With the views of a lot of people here dissing Gainax style work, *cough* Konomini *cough*, where does fanservice in anime stand? What about Mahoro? An example of Ecchi-Comedy where a lot of fans still age threads on imageboards with "needs more mahoro"... thats not the only case. Love Love, DearS, etc etc all part of that style of script and plot that ends up about a character looking at another characters "pantsu" or their head inbetween some female character's breasts.
Discuss.
Konomini is anything but "Gainax style". Gainax always put a lot of effort into their shows, and obviously pride themselves on their storytelling - Konomini on the other hand was some sort of attempt to clone Mahoromatic, but apparently without any kind of focus or clear idea. Hell, it hardly had any writing at all.
Mahoromatic was quite boring up until the last few episodes of season 2, when they finally dared to cut loose a bit.
On the subject of both fanservice and Gainax shows, though, there's Melody of Oblivion to be considered. It is packed full of fanservice, but the fanservice is of a more mature kind than the usual "ZOMG PANTSU". Furthermore, the fanservice in that show actually manages to add to the creepily suggestive atmosphere of the show, instead of - as is the case with so many shows - feeling tacked-on and completely unrelated at best, or annoyingly distracting at worst.
Fanservice normally works best in comedy shows, and preferrably very silly comedy that is completely unapologetic about its fanservice - 2x2=Shinobuden is one good example.
You know, Divergence Eve is just silly with fanservice, but I'd watch it even without any of that. The story sounds pretty interesting. (Not that some T&A -- woahmg the ending -- doesn't help keep my interest.)
I'm sick of hearing about how gainax has too much fan service. I mean it does appear but I would go so far as calling it subtle whe compared to some other shows.
popotan and najica come straight to mind as being insanely unneccisery
There's no such thing as too much (good) fanservice.
However, there are people who get rashes and turn violet/purple when viewing the female anatomy. :)
Fanservice in an otherwise serious show is just embarrassing and distracting. Fanservice in a silly show is good clean fun. That's pretty much sums up my opinions on the matter.
It's good to have a little distraction now and then. It can shift the mood of a show from "too serious" to more "life-like". Not to say that Neon Genesis Evangelion has been a "serious show" but the whole bits of fanservice with Asuka and Misato have considerably helped to get the series out of its general emo athmosphere.
>>6
Fanservice in a serious show nearly always means that the girl is gonna die/be kidnapped/be raped soon. ^^;
It's such an old and universal trick that when I see the fanservice I know instantly the girl is gonna be in a hell of troubles very soon. Zomg spoilers.
If the writer had been serving some fanservice before, that spoiler could have been avoided.
I'm not feeling very coherent right now, so I'll just comment random anime.
Kousetsu Hyaku Monogatari - has fan service. Fan service often linked to sex. Works well, because sin is an integral part of the story. Whether it's just another case of horror having to contain sex in some way....well, I don't really know. Oh yeah, great series and stuff.
Agent Aika - this series is very honest with its being cheap entertainment. I don't mind seeing boobs if my brain is turned off already. Works well.
Ai Yori Aoshi - fan service feels tacked on, like most things in this anime. The anime starts and ends well, in between there's just fan service and not much else. Not-really-nudity and not-really-humour don't make good anime. Enishi removed anything present in the beginning and the end of the original season. I'd rather have watched porn than Enishi.
In general, suggesting is better than showing.
>>8
Not always. Cowboy Bebop was just about as serious as an anime can be, but the character Faye Valentine was 100% pure fanservice.
The promos for Neon Genesis Evangelion, at least in the Japanese version, were always promising "more fanservice," too. Which didn't really materialize, unless 14-year-old girls in plugsuits count. And NGE wasn't a comedy--it had moments of comedy, like the toothpick holder scene, but it was very serious and very dark, especially at the end.
Yes but Faye was running around in her skimpy clothes all day long. It wasnt a foreboding, one-time-only event. Besides, I think the purpose for her clothings wasnt to attract sympathy from the viewer for her but to show she was a low life, cheap slut.
As for NGE, they started with the idea of fanservicing (that pic of Misato showing her breasts with an arrow) then ditched the concept later. The "service service" phrase that Misato kept serving at the end in the early previews vanished from the later previews. As an aside, NGE feels to me like there wasnt anyone at the helm, nobody writing a script, its "ok that ep is done, what are we gonna do next? The more crazy, the best! oh and btw we are out of funds." And still, the law still hold somehow - she got wasted.
ttp://tvwiki.sytes.net/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NeonGenesisEvangelion <-- long and in-depth review article suggesting that NGE was indeed all planned out in advance by Hideki Anno, who did what he did for a reason, possibly because his mental health was poor.
There are still rumors that Hideki Anno--the producer and head scriptwriter--was in a mental hospital when he wrote NGE.
I loved NGE up until around Episode 21. I was so hoping for a great ending, because so much of the series up to that point was so good. But at that point it stopped being about the war, or the Angels, or even Shinji, and became about gimping Shinji harder and harder and making him have a nervous breakdown. Most characters acted completely out of character, including Shinji himself, to help the gimp-a-thon along.
