Fan Service — Its Impact, Purpose, and Usefulness
Well this is a broad subject, since the term fan service covers pretty much anything done to make a show — or VN, or whatever — appeal more to fans. So, more specifically, I’d like to focus on sexualized fan service, most of which tends to be referred to as ecchi, though there can be fan service that’s seen as sexual that I would be hard pressed to term ecchi.
I’m sure anyone reading this can think of a hundred different examples of fan service involving females, ranging from the simply attractive outfits present in just about every show all the way to things like Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. On the opposite side of the fence, things tend to be either pretty tame or really heated — fan service in which the male is sexualized tends to jump straight from shirtless attractive men to homosexual relationships between, again, attractive men.
To be fair, there isn’t really an equivalent to the boob grab for guys. Touching a guy’s chest through his shirt isn’t particularly sexual like it is for a girl. Well, it’s possible to do it sexually, but, for various reasons, if an anime portrays a girl doing that to a guy, it’s the girl that’s going to seem sexy. If it’s a guy doing it to another guy, well… again, straight to homosexual relationships. And a girl or guy grabbing other parts usually doesn’t make either of them seem sexy. Much like Okabe’s grab on Rukako in Steins;Gate, it ends up being more creepy on the grabber’s part than anything else — outside of hentai anyway, but there are a lot of things that are creepy outside of hentai.
Also, though there are plenty of people who don’t fall into the usual stereotypes, men and women often are looking for different things when they’re considering whether something is sexy or not. For men, the most important factor is often more immediate and visual, while for women it’s often more in the person’s behavior. Not to say that the visual isn’t important for women, but it tends to be less important than other factors. On that note, I really need to write about something more concrete so I can stop using words like “generally” and “tends to.”
Sexualized fan service of women is much more varied. It can be, and has been, successfully argued that even the clothing in Amanchu! is fan service. Shots of women on their hands and knees from just about any angle end up being fan service, and Yume from Hai to Gensou no Grimgar is particularly famous for this.
There’s fan service that focuses on the girl alone: panty shots, cosplay, beach episodes, onsen episodes, magical girl transformations, and the subsequent outfits, and Gainax bounces being just a small sampling. There’s also fan service that focuses on interactions between a girl and someone else: boob grabs, tripping and landing with your face in the girl’s chest/crotch, walking in on a girl changing, etc.
Given its prevalence, it’s reasonable that some people have begun to wonder: what effect is this type of fan service having on viewers? It’s a controversial topic. Much like how people debate whether playing Grand Theft Auto can make people more violent, people debate whether sexualized fan service ends up perverting viewers’ morals.
Personally, I think it’s probably somewhere in between. Humans are inherently a product of the mix of their genetics and environment, so if that environment includes a lot of sexualized fan service, then there probably will be an effect. However, I think it’s highly unlikely that it has a morally significant effect on anyone who isn’t already predisposed to it — although I suppose it depends what you consider morally significant. People have standards. Those standards may shift over time, but I find it unreasonable to think that anime is going to push someone into the criminal end of the spectrum on its own.
In other words: while watching a lot of anime with lolis will probably make you more comfortable with watching other anime with lolis, I really, really doubt that watching Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya is going to turn you into a pedophile.
But, I mean, if you find children attractive in anime, why wouldn’t you end up finding children in general attractive? Because the kids in anime aren’t real. People are actually pretty good at distinguishing between real worlds and imaginary ones. Crash Course Philosophy #29 goes into this in more detail. Additionally, even within anime, the more real a child character acts — as in, the closer to the age they appear that they act — the less likely they are to be seen in any sort of sexual way. Plenty of people find Shinobu from the Monogatari series sexually attractive, but I’d expect that a very small percentage of anime watchers, if any, have ever considered Tsumugi from Amaama to Inazuma in a sexual sense.
Similarly, very few people watch guys in anime groping girls and think “well, that’s an okay thing to do then,” or the reverse — while it’s a bit humorous, Anna’s behavior in Shimoneta makes most viewers uncomfortable. While she honestly doesn’t understand that what she’s doing is wrong, the entire point of the her behaving that way is that the viewers do.
Of course, there are people who argue that, while sexualized fan service doesn’t make people act in legally reprehensible ways, the general one-sidedness of it does lead people to have pretty misogynistic views of women. Again, I think this depends on the person to an extent. However, well… I can’t honestly say it isn’t true for some people but, as long as people are aware of this possibility, I think they’re more than capable of avoiding it if they so desire.
So, should this kind of fan service be removed from shows?
There is no right answer.
Fan service exists for a reason, and that reason is that at least some people enjoy it. It literally would not be fan service if fans didn’t enjoy it. For those people, fan service makes a show more enjoyable.
But, for others, it can make a show unwatchable. These people recognize that it’s meant to be fan service, but, for whatever reason (and there are a lot of them), it doesn’t perform that function for them. There are also people between those ends of the spectrum, who don’t much care one way or another about fan service. It neither improves or degrades the show. And wherever you set yourself on that spectrum, there are probably types of sexualized fan service that you do enjoy and types you do not, so your position on the spectrum shifts even within the realm of fan service. In other words: there’s not some magical fan service formula.
Many people want fan service to serve a purpose. There are plenty of arguments that Monogatari and Kill la Kill’s fan service is better than other fan service because it serves a narrative purpose.
I agree — anything in your story that can serve multiple functions is better than something that doesn’t. It’s just more efficient. That doesn’t mean “less good” fan service is bad though. No, I don’t think anyone’s likely to argue that Hestia’s breasts, and the emphasizing string beneath them, serve any purpose other than making her more attractive, but so what? Her appearance adds to my enjoyment of the show. Isn’t that the important part? And while Lux falling into the girls’ bathing area in Saijaku Muhai no Bahamut added nothing to the show for me, that doesn’t mean it didn’t add to someone else’s enjoyment of the show.
There’s definitely a sliding scale of how useful a show’s fan service is to that show’s popularity, and there are probably shows for which the fan service appeals to so few people and turns away so many people that it becomes counterproductive to include it. Overall, though, I don’t find fan service, sexual or otherwise, to be a bad thing. It’s ultimately just one aspect of a show, and definitely not the most important one.
