Fan Service Is Not a Necessity for the Anime Medium to Thrive

Fan service is a not a necessity for anime to thrive. By definition, it makes up the set of scenes and content that don’t serve the story in productive or probative ways, instead grabbing attention with often unnuanced and potentially harmful sexualization as opposed to plot or character-driven sexualization. The notion of fan service handled with intention such that it meaningfully aids storytelling is almost an oxymoron; those scenes or content would likely cease to primarily be fan service once their primary intentions shifted. At best, fan service is a non-intrusive but unessential element of a scene. At worst, it’s part of a culture of objectification that is actively harmful. I want to be abundantly clear that my position on this isn’t that all fan service should be removed or banned from anime. I think it’s something people can enjoy. My position is that it isn’t a necessity for anime to thrive, that its worst forms can be broadly harmful in excess, and that the medium thriving means not having an overabundance of those harms. To me, for anime to thrive means for it go grow and achieve some level of success in ways that emphasize the creative elements of the artform while not causing harm. In other words, it’s not just about commercial success, but rather what becomes successful.

Crucially, fan service is not inclusive of all instances of sexuality or sexual content on screen. This is an association that I see made often, in my opinion erroneously. Fan service in anime is distinct from sexuality in anime in that it is added with the express purpose of pleasing or causing gratification for an audience, often with little relevance to the principle elements of the plot or its characters. If a moment of it becomes “necessary” because the plot reasonably dictates it, then it likely ceases to be fan service. If a scene passively pleases or gratifies the audience, but has a primary function in the story, then it’s probably not fan service. Sexuality in general is a valuable part of storytelling when it doesn’t objectify characters.

Moreover, as mentioned earlier, fan service can be relatively unobtrusive or give an artist an opportunity to show off their artistic skill in unique ways. I don’t have much of a problem with this. Personal definitions of fan service may affect your response to this take, but I think TRIGGER is successful at producing anime where much of the so-called fan service is either unobtrusive, a visual spectacle, or arguably not fan service at all. For example, I’m of the opinion that KILL LA KILL utilizes nudity to build a dichotomy between autonomy and authoritarianism. It certainly includes fan service alongside that, but I think a lot of scenes that would be called fan service arguably are not. Others, like New PANTY & STOCKING with GARTERBELT, are sexually irreverent and do include some fan service, but also include scenes that ostensibly are fan service while really being clever parodies of different genres. I don’t bring these two up to suggest that they don’t have any fan service (that would be silly), more so to distinguish between shows reliant on fan service and shows that just have sexual imagery. And plenty of anime broach the topic of sexuality without even getting close to fan service.

In many instances of the worst fan service, characters cease to be characters. Their bodies become an instrument solely for the external gratification of the viewing audience or those involved in the media’s creation. The worst of these portrayals have consequences, something that most proponents of fan service either implicitly or explicitly agree with. If an element of an artform is able to create good outcomes for some people (enjoying fan service), then it logically is able to create outcomes in general. Given the diversity of people and the myriad ways they react to media (sometimes even receiving both good and bad effects) it stands to reason that those same elements can create bad outcomes as well. I won’t pretend that whether something is objectifying can be objectively stated with 100% certainty, but media itself can be associated with the negative outcomes associated with objectification, and I believe those outcomes are detrimental toward whether a medium thrives.

The effects of consuming media with pernicious amounts of objectification have been researched and documented for years. A consequence of viewing high amounts of overly sexually objectifying material (again, sexually objectifying material, not sexual material in general) is that such material is normalized. This is something that ideally is proven using empirics (though I’m not going to start pasting references to meta-analyses), but we can also build an argument as to why this sort of thing might be the case. The phenomenon of media affecting how one sees the world and what one expects from other media isn’t unique to sexual objectification; the more pervasive something is in the things we consume or are exposed to, the more normalized those things become for us over time. Think of something as straightforward as witnessing violence. Early on, especially in their younger years, I’m sure many anime watchers were shocked or even frightened by hyper violent depictions in anime. Many sects of society saw a public benefit in limiting these depictions in media, and there were movements to set stricter media guidelines, many of which are still in place today. But, as the industry and media writ large have gone on, we’ve begun to make more exceptions. Seeing a character get beheaded is not only normalized, but can be an element of one of the most successful films in modern history. Some films that used to easily be rated R or even X are now rated PG-13 in the United States for example. Just as violence has become more normalized, so too has the prevalence of sexual content (including fan service), which is one reason the debate over it turns so many heads in the first place.