I hated the ending of the series and I hated End of Evangelion more. Hated, hated, hated. I thought I was going to see Shinji learn to believe in himself and find love. Instead I saw Misato, the one character who always seemed to believe in him, care about him, maybe even love him, losing everything and being cruel to Shinji, who was the one male character who might have been worthy of her love.
Meh. I don't want to start ranting. I'll become angry.
Yes I think there was a solid script originally. Probably it was the manga of Sadamoto.
And Anno was the one who tore it apart, I believe. He used it to take revenge on the girl(s) who ditched him, or so I heard.
Has Sadamoto finished the manga? Last I heard he was still working on it.
What I read was, Anno wrote the script for the anime during the period 1992-95, during which he was in mourning for his wife and child, killed in an automobile accident, during which time he was in a mental hospital for a while because he was suicidal.
Sadamoto has been working on the manga since 1995 (Sling is correct, the anime is still coming out, Sadamoto does another issue every year or so), working from Anno's notes and script outline. Sadamoto did the character design for the anime at Gainax, also. But the concept, the plot, and the script, are all Anno's.
It's very frustrating. So many things about NGE were so great that it raised the bar for what people expect to be possible for anime. In some ways it's the most impressive, most ambitious thing ever animated.
But the end of the series is basically Anno slapping all his viewers across the face. And "End of Evangelion" was Anno jumping up and down and screaming "I'm going to slap you across the face some more!"
It frustrates me. It leaves me with a shameful urge to read bad NGE fanfiction. Even screechy semiliterate 13-year-old fangirls with a crush on Shinji write things that disappoint me less than the end of NGE did.
Hell of a thing, isn't it?
But if the things you asked for in >>12 had happened, who would remember Evangelion now? It would have been a very good show, true, but it would just have been one more good show.
What it DID, affected you deeply - you're still talking about it, aren't you? It was very, very memorable. It didn't strive to make you feel good, it showed blatant disregard for its viewers, and in doing so cemented its place in your memory and in history.
Huh, I prefer good memories to bad memories. ^^;
NGE, I never wanted to see it. From the rumors it sounded like a one-way trip to a bad insanity. After many years I forced myself to see it because they were people referring to it and I felt out of the loop. So I forced myself to watch it. The rumors were right - quite a few episodes gave me bad dreams and restless sleep. It's a sick puppy. :/
>>15
That is true, but I will always remember NGE as a flawed masterpiece, and wonder what it could have been if it hadn't gone spiraling down into the Black Pit of WTF at the end.
Think of all the great films you have seen, not just anime. How many of them are memorable because they were good, and how many of them are memorable because they started out great and then got really, really bad?
I think that NGE, with the last 3 or 6 episodes thrown out completely and rewritten by someone who didn't feel a compulsion to abandon the story and abandon 20+ episodes of painstaking, exquisite characterization in favor of spending the last few episodes kicking the audience right in the beanbag over and over, could be the Best Anime Ever. The way it is now, it's just frustrating.
I think that could be done, and I think it would be good, but I also think it's been done, both before and after. It'd simply not be as interesting as Evangelion as it is now.
>>18
Would Star Wars really be more interesting if Luke had broken down sobbing at the end and watched Darth Vader strangle Leia and turn Han and Chewie into puddles of LCL? Or would people say "WTF was Lucas smoking?"
Well, the first halves of Star Wars and Evangelion are hardly compareable, are they? From episode one, Evangelion sets out to be pretty emotionally intense and dark.
>>20
Well... yes and no. The first half of NGE has lots of little comedy moments, lots of facefaulting and cross-popping veins on foreheads. Remember the toothpick holder scene? All the wackiness with Toji and Kensuke? Even the "first kiss" scene between Asuka and Shinji looks more like something from a sitcom than a comedy.
I'm not saying you're wrong. NGE is very dark, even from the beginning. But before Episode 21 or so, it isn't so dark that it seems appropriate to destroy the world at the end.
What I'm trying to say here is, there's good tragedy and bad tragedy. Cowboy Bebop is good tragedy with a well-written, appropriate tragic ending where there's been some character development (at least for Faye) and everyone acts appropriately, the way you'd expect them to act now that you've spent over twenty episodes getting to know them. Cowboy Bebop's ending is so appropriate and so perfect, in fact, that anything else would have felt like cheating the viewers.
NGE is bad tragedy. It's so good for so long and then it takes a bizarre left turn into the land of ZOMG CHEAP ANGST, characterization and even the plot go flying out the window in favor of watching Shinji have a nervous breakdown. And in End of Evangelion, it's even worse--we get to watch every character we cared about die, and watch Shinji watch everyone he cared about die, and THEN have a nervous breakdown. WTF?
