"This show only uses fanservice to compensate for being bad"
There's a lot of series out there that prioritize it to the point where it's an integral aspect to the appeal of the series and how it connects with the audience. Those are actual ecchi series, if you ask me, and often times don't have to compensate for anything in that regard, they're mostly about that to begin with. Thing is, though, you can look at anime with fanservice yet aren't committed to it enough to be an ecchi - where this becomes much more applicable in a sense, I guess - and this still isn't necessarily the case. It's just trying to ascribe cynicism for why somebody would sexualize something in a creation, which irks me.
Can this be the case? Sure, it can. That interpretation should be substantiated accordingly, though, honestly, and not just tossed out at everything with fanservice or ecchi in it like it so often can be. That's when it goes into being shitty.
"Creators only put fanservice in to make money"
Yeah, no. There's a lot of people who love sexy things out there and want to create them themselves. This is not surprising - hell, it's not even uncommon. There's been plenty of times that I wished I had the talent to become an artist because I had an idea for a picture or scenario that I thought would just be fucking sexy as hell. It's not inherently this "safe money, cash grab" scenario and that seems like a thoroughly retarded way of interpreting creative intent.
Seems like if all somebody cared about was money then they would probably go into a different field than being a mangaka or an animator in Japan all together, because of the crazy work lifestyle that doesn't exactly leave you swimming in cash or anything of that nature. People using their creative output to make things sexy is something you see outside of anime a lot as well, it's not uncommon and it's kind of reductive to assume that the primary concern with "geniune" creators is always going to be telling a thought-provoking, serious narrative. Kind of has a No True Scotsman fallacy as an underlying implication, "No TRUE creator who loves what they make would put fanservice into their series because it's just exploitative and meant to capitalize on horny audiences." Pretty sure somebody like Yabuki takes his craft just as seriously as somebody like Yuasa does, and that's part of why there are series like TLR that reach such high acclaim with the sort of niche audience for these things when you look at the drawings and the ecchi and such in the manga, with all of the little details and sort of subliminally pushing at what can be considered acceptable to be shown in a non-hentai manga and finding ways to show areas and scenarios that could never get past censors if they were put in outright, and doing things like shooting the finger after the BPO and the Tokyo Government tried (and failed) to hit it by only turning it up in that regard. I can't exactly fathom somebody who didn't love what they do going as far as somebody like people such as Yabuki does so often, where they can be downright rebellious and put their careers and series at risk over it, and yes, believe it or not, there are people that can love and wish to create sexy things to the point of being willing to take on that battle. Just because you deem it to be lesser in some way, shape, or form doesn't really inherently correlate it into being a cynical, exploitative cash grab pandering to audiences to compensate for not being able to be something else. That's incredibly reductive and kind of insulting to works people can actually put a lot of effort and care into themselves.
Things like "I don't like ecchi 'cause it's distracting" seems kind of silly to me a lot of the time, but I think it either can still be fair game in certain contexts, or at least not really bad enough to outright be called "shitty" and is closer to being something like a bit goofy. These two are the ones on ecchi I see enough to consider relatively common and consider to be genuinely shitty whenever discussing the field of ecchi anime.
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In a more general sense, there's a lot of stuff I haven't really thought over much because, well, they're not in areas that interest me in particular, but something I feel I see a lot of is being a bit haphazard about creativity and ambition to the point where they can neglect to take anything else about the series into account and don't really seem to care about much else yet still forming an overall opinion on the series based on that one thing. The sheer amount of emphasis I see put on that in reviews in particular, but on AD a lot as well, can make things seem imbalanced, unreliable, not trying to look at the whole picture, just whittling everything down to a single aspect that can be discussed and then not caring about anything else, which is pretty far from taking a holistic view on the series itself and is instead just being really narrow-minded in the assessment. It makes it difficult to take the review/opinion with anything except a grain of salt whenever the emphasis is just on how original it is and not much to nothing else. It's fine in of itself to weight that, or hell, even weight it heavily, but I think it kind of becomes shitty whenever nothing else is really brought up or being taken into consideration.
Also hating things because of the audience. Audiences and series are separate entities, and it's one thing to look at a fanbase and think "holy shit this fanbase seems annoying" - it can't be helped sometimes, I feel that way about FranXX fans right now looking at some of the discussions they've had and responses to things within the series they've sort of put out there - but to not want to watch a product for its fanbase or to think the product is bad because you can't disassociate it from its fanbase kind of seems...goofy? Like, idk. That's all-encompassing. Hating ecchi for ecchifags, hating critically-acclaimed or obscure anime 'cause elitism or some shit, not wanting to watch fuckin' Gintama or something because it has a high mean score, literally anything that simply treats the audience who enjoys the product and the product itself as a singular entity just seems petty and kind of childish to me. |