heart' was a stupid power, again?
Just the other day I had this illuminating conversation with Smankh on Twitter (I meant ‘blinder’, not ‘blinker’) about Love Hina, Negima, and the nature of fanservice thereof, which brings me to this extremely sad truth: There will be fans who, by virtue of their position/disposition with regards to fanservice, or ecchi as the Japanese say, not bother with such gems of the Akamatsu persuasion.
And then there’s Happy World!, of which I’ve Twitted some [1] [2] [3]. If you ask me, HW resembles one of those possible-worlds that Kosuke Fujishima never visited while planning out Ah! My Goddess!, for the premise of both series are essentially the same in nature; powerful otherworldly female visits weak Earth male, begins living with him, and betters his life as a result. Cue all sorts of awkward and titillating situations, and much comedy in-between, cohabiting harem sold separately.
The difference is this–while Fujishima chose to go the path of the Cash Cow and turn AMG into a slice-of-life affair with iyashikei undertones, Kenjirou Takeshita chose to take HW to its natural end with a well-executed mix of conflict, romance, action, and drama. The end result? Something that ranks up there in my book with other more well-known manga like Monster, Koi Kaze, and Welcome to the NHK (but disregard 20th/21st Century Boys for the moment, since that one’s due for a re-review some time soon).
But that’s just me and my value system of relative ranking, so don’t let it get to you. What makes me seethe with righteous indignation is that those who read AMG would never consider–or even consider considering–reading HW by virtue of what it is. Sure, both AMG and HW share the aforementioned similarities, but what ultimately separates our good-natured limited-omnipotence prone-to-jealous-rage goddess from the good-natured limited-omnipotence prone-to-jealous-rage angel is that you get to see the latter naked, while the former remains relatively chaste and covered-up.
Tragic, isn’t it? I think there’s something I’d like to call the Blinder Effect, or, “I can’t see the story for the boobs!” that affects many a well-meaning but otherwise ignorant fan. So this fan, right, he walks into a bookstore/visits his favourite internet piracy website and looks for the cover/synopsis of Series X. Series X starts out in all its fanservice glory before escalating into otherwise unrelated glory later on, but Mr. Fan does not know this, and after reading the first volume or two he throws up his hands in disgust, proclaim the end of manga to be ‘nigh’, and lets everyone on the internet know how terrible this is.
How terrible is it, really? I’ve never gotten over how those out there who just aren’t into this type of thing have never gotten over the initial skinfest that comprises the majority of such series–such as HW, Love Hina, and Negima, to name a few–and moved on from there to enjoy something arguably better than the norm. Yes, we know there’s a pantyshot ever so often, that communal bathing in the context of such a story is never safe from the opposite sex, and that the female protagonist will have her clothes divested. But would you know something else? That’s not all there is to the story.
It is, of course, incredibly convenient and useful to tar genuinely good manga with the same brush that you’re using on otherwise mediocre and generic ecchi/fanservice series. All of them feature girls losing their clothes, right? Therefore, they must all be the same! Or maybe you’re one of those people who’ve had a particularly bad brush with a series of similar make and have come to the intelligent and reasoned conclusion that fanservice in manga automatically makes it a bad read.
Here's a Fanservice Rorschach Test: Who did you notice first, Yoko or the Anti-Spiral?
“But Owen, you crabby crusty curmudgeon!” You say. “This here is a matter of taste, and you’ve got no business taking the mickey out of what is essentially a person’s expression of his or her individuality, on the internet of all places!” In reply I say to you, my dear Watson, that I do have a business in aggressively defending what I perceive to be the merits of a series vis a vis what people perceive to be the faults of a series, and if it involves piercing Sword after Sword of Blazing Rhetoric through their pointedly thick skulls, then so be it!
No shit, Sherlock, I think what separates a good fan from a great fan, or–if you’re not into my crude and subjective evaluation-cum-appraisal of fans–what separates a regular fan from a critical one, is the ability to look at a series from more than just appearances, ‘appearances’ here being nothing more than silly matters of aesthetics like moe, fanservice, superflat and what have you.
