Instead, I want to present my contempt for DxD from the perspective of somebody who loves this type of shit. Because yes, I love ecchi. I love how ecchi is about jack-knifing sexualization and more traditional types of content and characterization. At the same time, I love that it still veers more towards the stupid and pornographic than it does the thematic and substantial. I also love what it represents on a grander scale, beyond what's put before the audience.
Remember that last one. It's important.
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So, before we dig deeper into the series itself, let me lay some groundwork. I'm under the impression that in order to understand why DxD sucks so much, we need to understand what makes it work for so many people. Plenty of people do like this series, and it's not like I'm sitting here with a stupid look on my face trying to understand why. It's not hard to figure out if you think about it long enough.
DxD has two contrasting elements that end up developing synergy in their execution - a traditional action narrative and a lot of fanservice scenes. They're not connected in any meaningful way. It doesn't make any kind of thematic statement on sexuality, either. No narrative relevance. None of that shit that outsiders like to fawn over so much in their piss poor forum posts or Twitter hot takes.
Rather, the synergy between narrative and fanservice in DxD stems from the relative simplicity of both. The traditional action narrative I spoke of isn't anything groundbreaking by itself. The MC, Issei, has a special power. He gets his ass kicked sometimes. He powers up and comes through with the power of friendship or tits or something. Rinse and repeat, the only differences being aesthetic and the growing sense of scale that each new arc brings to the table.
A lot of people have pointed to the emphasis DxD places on narrative as a primary point of defense to me when I've criticized this series in the past, but let's be real - if we removed all fanservice from DxD, nobody would fucking talk about this shit. Nobody talks about DxD power scaling, that'd be stupid. Nobody talks about how epic any of the fights are, either, or how dope the pseudo-religious backdrop is. None of that matters by itself, because none of it is interesting by itself. It's about as bog-standard as you can get with an action narrative.
This series is still distinguished *because* of its fanservice, which it does have in spades. We're not going to have to sit there and debate on whether it's an ecchi anime or a mere anime with fanservice. This isn't Fire Force or Shokugeki. It's a fucking ecchi.
Yet, I'm under the impression that DxD's fanservice is just too basic to be a selling point by itself. Nothing about how it implements fanservice makes it exceptional relative to its field. It relies on the most basic exposure shots *to an extremity* and it repeats those shots over and over again, redrawn, but not different. Is seeing a bare nipple enough to give you some Looney Toons-esque, heart-beating-out-of-your-chest reaction? It's not for me. I stopped being 14 a decade ago. A tit is a fucking tit.
We compare shit to other shit we've watched. Almost everyone does. If you rate one series an 8 and another a 7, you've compared them to one another and said the 7 was worse. If we don't factor in DxD's emphasis on a traditional action narrative, DxD's ecchi is like, a 2 compared to other ecchi. If what you want is an ecchi, there are hundreds of much better options for that. They go further with how explicit they're willing to be. They have better characters with more meat to latch onto. They're centered on this element of their identity and wear it on their sleeves. There's a lot of dope ecchi content out there, and you're missing out on it if you think DxD is at the apex of what the genre has to offer in that regard. Ecchi isn't any more of a strong suit for it than narrative is.
This is where DxD's synergy between narrative and ecchi kicks in.
The narrative kind of sucks, right? It's nothing great, but it's familiar territory. That's what's important - it's barren ground that other series have treaded time and time again. It'll take somebody who is unfamiliar with ecchi, yet familiar with more mainstream types of anime, and put them in friendly territory. It's something they know. It's something they can digest and understand. It's not going to weird them out or come on too strong with the Harem&Ecchi elements, because it's kind of like that one battle shounen they like, but with tits.
And the ecchi kind of sucks, right? Well, maybe if you're iffy about fanservice in anime, it's not. It's so safe and conservative that it's hard for it to offend anyone. It's got quantity, but it lacks any desire to push the envelope with its sexual content. It rests on its laurels, making everything always trace back to being a sequence of basic exposure shots.
But if you take shitty, conservative ecchi and mix it with a narrative that's derivative and safe, you get synergy for a specific type of audience member - the type of people who watch anime but don't watch ecchi. It has a good shot at removing the weird element of watching a straight up-ecchi anime for someone who wouldn't.
That's where it succeeds. It's so safe for the genre's standards that people who may be uncomfortable watching an ecchi can watch something like DxD and feel more at ease with themselves.
It's not great because of its narrative, and it's not great because of its ecchi. It's because the simplicity of both of those elements come together to create a safe environment for people who might otherwise feel insecure in watching something like this.
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You *might* have the wrong idea of where I'm going with this now, so let me clarify something. DxD is a kickass gateway for getting people into ecchi anime, and I think that's awesome. I am all for getting more people into the ecchi fandom. I don't like or promote trying to get people into anime itself for the sake of "introducing your friends to your hobbies" or whatever, but if people want to try out ecchi on their own terms and end up liking it, I think that's great. DxD being the way it is *does* make it a great point of entry for people who are unsure whether they'd like Harem&Ecchi anime.
DxD doesn't suck because it's a gateway anime. No. DxD sucks because it's too conservative. Lemme try to illustrate this.
