Answerman

Why Does Fanservice For Girls Get So Much Blowback?

Eric asks:

I keep hearing negative things about fan-service for men(like how the women are unrealistically curves, wear way tor revealing outfits, etc), but i haven't heard anyone saying the same thing about fan-service for women(guys are made to be as "pretty" as possible, or really muscular, etc.). Is it because of a double standard, or is it because fan-service for women isn't as wide spread as it is for males, or what?

It's true, you USUALLY don't hear much complaining about fan service aimed at women. Usually. Except remember how much anger and loathing there was when Free! was announced? Some people absolutely lost their minds about their beloved Kyoto Animation (KyoAni) making something that didn't involve cute girls. It was really... ugly, frankly. Of course, like everything else on the internet, I have no idea how big that unrest actually was. Stuff like that could easily be like 10 people.

At any rate, most "fan service" aimed at women is a lot more subtle and a lot less distracting than its male-oriented counterparts, and tends to wedge itself into things integral into both the character and the plot. For example, making the characters bishonen might count as service, as it's pandering to what female fans want, but it's also the entire look of the show. Guys like that show up everywhere in anime, and they're not exactly offensive to look at even from a straight guy's perspective. Their existence is just a basic part of the anime aesthetic.

Another form of female-oriented fan service is having yaoi moments. But most yaoi moments are subtextual, longing stares rather than full-on make-out and boning sessions. Those moments are aimed at getting female fans' imaginations going, and churning out metric tons of filthy doujinshi and fan fiction. They don't really stand out if you're not looking for them, and a lot of people don't even notice when they happen. Even if there is a gay kiss in a show, most fans are pretty LGBT tolerant and wouldn't find that necessarily off-putting... and besides, romance is an important part of the plot. There are outright yaoi shows, of course, but most straight guys know that's not for them and just avoid them.

So without turning the show into outright gay erotica, it's pretty hard to do things with male characters that would enrapture females and put off males. What is the equivalent to an upskirt shot of a girl with a ridiculously detailed cameltoe? I don't think many female fans would be that excited to see a detailed outline of a guy's junk through a Speedo or boxer-briefs. And straight guys already willingly hang out with each other shirtless (call it a primal way of sizing each other up), so having a perpetually shirtless male character like Grey from Fairy Tail is completely inoffensive all around.

But the problem with male-oriented fan service isn't that it exists, it's that in many lesser shows, it's ALL that exists. Every season has at least a handful of shows that are seemingly designed purely as a vehicle for fan service, and has virtually no thought put into writing, animation quality, visual technique, or pretty much anything else that people watch anime for. (Ikki Tousen, Queen's Blade, Juden-chan... the list is practically endless.) The type of fan service that these shows engage in is usually so over-the-top that it's nearly impossible to take them seriously as stories -- and oftentimes the stories are pretty dopey to begin with. There are also shows with real promise that end up getting so distracted by fan service that the plot completely falls apart. (Real Drive, anyone?) Fan service fans might love those shows, but anyone who is not watching it for the fan service will walk away sorely disappointed. I can't think of any fujoshi-oriented shows that have attempted to do similar things with male characters. (At least, none that weren't outright yaoi hentai.)

Worse, many fan service shows revel in showing female characters being victimized or otherwise robbed of their dignity. How many anime have you seen where a girl has her skirt flipped up, her panties stolen, her boobs exposed or groped, and she screams, and it's played for a laugh or for titillation? Sure, a guy's brain might - might, mind you - see that and revert to their more basic stimulus response ("OMG boobies, yay!", which is the response the show is expecting you to have, hence the framing) but a girl, lacking that instinct and probably identifying with the girl on screen, would be more likely to just sigh quietly. Obviously some people are more bothered by it than others. There are a handful of shows that sexually harass male characters for laughs too, of course, but it's nowhere near as endemic. With female characters, it just happens SO MUCH that eventually some people get fed up.

I don't think fan service is inherently a bad thing, no matter who it's aimed at. Well-made shows can and often do integrate fan service all the time, whether it's just an extra couple of animation frames spent on boob jiggle, or barely-there costumes, or what not. But it's important for shows to put quality first; wallowing around in sexual harassment for titillation isn't the way to do that. We don't see "mean-spirited sexy" much in female-oriented anime fan service. I think that's primarily where the difference lies.

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Justin Sevakis has worked in the anime business for nearly 20 years. He's the founder of Anime News Network, and owner of the video production company MediaOCD. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.