Just how does the form of the story affect the story that’s being told? This is a rhetorical question, surely, for certain simple and clean styles are obviously more attuned to lighthearted fun and darker, more complex styles of drawing with a tendency for the chiaroscuro would lend themselves better to the dramatic. Even with that considered, though, I’m stumped as to how exactly does a bit of skin or tail drastically affect one’s ability to enjoy something like that.
There’s also the intentional fallacy that I think could apply to a situation like this (thanks, jp!): When someone brings up ‘fanservice’ as a reason for not watching and/or reading something, what they’re really saying is that they think that the author of the anime or manga is using a particular scene, trope, or plot device for the sake of showing delicious 2D flesh to the reader; ergo fanservice is bad simply because of this perceived notion that the author is supposedly having, even if those scenes in mention (bathing, changing clothes) are perfectly normal.
Not too long ago ghostlightning brought up the elephant in the room by boldly stating that “We will not like some anime because we are not ready for it.” Obviously, I agree with him, but I’d like to add on to his statement by stating that some people will never be able to be ready for anything no matter how much time you give them. Not in a million years, and then some.
Why won’t these poor, unwitting tools ever be ready? It’s simple–they prefer stagnation over progress. They prefer comfort over adventure. They prefer not wandering out of the comfort of the Shire to traipse to some god-forsaken place for the sake of some damned Ring, just because it’s too unsettling for them. I know this is turning into a reductio ad absurdum/false analogy-cum-dichotomy, but while there’s no law against not watching or reading anything that you think you won’t like, there’s no law against not not doing so, either.
I mean, we all know that nudity doesn’t necessarily equate fanservice, right? So why make an equally laughable leap of logic and equate fanservice to quality, for that matter? Your guess is as good as mine. While it’s perfectly reasonable to brand those who watch or read something for the fanservice and nothing else as ’shallow’, I’d like to think that those who overlook something by virtue of its fanservice are dipping their toes in the very wading pool they’re deriding.
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I used to find fanservice offputting but the truth behind my acceptance of it is a bit more mundane than some sort of eureka moment. I live on my own so there’s little chance of someone catching a glimpse over my shoulder at what I’m watching/reading and getting the wrong idea!
A couple of years ago I would’ve been self-conscious about it but these days that’s not the case. There is of course the element of being desensitised to it: is there a point where you stop thinking “Damn, not another fanservice show!” and start looking past the fan pandering or ignoring it entirely? If there are cleavage and pantsu shots galore you can either concentrate of things like the storyline instead, or watch something else.
Alternatively, the wild weather we’ve been having lately has led me to conclude that people just enjoy a good old whinge about trivial things: Fan service in anime is as expected as sad commuters in snow!
I guess if I really wanted to I could counter-whinge about the following overused-and-extremely-predictable whinges at the beginning of every season, come to think of it:
1. Harem/Eroge adaptations/Fanservice
2. The end of anime and manga as we know it!!!
2a. There is nothing worth watching this season!!!
2b. It was better back in the day!!!
3. Pandering, pandering, pandering.
4. KyoAni
Re #2: Those prophets should stick to their day job. Really.
Nope, I’ve still yet to find an explanation behind the “everyone says there’s nothing worth watching but there are always plenty of interesting blog posts on my feedreader.” paradox. You can’t write something interesting about nothing, right? Granted, a lot of posts are about shows I know nothing about but the collective sighs always give way to gasps of relief when a sleeper hit turns up. Which is why I refuse to write off this season…for now.
Looks like my brain twin is back again. I tried to address the seemingly increased desire of bloggers to whinge and whine about everything these days in a post a little while back, but I’m not sure there really is any reason to it other then that it is the trend right now. Nothing more, nothing less.
There is however a definite tendency among some groups to instantly dismiss any series that has fanservice simply because of that aspect of it without bothering to look below the surface (or peek beneath the blinders as you put it) to see if there is something else there worth seeing. I’m going to copypasta a post I made on this topic over at animesuki since I’ll probably never be able to nail my thoughts on this like I did that night ever again. I’ve made some minor edits to shift the context to a more general subject too:
I think most people either write these shows off after the first episode and/or haven’t figured out that some series just aren’t supposed to be serious shows yet. To be honest I’ve almost done the latter on some occasions with some shows but gave these shows a second chance on a whim and found that a lot actually aren’t all that bad as one might be led to believe. Not always though….
