What Is Fanservice?

Many anime fans are reluctant to admit that they enjoy the medium, because of the misconceptions that arise from it. Admittedly, part of the reason why I created this blog was to clear up some of them. Anime, after all, is a medium; not a genre. You can no more generalize about what anime is like than you can generalize about what film or painting or music is like.

However, I'll be the first to admit that most anime is crap.

OK, let me rephrase that. Most anime is stuff I don't like, and some of it is crap. For example, I'm not a big fan of mecha (giant flying robots and such), or at least haven't been since I was 12, when shows like Battle of the Planets and Voltron were favorites of mine. I'm also not a big fan of "moeblob" anime - shows featuring largely shallow and one-dimensional characters who act ridiculously cute for a mostly plotless episode. I can appreciate these genres in their own right, however, as having a time and place. Sometimes you want to see giant flying space robots battling for the fate of Earth. Sometimes you want to see four high school friends sitting around a table and eating cake. I can dig it, even if it's not what I look for when checking out a new season.

What I can't abide, and sends me running for the hills, is fanservice, a.k.a. the reason why anime fans don't talk about anime with people who don't watch anime.

Fanservice is the pointless use of cleavage shots, panty shots, breasts that defy several laws of physics, and basically every sort of slapstick sex gag you can cram into the story. Fanservice is what many people who don't watch anime think all anime is about.

Not that I'm crying "prejudice" here or anything. And the occasional sex gag now and then in an episode is certainly forgivable, potentially even funny. But still, a great many series do make these cheap gags take precedence over the story, and employ fanservice to attract eyeballs and sponsors.

Some otherwise good series that showed real potential have been ruined by the excessive use of fanservice. Case in point: High School of the Dead. This gorgeously drawn, sharply written and fast-paced series showed a lot of promise in the genre of horror anime. But then they peppered episodes with crap like this:

Why is this here? What does it do for the story, really? I don't object to sex and sexuality used in art, but scenes like the image above are quite transparently shoehorned into the episode because someone decided, hey, let's have some titties flopping around every two and a half minutes to keep the audience from getting bored with the story.

And that's one of the big problems with fanservice. Not that it fosters misconceptions about anime, but that it insults the attention span and the intelligence of the audience. It makes plot and character development secondary to the panty shot. The actual story is there to prop up a string of unimaginative and empty boob jokes. And this is before we get into the entire issue of objectification of women in these series, which is another big problem in anime (I intend to do a list of anime series that feature powerful women - and trust me, there are many - but that's for another article).

Ultimately, though, this crap actually sells. And as long as it sells, people will keep making it. And as long as people keep making it, people like me - who don't watch it - will forever be reluctant to admit to people that don't watch anime that they watch anime. So you see the dilemma a snob like me faces. Ah well!

(Incidentally, the image leading this article is from a two-episode series called Eiken, a towering monument of unashamed fanservice. There is barely a half minute that goes by without it, so it's hard to be mad at a show that clearly doesn't take itself seriously nor is even trying to be "sexy". If you do check it out, I have two words for you: yogurt slide. You'll know what I mean when you see it.)