A Rise of Fanservice?

Something that’s happened recently (and by recently, I’m referring to about the last ten years or so) in anime fandom is the rise of fanservice shows and the relative drop off of high concept shows. Out of the shows I only picked up nine new shows this season and out of those nine, five have shades of fanservice (two moreso than the others).

In spring 2012, I watched seven new shows (one of which I picked up after it aired). Two were high concept and four had shades of fanservice (three moreso than the other). In winter 2012, I picked up seven new shows. All seven had shades of fanservice (one was way worse than the others and the rest varied from cutesy moe to general character design of the girls). In fall 2011, I had perhaps my busiest season where I watched 14 new shows (one of which I picked up after it aired). 10 of those had shades of fanservice (three of which were particularly bad).

That’s as far back as my records go back of labels for season, but the ratio has been 9:5, 7:4, 7:7, and 14:10. Those aren’t great odds for the good shows like Chihayafuru, Fate/Zero, Bodacious Space Pirates, Kids on the Slope, tsuritama, Space Brothers, Kokoro Connect, and Humanity Has Declined. The connecting trend between all those series? They don’t rely on fanservice. Nope. Not even the unfortunately titled Bodacious Space Pirates (though I suppose it’s better than the light novel counterpart of Miniskirt Pirates).

I’m not going to try to justify fanservice. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. I guess everything does follow Sturgeon’s Law. K-ON! is probably the big example where fanservice can produce a show that people love for the cute characters and not because the characters are cute (if that makes sense; though the divide in K-ON! fans and non-K-ON! fans is very, very large).

What fanservice does mean, at least for Japanese production companies, is that they can make figures with their cute characters and sell them for $80 a pop. The production company gets some royalties (or maybe one lump sum that allows the toy company to produce the likeness of the character, I’m honestly not sure which) and the toy company makes money. Lots of money. Because anime figurines are all the rage. I know my nedroid-ish but maybe not really nedroid Rei and Asuka are adorable. And at home. Note to sell, get those.

But it’s just what’s popular right now. I’ve been told that in the late 80’s and early 90’s, science fiction shows were all the rage and shitty science fiction show after shitty science fiction show premiered in Japan (with their own action figure and model tie-ins). Now, it’s fanservice. Making a fanservice show to stay afloat (like making a science fiction show for the same reason) doesn’t make it any better. The market has changed and hopefully it’ll change out of this into something better.

My guess? It won’t and the fan community will continue to remember one or two shows each season and throw all the rest into the “forgettable” pile.