In the first OVA, they go to some museum-type thing, fight some Egyptian-type thing, and after they're done, a tentacle monster swoops in and begins grabbing up the girls. Tentacles are fucking weird, yo. That's not what you'd expect to see out of a conservative ecchi anime, so I was hype. It was being different. I'm not even big on scenes like tentacle scenes, yet I'm all for this shit. After being subjected to clothes dissolution -> basic exposure shot like, seven times an episode throughout the first season, it was going out there and getting ready to push the envelope and be explicit and lewd.
The tentacle monsters grab the girls. They scream and squirm and cry for help, all of that rape-y shit.
Then the tentacle monster secretes a toxic substance or something. Then their clothes dissolve.
Then it does a basic exposure shot.
It looms over one girl's chest for a few seconds. Then the next. Then the next.
Then it's done and they beat up the tentacle monster.
It started doing something different. Something out there. Whether that's my scene or not, it built up the expectation it was going to do *something* that wasn't a basic exposure shot. Then it turned that into a series of basic exposure shots. Just like that, I went from intrigued to seeing the series bombard me with the same dull shots I'd seen a million times during the previous season. It teased pushing the boundaries, then it defaulted back to being as conservative and safe with ecchi as it could get.
Fuck off.
I watched DxD at around the same time I did To LOVE-Ru, too. I switched back to TLR after that episode.
One of the main scenes of the TLR episode that I watched afterward had a bit where one of Lala's inventions malfunctions, which is pretty much the most typical TLR ecchi scenario setup in that series. This invention is a telephone that's supposed to do...something else, I don't even remember what, but the unintended result is that it makes the person on the receiving end of the call begin to orgasm.
When Rito makes a call to Yui, we get this awesome prolonged masturbation scene that was borderline - if not outright - pornographic. Not some fucking basic exposure shot. Not something that's on the screen for a few seconds before switching off. It was an entire scene constructed around sexualizing a woman masturbating due to this weird pheromone phone. And I loved it. This is what ecchi could be! It can be an ecchi! It can show lewd shit! It can fire up your fantasies and stoke your imagination! You can masturbate to a series like To LOVE-Ru and I wouldn't find it weird, yet if you said the same about a series like DxD, I'd be side-eyeing you.
The reason it'd be so weird for one and not the other is because of this difference in execution. TLR goes places. It prolongs scenes and doesn't shy away from being what it is - an ecchi. Doing the same for a series like DxD would be fapping to a bunch of brief basic exposure shots interspersed with mediocre action scenes. That'd be...strange.
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At the end of the day, ecchi is rebellious. Refusing to conform to what people want and demand of you rests at its foundation. The series I compared DxD to earlier, To LOVE-Ru, was the subject of intense government scrutiny under Tokyo's Healthy Youth Development Initiative and how unrepentant it was in being explicit. It risked getting banned from being sold in Tokyo, which would have killed its publication.
The mangaka for To LOVE-Ru responded that government pressure by pushing TLR even farther and harder than he had before. He began doing shit like slipping subliminal pussy shots into his manga to sneak that in there, *as* the government was coming down on his work. That's fucking awesome.
The Japanese government doesn't like ecchi. Most ecchi-centric manga mags got fucking axed by them and the HYDI, and creators had to disperse to having their content put at the backend of more "acceptable" magazines.
Networks don't like it much. They'll stop airing this as soon as it steps out of line. See Interspecies Reviewers, another ecchi that made it a point to go as far as it could while still being comedic and having fun characters.
You don't make a lot of money making ecchi content, contrary to popular perception, so that's out the window. Any anecdote from a creator of ecchi content will make as much crystal clear. Even the author for Redo of Healer admitted that in a recent interview he did on YouTube when he talked about making lewd shit, and that guy was transparent about being in it for the cash.
We're never on top sales charts. We're always at the back of manga mags. The floor and the ceiling are both lower whenever you take the established myth that "sex sells" and look at the experiences of creators and actual numbers.
It sure as fuck doesn't have much legitimacy in the eyes of non-ecchi anime fans, either. It wasn't even that long ago where I was having an otherwise decent conversation about anime with somebody who knew I was an ecchi fan, and when we talked about anime he felt the need to assert that he "liked real anime, y'know?" - in comparison to me, the degenerate, irresponsible ecchi fan.
Do we need another forum thread or review complaining about the presence of fanservice in anime to make it clear that no shortage of outsider fans view what we like as illegitimate and less valuable than what they think anime should be? Considering that's more common than shitty isekai LN adaptations, I don't think we do.
We're here though, man. We're too weird to be normal anime fans, and we're too story and character-centric to be hentai. Nobody outside of us seems to like the middle ground we occupy, and yet the genre we gather around persists. It's not dying anytime soon, at least as far as I can tell. We still stand as an antithesis to people's idea of how media should be categorized, and that's despite copious amounts of opposition.
Yet, by being so conservative, everything that DxD's existence represents is antithetical to that entire ethos surrounding ecchi. It's an anime that is only shameless in how willing it is to kowtow to what others can consider "normal," and it accomplishes that through being safe, conservative, and boring. DxD represents subservience. It represents refusing to push the envelope with sexual content. It represents making something surrounded by an ethos of refusing to corrode into conformity and making that as safe and approved by the masses as it possibly can be. If To LOVE-Ru represents being willing to die on your feet, DxD represents living on your knees.
It's not what ecchi is, and it sure as fuck isn't what it should be. There's a lot of great ecchi out there. If this is your first stop with ecchi, I hope you manage to find the great stuff that lies beyond the gate. I really do.