However, I will say that the current mindset IS that fanservice (not necessarily moe though) is automatically bad and the dominant idea therein is that only dumb people watch shows that have large amounts of fanservice in them and that if you appear to enjoy them then that makes you dumb too by association. It’s a little bit like imagined peer pressure, but that’s just sort of the way it goes.
You might also chalk it up to superficial methods of evaluation (we’re all guilty of this at times) if you want, but I don’t see that sort of thing changing any time soon since a lot of people don’t have the time to really look at a show in depth before deciding whether they want to keep it or not. You’re average show either leaves an immediate impression and you decide to keep it, or it fails to do so and you write it off.
Finally, I suppose you could say that what a lot of people don’t realize is that a show can appear to be total bullshit on the surface, but on closer inspection it can reveal a certain charm, just as a show can appear to be all deep and thoughtful on the surface, but on closer inspection it will reveal that it’s entirely hollow at the core. I think it’s just because some people don’t really care. As I said, we live in the age where instant gratification is in demand and some people feel that they don’t have the time to stick around and see if they’ll get some satisfaction out of something at some point. If our needs are not met then we either move on (the smart thing to do) or stick around and complain about it (the not so smart thing to do).
In short, people need to just learn to deal with some things better. Complaining about fanservice really doesn’t make one look like they have better taste then others if that indeed is what they think, it just makes them look either bored, misguided, whiny or all of the above. At least that’s how I’ve come to see it.
By the way, not to complain myself now, but your new theme makes it next to impossible to see where my cursor is in the comment box. It’s actually completely invisible right now. I can deal with it, but it might be worth looking into as it could prove a nuisance in the future.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I don’t know how I feel about ‘brain twin’, but I guess as long as we can torture lolis in our mansion’s dungeon it’s all good.
I think the inherent problem with people immediately writing off anime/manga through the simplistic equation that (Ecchi) Fanservice = Bad is that they’re not really giving it a chance to develop beyond what they perceive to be the be-all and end-all of it. And then you have shows like Kanokon and… Akikan? That make matters decidedly worse, since people tend to remember the most recent examples when making decisions like those.
(Sorry about the comment box quirk, but I have no idea how to fix that. Ditto the GLARING RED BUTTONS OF DOOM.)
Ah Fanservice! I hesitate to say I’m a connoisseur of it, but I do have a taste for certain particular kinds:
1. Nostalgia (and Continuity) Porn
2. Battle Porn (bonus points if scene/anime includes mecha)
The 2 above are actually quite broad categories. I believe that I got OVER 9000% more value out of Macross Frontier than anyone (or at least anyone in the sphere who’s written about it) due to my particular context of being a fan of the franchise since it first came out in the distant ’80s. For most (even for fans who saw the whole franchise, but due to a marathon over a few weeks/months) it was just ‘what’s next,’ and they’d immediately rank it against the other installments. Impossible for me: it was a long-awaited gift, as if (intentional fallacy be momentarily damned) Kawamori himself was doing the series as a personal favor to me.
Being an older fan and having seen shows and traditions (tropes) as old allows for a particularly intense appreciation when such a trope is used, or a tradition is paid homage to. Try to imagine the kind of obnoxious shouting and pointing at the screen that transpired when I watched Gurren Lagann for the first time. It recalled the most distant of memories – as I watched super robot shows before I could properly speak.
Regarding Battle Porn, it’s not really difficult to explain. I like on-screen violence of all kinds: intensity and graphic value, choreography of the actual fighting, complexity of strategy and tactics, among a lot of other things. So hello there Legend of the Galactic Heroes!
Owen this comment has turned into a response post, but there’s no turning back for me now.
People actually think anime should be fanservice free? There are fandoms who demand nothing but! And, they do it in the spirit of demanding excellence and quality!
I think the best example of this is the Gundam franchise and its fandom. The Japanese fandom behave as if innovation from the core elements and tropes of the franchise is a bad thing. So they are like me, but demand the continuity and nostalgia service. The ‘commentary’ you find around the web re Gundam 00 is quite painful to read. It’s not that the show isn’t bad – there’s a lot of things about it that I find atrocious, and yet I love it and stick with it (and let me be clear that it’s not related to THAT meme that supposedly FORCES people to be unable to stop watching).
