Fanservice and Storytelling: Close-Reading NieR: Automata

Chris Chua
Jul 27, 2017 · 6 min read

Anime and video games are condemned, often righteously, for excessive fanservice. Often, fanservice takes the form of situations, clothes, or other circumstances that place a typically female in a needlessly sexualized light. There are a plethora of examples of fanservice, such as High School of the Dead, which advertises itself as a story about high schoolers fighting zombies but is instead popular for jiggling breasts and convenient upskirt shots. While such scenes can be perceived as fun and self-ridiculing, the story ultimately loses out to a system in which creators naturally respond to audience’s demand for such content.

It’s very easy to criticize fanservice as nothing more than pandering to the male gaze, as a cringe worthy sign of how too often in stories women are portrayed as worthless unless they’re sexy. But this view is un-nuanced and surface-level at best. I ask: how do queer women and their gaze fit into the sexualization of women? Can fanservice serve a plot purpose after all? What’s the difference between a woman who is sexy and knows it and a woman that is sexualized? How does the sexualized character’s personality factor into the fanservice? What cultural differences should be taken into account? What are the language implications behind the terms sexualization and objectification?

Many of these questions go beyond popular culture studies and into older studies of literature, art, and other forms of storytelling. However, the self-reflexive nature of popular culture makes fanservice a point of interest and study.

It’s very easy to criticize fanservice as nothing more than pandering to the male gaze, as a cringe worthy sign of how too often in stories women are portrayed as worthless unless they’re sexy. But this view is un-nuanced and surface-level at best.

By ‘self-reflexive nature,’ I mean that fanservice is a known phenomenon among ‘gamers’ (an umbrella term I use very loosely to identify those who regularly play video games and engage in gaming culture). Put simply, gamers are receptive to fanservice implementation in games. The reactions may be positive, negative, or in-between, but nevertheless, it is a constant topic. The creators get to know their audience via social media and often create stories that speak to them directly through the medium. Games are an interesting example of this — one such example is Bethesda’s upcoming release, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, which advertises itself with an alluring headline to many folks on the left (or those with any sense left in them): “1000 ways to kill Nazis.”

To redirect this discussion to fanservice, I look specifically at the recent hit NieR: Automata.

The following contains major spoilers for NieR:Automata!

From the moment NieR:Automata’s android protagonist 2B was revealed, everyone buzzed about her appearance: she wears thigh-high heeled boots and a short skirt with a slit revealing white underwear. When the demo came out, players tried to move the camera in ways to look up her skirt, and someone even forged an image of 2B’s butthole, claiming that developers purposefully put it there.

There’s even a mechanism in game to make 2B self-destruct to destroy enemies, which happens to have the side effect of destroying her skirt, revealing her very ‘lovingly’ rendered behind. Yoko Taro, the mastermind behind the NieR franchise, was also quite shameless about the sexualization of 2B. When interviewed about 2B’s appearance, Yoko Taro simply said, “I just like girls.”

As I was in the middle of catching up with my ridiculous backlog of video games at the time, I waited to buy NieR: Automata. But at once I started hearing folks on various gaming sites rave about and contemplate the plot.

As a writer, I was immediately interested, and picked it up. I can dissect the game for hours — it was thought-provoking, melancholic, and beautiful. Its straightforward androids vs machines narrative broke down into an existential crisis in which the androids and machines question what it means to be simply machines, and what it would mean to be human. This crisis is mostly seen through the growth of the second protagonist, a boyish android named 9S.

9S clearly holds admiration for 2B, one that eventually becomes obsessive and is hinted to be sexual (2B cares for 9S as well, though her behaviors towards him seem platonic). During a sequence in which 9S is hacked into by a machine antagonist named Adam, Adam asks 9S a question: “Do you want to **** 2B?”

Naturally, ‘fuck’ came to mind (though that is debatable), immediately shocking gamers familiar with the discussion about 2B’s sexualization. Looking closely, I see that Yoko Taro knew that 2B was sexualized and a form of fanservice and used 9S’ adoration for her as a vehicle to exploit it, making the game scarily self-aware. On top of scenes that conflate death with sex (2B choking 9S in one scene, and 9S viciously stabbing 2B in another, both in sexually charged positions), it’s clear that the concept of NieR:Automata, which outwardly discussed humanity, was also thinking about sexuality. (The RPGsite published a particularly compelling discussion of this, which I highly recommend.)

When we place the knee-jerk interpretation of **** to ‘fuck’ in the context of the whole game, the issue of fanservice is implicitly addressed. 2B says early in the game, “Emotions are prohibited,” so we can imagine that something as humanly primal as sex would be a serious violation of their existences as androids — 9S reacts to this question by stammering, “I would never do that!” Adam, the machine who posed the question, is a slippery, charismatic, and very much wants to be human. His planting of human-like ideas into 9S’ mind does not seem as horrible as 9S makes it out to be, as the only difference between androids and humans thus far is their physical constitution. In a way, we already perceive most of the characters in game as human. We never see one ‘true’ human throughout the course of the entire game.

Looking closely, I see that Yoko Taro knew that 2B was sexualized and a form of fanservice and used 9S’ adoration for her as a vehicle to exploit it, making the game scarily self-aware.

Put simply, gamers’ view of 2B as sexualized in our world is critiqued in-game. In the way that players see Adam present the idea, we see that sexual attraction to 2B is a perfectly human concept. On the other hand, 9S immediately condemns the idea as wrong, as a violation of his nature as an android. Sex, and particularly the figure of 2B, is then placed in the center of 9S’ existential crisis, which we see in the latter part of the game as 9S’ mental state deteriorates after 2B’s death.

I present this case study not as an example of how ‘fanservice is good,’ but as a possibility to tackle the issue of fanservice in more nuanced way. It’s a common mistake in communities dedicated to social justice to place concepts such as sexualization in a box labelled ‘bad, no matter what.’ The ways that gamers, movie watchers, readers, and other media consumers discuss and engage with the material they consume can change the way sexualization is used in, as I’ve drawn out, surprising ways. With the internet, it’s also easier for creators to access popular opinion of their stories, making self-reflexivity and real-life critique via fiction all the more possible.

It’s a common mistake in communities dedicated to social justice to place broad concepts such sexualization in a box labelled ‘bad, no matter what.’

Of course, this kind of self-awareness is not present in all instances of fanservice. It is a trope that too often does nothing for the story,instead using beautiful characters as billboards. Though the case of NieR: Automata can be considered an exception to the rule, I emphasize that close reading our media can further our understanding of representation in media. I encourage folks, especially those not as familiar with nerd culture, to engage critically with these questions. Given how nerd culture has directly contributed to the rise of neo-Nazism, the act of analyzing games, anime, and comics, both the bad and the good, may give us more answers to the current state of popular culture and how it has become inextricable from our political climate.

Chris Chua

Written by

Genderqueer Filipinx writer interested in video games, books, anime, and other storytelling things.

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