It could have been so much better than it was. I think it would have been possible to write an ending for NGE that would have preserved the elements that, to me, make NGE so memorable--the intelligent scriptwriting and plotting, the complex and deeply explored characterization that made me genuinely care about the characters--without suddenly going ZOMG LETS KILL EVERYBODY AND DESTROY TEH WORLD!!!!!11one It wouldn't even have to be a conventional The-Hero-Wins-The-War-And-Finds-Love-Huzzah-Huzzah happy ending, but at least give us some small hint at the end that it wasn't all for nothing. I feel like Dr. Evil shouting "Throw me a frickin' bone here, okay?"
Well, first off, I've always held that End of Evangelion was Anno's big "fuck you!" to those who complained about the TV series ending.
Second, I'm not quite sure I see a turning point for Evangelion around episode 21 - the real turning point for me was around episode 13, where the downward spiral really starts. It pauses for a little while in the twenties to catch its breath before plunging into the end, but I didn't really think the end was in any way unexpected.
And on a side note: What the hell happened to Studio Bones after Bebop? "You used to be cool!"
> the real turning point for me was around episode 13
Yes... a lot of 26-episode series do that. 13 episodes is a normal TV season or something, so episode 14 is often a recap or turning point, and the series progresses differently from there onwards.
WAHa, I agree with your assessment of EoE, but it seemed to me that somewhere between Episode 21 and Episode 23 is where it completely goes off the rails, and it was possible before that point to put it back on the right track.
And as I said, I'm not even asking for a conventional happy ending--just some hint that it wasn't all for nothing, just some hint that this series, so gorgeous and perfect early on, with breathtaking art, animation, and music, with wonderful voice acting, with great characters you genuinely care about, wasn't all for nothing. I just don't want to come away feeling like I watched all this just so that Hideki Anno could jump up and down and say "I've suffered for my art, and now it's your turn!" then slap me across the face at the end and say "PWNED!"
An interesting (well interesting to me) tangent here is episode 26 - it's quite amusing to read it as a deconstruction of the series itself, and process of creating it. The first half about freedom and limitation is a treatsie on genre and cliché, and how if you created something truly original in every sense, it would be meaningless. The second half is the counterpoint - the clichéd high-school comedy without originality.
I've read some reviews saying that NGE taken as a whole is a very cynical deconstruction of the entire "giant mecha" genre, with its giant mecha that have extension cords and aren't really giant mecha, its gung-ho warrior protagonist who turns into an adolescent Woody Allen-ish geek between fights, the tough-girl potential love interest who's a nasty little shrew all the way through. It is not so much about the giant mecha fights--though those are extremely well done and impressive on every level--as it is about psychological alienation and shadowy conspiracies.
Every single major recurring character and most of the minor ones are fully characterized and realized in great detail as emotional cripples, social lepers, basket cases, and worse, and yet the writing (at first) and voice acting are so good that you genuinely care about them anyway. Et cetera.
But thinking back to your earlier post, in my opinion the exact moment where NGE jumps the shark and goes completely wrong is in Episode 21, where Misato has learned of Kaji's death, held herself together by sheer superhuman willpower long enough to go home, and is breaking down in the kitchen, crying her eyes out. And Shinji, who has had an ill-concealed schoolboy crush on her since day one, who genuinely likes her and cares about her, who perceives her as the only human being alive who genuinely likes him, cares about him, and believes in him--just stands there like a dolt and then goes into his room. Shinji is a neurotic, alienated little geek, yeah. He's a whiner, yeah. Most of the time he's all but paralyzed by doubt and self-loathing, yeah. But there is more to him than that--if there weren't, he'd never have gotten into Unit-01 in the first place, and he'd never have been able to fight so well (remember, whenever people he cared about were in danger, he fought like a rabid wolverine). He's also uncommonly mature and responsible for his age, and also very compassionate--and he cares about Misato a lot, maybe even loves her. It was out of character for him to just stand there. The Shinji we have spent the previous 20 episodes getting to know would be nervous, shy, afraid of saying the wrong thing--but he would try to comfort her. He might not know exactly what to do or what to say. But he'd try. He'd put his arms around her at the very least.
That's where NGE jumped the shark. That's where it started to discard established characterization and turned into Hideki Anno's Public Angst-Fest. "I've suffered for my art and now it's your turn!"
>the clichéd high-school comedy
I loved that part! That's the only part I liked.
If it would have ended right there I would have forgiven that I had to plow thru 26 episodes of insanity.
It was dynamic, it was lively, and it has never been reproduced before or after ever in any other anime. It was all but cliche. It was THE perfect ending.
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>>28, 29
I agree. But I cannot speak your crazy Moon language.
>>30 you need the mona font to see the pics
tho it's just some DQN genius posting off-topic drawings
>>31
I have the font, and I saw the drawings, but I thought it was funnier than "gb2/ASCII/" would have been.
Does NGE make you want to read bad fanfiction?
several years later, I still find NGE rather meh, so.......meh.
I still find NGE frustrating. It could have been great, instead of just above-average.
Cut it out.