Point is, demanding that a show behave in expected ways and whining when it doesn’t is spoiled fan behavior. Perhaps this is the unintended consequence of being pandered to so much and for so long – combined with youth, immaturity, and THIS. Not surprisingly, the same fandom will complain about the presence of fanservice in the show when it’s not pandering to their particular tastes.
Heh, you’re bringing up an entirely different angle that I totally overlooked. I think that for the most part I’ve come to equate ‘fanservice’ as the semantic equivalent of ‘ecchi’, but it’s easy to forget that there’s other types of fanservice out there, all of which don’t receive as much flak as their raunchier cousin. Unless it’s KyoAni doing the animating, and the anime in mention a certain 4-koma.
Granted, the two types of fanservice you mentioned take a rather discerning eye to differentiate, in the case of the latter, and in the case of the former, well, you’ve just got to be around long enough, something that you’ve got an advantage over all of us!
I can’t really fathom the illogic behind something that’s ‘fanservice-free’ since there aren’t any clearly-defined boundaries–where does it go from story to fanservice, and vice-versa? People get riled over something with definitions and labels so hazy in their make that… I just don’t know. It’s like trying to talk to a bunch of blindfold-wearing deaf-mutes! In another room! Separated by soundproof glass, with my hands tied!
Happy World! falls into the more general trap, as it were, of people being unable to accept genre shifts in general. One need look only at the MangaUpdates reviews page for it, or the topic that it spawned on OneManga’s forums, to see that many people simply don’t understand the fact that A) Works can be more than one genre at once and B) Works can, in fact, become a different genre over time.
At the risk of sounding like a huge elitist, I’m going to just come out and say that many of the people who read HW! simply didn’t get it. People said it was “random” or “unplanned” because Takeshita has a propensity for sticking chapters about ero-doujins in between chapters about battles between angels and demons; others decried it as “generic shounen” because it dared to have fight scenes at all. tl;dr people can be fucking stupid.
Anyway, moving on to the focus of your post, fanservice… Happy World! has a serious bite to it that most anime and manga lack. I’m not talking about the forced edginess that many seinen manga achieve with arbitrary violence, but rather… a feeling that the author knows that he knows exactly what he’s doing, and fuck everyone else’s opinion on his work – a true, raw edge that makes what Takeshita pens undeniably provocative. This is, of course, achieved partly through Takeshita’s absolute refusal to censor anything when it comes to fanservice – an attitude which proceeds to permeate the piece as a whole. Because Takeshita doesn’t give a shit about making his manga palatable for a wider audience (it ran in Ultra Jump, a fairly popular seinen magazine, but very frequently pushes the boundaries of what can be done in even a seinen mag to the absolute limit – see chapter 50), he’s free to draw whatever “explicit” scenario he wants. In other words, because Takeshita drew Elle masturbating and Takeshi’s dad fucking a reporter, he’s able to create that poignant scene wherein Ruelle stops a bullet with her breasts, to put it a bit poetically.
Thus, in the end, it doesn’t really matter if it’s “fanservice” or not, at least in the case of Happy World!. It’s just… Takeshita doing what he wants. The way I see it, that philosophy is the reason why HW! manages to get a reaction out of people who are willing to let it.
Of course, in the case of Negima, it’s pretty much just Akamatsu being silly and is basically flat out fanservice. Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, either!
By the way, anyone who hasn’t read HW! really should! My group spent 400 dollars and about a month straight getting it all scanlated last summer.
I think this was what sealed the deal for me–the conflict was convincing, the emotions real, the plot wrapped up very reasonably, happy ending aside (I guess it’d be seriously ironic to call it Happy World if the ending was a downer)–all of this while having a hell lot of a good time mixing fanservice/slapstick/romance together. Quite the opposite from what I first imagined, considering how the first few chapters are like. And chapter 50 was hilariously meta.
I agree with your blinder theory, and it can be annoying when people instantly pass over shows without even bothering to check it out for a bit.
That’s what I think a lot of it is, and for a recent example, i think that’s why it seemed that all people could focus on with Strike Witches for a time was that “THE CHARACTERS DON’T WEAR PANTS!!!1″. That being said, I think KaioshinSama is also right that it also has to do with entertainment and convienience, and while a quick appraisal of a show isn’t necessarily best, for people looking for those two qualities when watching anime, if they aren’t immediately premise from the premise on, why should they bother paying more attention to it at that time?