You may be thinking to yourself that you can accept that something like fan service or objectification can become more normalized, but why does that make it bad? First, recall that the question at hand here isn’t even whether fan service is bad, but whether it’s a necessity for anime to thrive. Second, recall that we can consider the worst, most objectifying forms of something to be bad without demonizing 100% of it. I don’t particularly care if some anime has fan service; I do care about the worst forms of it becoming inextricably linked to the artform.

While the exact longitudinal studies to explore objectification are more the domain of academia and less of a random anime journalist, there are some common trends that a few hours of Google scholar-ing will tell you, and these are the reasons that it can be bad. Normalization of sexual objectification is linked to internalizing the importance of the behaviors that occur during that objectification. Exposure to objectifying content can lead to discomfort with your own body, even if the content being viewed isn’t objectifying someone of your assigned gender at birth or gender presentation. The level of importance one attaches to the qualities that are emphasized during objectification, like conventional attractiveness or certain proportions, can change when one is exposed to lots of media that itself places higher importance on those things. While the vast majority of harmful fan service tends to objectify women in service of a (usually) male gaze, the male gays aren’t getting away scot-free either. Some BL (and some queer anime in general), for example, play into gratuitous sexual fantasies and lead to a perception of oversexualization of queer folks in general, a phenomenon that many of those people are likely to have experienced from the same oversexualization that tends to happen for queer characters in even non-anime media.

And, even if you don’t believe that these sorts of associations are happening, ask yourself, what is fan service doing for those watching it, and is that an integral part of the medium overall? What it provides isn’t a necessity to anime thriving, for a reason as simple as there are plenty of good, thriving anime without it. You also don’t have to believe that it’s going to have some sort of massive knock-on effect in order to believe that, in many cases, it simply isn’t adding something that is better than what could exist in its place. If a single series cannot thrive without fan service, then fan service becomes a necessity not for the anime medium, but for that series’ success, potentially just commercially. And I believe that this is a form of success that shouldn’t be prioritized, in order to encourage more quality storytelling.

For the industry, I believe fan service represents a tantalizing way to get engagement from an audience in places where the plot isn’t doing it. In cases where some level of engagement and audience retention can be achieved with consistent fan service, I believe some in the industry may (1) neglect other elements of the story and (2) create something marginally well-received for reasons other than quality. From a more cynical perspective, if you can make just as much money by putting in less work and just throwing in a lewd shot, someone with a primarily fiduciary responsibility is going to pick that option. Moreover, they’re going to create a norm of gaining success with that option, inducing similar behavior from others in the industry. Just as a successful isekai spawns more isekai, the success of fan service spawns more. While those who really enjoy it might receive the same utility from an 8/10 anime and a 5/10 anime with fan service, I believe the majority of consumers don’t have that set of preferences.

And those who don’t watch anime certainly don’t have those preferences. While I’ll be the first to admit that those who find anime weird / overly sexual often don’t notice the amount of fan service in traditional media, it remains true that fan service lends toward the general perception that anime fans are perverted freaks. This isn’t as much of a problem as it was even just 10 years ago, but it’s also a reason why you might choose not to watch anime in public for fear of what might randomly show up on your screen (or at least is a reason for me). Thriving includes attracting new watchers to anime and converting non anime fans to anime fans.

Ultimately, creators can do whatever they want and anime fans can vote with their clicks on whether or not they deem excessive fan service a good or bad thing. As with anything, a lot of this boils down to subjectivity and semantics as well, but that doesn’t mean we can’t present arguments about it. Tens of thousands of words could be written about something like this, making for a more complete discussion, but none of you are reading all that. I doubt fan service will ever completely be gone from anime, and there are arguments around creative expression for why it shouldn’t. But, to say it’s a necessity for the medium to thrive is, in my opinion, incorrect.

Featured image: ©Koyoharu Gotoge / SHUEISHA, Aniplex, ufotable