Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Is Mieruko-chan Scary, Sexy, or Both?
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Sekaro
Posts: 390 |
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Watching this series makes me imagine what a crossover between Natsume's Book of Friends & this series would look like... Hmmm.
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5922 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Read the manga first, and this anime adaptation is spot on. Great watching for any fan.
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yeehaw
 Posts: 536 |
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i watched the first episode but I found it incredibly boring except for the part when Miko saw a ghost in the mirror and we learn that she feels fear via her ass. And I can't take this much fanservice when the girls aren't even cute
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earl.m
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Are we forgetting that there is much less "pointless fanservice" in anime than there has ever been? 80s and 90s anime was filled with skirt-flipping, panty shots, groping and even frontal nudity in shows aimed at 12 year olds and even younger. Take Bulma in Dragon Ball: her actual name is analogous to "panties" and the show very much demonstrated why. Also the entire 2000s - with its flood of visual novel and light novel adaptations - was filled with titles where the fanservice was the entire point. Today there merely a single Uzaki-Chan or Mieruko-Chan airs a season so everyone can subject them to endless male gaze objectification discussions. In the 2000s there was so much content like High School of the Dead and Sankarea that it would have been too much - and too normalized - to discuss anything but the most extreme examples. Where Mieruko-Chan has maybe a couple of questionable scenes per episode, Rosario to Vampire used a panty shot to introduce its female lead. Audiences saw Moka's pantied rear before seeing her face. And RtV was aimed at a younger demo than Mieruko-Chan.
So in addition to analyzing the fanservice that still occurs, how about some attention to comparing it what used to be routine and coming up with theories for its decline? One guess: the visual novel boom from the 2000s is basically dead. Killed off by mobile gaming, maybe? I have read that Haruhi Suzumiya was responsible for creating a fanservice-driven light novel boom that decade. So naturally the first wave of anime adaptations were going to follow suit. But now light novels have settled in as just a regular part of the media landscape I suppose? If so then perhaps fanservice will also become less of a factor in the web scene that produced Mieruko-chan over time. Yes the VHS and DVD markets that drove fanservice-heavy OVAs are long gone, but it doesn't explain the reduced fanservice in anime that once aired on network television. Would a Ranma 1/2 air on a family time slot on Fuji TV today? Would NHK - Japanese equivalent to PBS - air the so very much Gainax Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water? For all the criticism of the fanservice in Gainax offshoot Studio Trigger's SSSS.Gridman and Darling in the Franxx, Blue Water makes Gridman and Franxx took tame by comparison. Stuff like that would be a neat way to expand this discussion and provide some context. |
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Terry Lang
Posts: 74 |
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The decline of fanservice is an interesting topic, but I feel this is not the right thread to discuss it in depth. In this particular series it may be that the author had a more trashy horror in mind at first but then decided it did not fit with how the story developed. It feels an odd choice for the anime to keep it in. (Although I personally find the main character pretty sexy
 )
Anyway, I am really impressed by how well the series balances Comedy, Horror and Drama. |
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harminia
 Posts: 2045 Location: australia |
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I mean, to be fair, there's still a lot of anime coming out these days that introduces characters by their boobs or panties.
I don't think this really has a place here. This is about Mieruko-chan overall, and not on whether the sexy parts of it are justified or how they compare to past fanservice etc. Sounds like you care a lot about it though so you could maybe offer to write a piece about this for ANN if you want to spark discussion! (I mean this genuinely, not sarcastically btw) Regarding Mieruko, I read the manga but have only watched one episode of the anime. With the fanservice, I think it's worse in the anime though. In the manga you can just skip past it while you read; just look at it as long as you want to. But in the anime you're forced to watch it for an extended period of time. It's right there, shoved in your face. That said, I do remember the fanservice in the manga being pretty bizarre (like the panty lines under her pyjamas being so prominent), and am in the camp of "glad they stopped doing it pretty early on". I'm looking forward to watching more of the anime though. I felt it was quite a good adaptation from the first episode, and hearing the fight scene at the shrine is well animated is definitely making me want to continue. |
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