Now if they then get information from plenty of people that shows they passed on are good and they still don’t bite, you can’t stop their tastes, but it’s still sad.
I don’t mind fanservice itself. I’m a guy after all. My problem with fanservice lies more in its presentation I guess. I liked meaningless fanservice in shows like Zetsubou Sensei, while they are of poor taste (imo) in shows like Idol@Xenoglossia and Zero no Tsukaima.
Ah, I remember hearing a few tonnes worth of praise for love hina, then reading the first volume and didn’t read anything that I liked. Thankfully I later finished the series (am now a fan of anything with Ken Akamatsu’s name on it, especially if it involves Negi). Similar situations occurred when I encountered Happy world and Airgear, which is really sad if you ask me.
Going through my share of eroges has changed much of that though, I’ve learned to give series a chance (unless the art is REALLY ugly, like akikan). Even if fanservice is meaningless a lot of the time, there are still a lot of gems hidden in there (not just drama, mindless fan service can be pretty funny, like in tolove ru) Though I have a friend who has this endless grudge against anything with fan service in it and every time he mentions it I just want to smack him in the head (can you believe it? there’s actually a 16 years old boy who’s openly against fan service).
Anyway, just want to say that I wholeheartedly agree with you (except for the bit about your favorite series, I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read any of those).
I’ve always considered fanservice as a kind of spice one adds to a series; used right it can accent a series well, too much and it overpowers. And, like a spice, using the wrong kind of fanservice can be off-putting–if I’d seen Ken Akematsu-style fanservice/comedy in Monster or 20th Century Boys (and the latter certainly had “fanservice” moments; the former amused me for characters going to the red light district when they just as easily could NOT have gone to the red light district), it would have struck me as profoundly odd.
And, as ghostlightning said, fanservice isn’t all the “whoops I just saw up your skirt!” sort. Men are fanservice, robots are fanservice, and, in fact, if you ever find yourself squealing in obvious fan glee at something in an anime series, chances are it’s fanservice of some kind, from Kenshiro on up to mysterious anime fondness for Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Fanservice is almost a defining characteristic of anime, and its inclusion can often be part of the reason any one of us gets REALLY into a series, even one that wouldn’t be left hurting in its absence.
I used to think fanservice was evil, until I saw Godannar. Beyond the oversized breasts (human and robot), and frequent nudity, it was almost as good as Gurren Lagann.
I could say that seeing a strong female Gundam character (who pilots well, isn’t insane or killed by the end of the series) is enough fanservice for me.
Though I read Happy World and thought it was a great manga, I have to admit that when I first started reading it I stopped after around ten chapters not because the fanservice was off-putting but because I thought there wasn’t any else to the series but fanservice and all the generic harem/comedy trappings. However, when the story and plot came in as well as all the fanservice (like during the tournament arc) I didn’t mind.
The manga just needed time to develop and give the reader time to get to grips with the characters. Placing fanservice at the beginning of a series probably does more harm than good; for example, the manga “Change 123″ started off by focusing more on the action, the plot and the setting, then as it went on incorporated more elements of fanservice and the like and by that time I’d already become accustomed to the characters and everything about the manga, so it didn’t bother me when fanservice started showing up.
The first couple volumes of a manga are supposed to tell the reader what they’re getting into for the long haul, so if you start of with fanservice and pay little to no attention to the plot, then readers aren’t going to expect much more from it and are likely to give up thinking it’s just another fanservice clone.
I’ll use this time to ask, is Love Hina any good?
I have nothing against fanservice, on the contrary, I rather welcome it, but the first several chapters of Love Hina had nothing but fanservice. I just couldn’t get into it, nothing was happening.
I liked the way Negima! changes into what it is in its later chapters, so does Love Hina do the same?
Reminds me of Nanoha when it was reviewed by ANN – there are little girls so it’s obviously pedo-licious fap material. Of course, there are shows that are just full of shit, but fanservice isn’t bad per se, but just in moderation.
@LHS Latin Class – the manga is quite good; can’t speak for the anime though, if that’s what you’re referring to.