Fanservice or 'fapservice'?

[Relish in Chaos]

Basically a question that I thought up sometime ago: why is it that, whenever fanservice is talked about here or elsewhere, it's always in a sexual context? When did the definition of fanservice stop simply being a broad way to say something that feeds into the desires of the viewer, to purely anything that exists to be titillating without having any impact on the plot? Or am I mistaken, and it was always the latter? I dunno; personally, 'fapservice' sounds more accurate.

I mean, if Toriyama wrote a new Dragon Ball volume where Superman somehow got transported to the Dragon World and had to fight Goku - a dream fight for many fans - would that be counted as fanservice as much as if Ceres Victoria from Hellsing's clothing got damaged in a fight and she had to continue in nothing but her bra and panties?

 

[Legion]

Fan Service is anything included in a piece of work purely for pleasing the fans, regardless of whether or not it fits in with the rest of the work. It doesn't have to be sexual and in many cases it is not. It's just a lot more noticeable as a trend, especially in anime for there to be unnecessary nudity or sexual content. Nor does it have to stand out really, it's about the reason for it's inclusion.

To use a gaming example, Bioware often include a lot of Fan Service.

Garrus and Tali were romance options in Mass Effect 2 because fans kept asking for it. EDI and Jokers romance was something else fans would not stop asking for after Mass Effect 2 came out and was included in the third game. Varric is the fan favourite character in Dragon Age 2 and is making a return in Inquisition. The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 was pretty much entirely Fan Service from what I have seen of it.

I imagine the inclusion of the DinoBots in the latest Transformer film was done entirely for Fan Service too. It is not as though they added anything to the plot.

The reason most people see nudity/sexual content as the definition is purely because it's the most obvious example.

 

[Elfgore]

You have the definition right, anything that makes the fans happy is considered fan-service. Doesn't matter if that happens with boobs, action, or whatever. Legion pretty much explains it above me. It all comes to sexual fan-service being the most noticeable.

The word fapservice sounds clunky and kinda crude, I would just stick with ecchi to describe sexual fan-service.

 

[Lieju]

I think sexual fanservice is easier to pinpoint and it often feels more superfluous and out of place.

If you have a manga for example that's built around action, and then you have two character fight for no other reason than 'it's cool', it's easier to justify it and give it plot-relevance.

If it's a female character in the same kind of manga having her clothes torn off in a fight, it more easily comes across as something that's just thrown in there in your fighting manga to distract you with boobs.

 

[Fappy]

All I know is that I need to stop checking news updates on anime sites. Every time a boob mousepad or hug pillow is created for one of my favorite female characters I get an unnatural urge to find otakus and strangle them in their sleep. I'm a horny bastard just like every other man on this earth, but I do not get that shit! DX

Edit: For example... (NSFW)

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[Happiness Assassin]

snip

Thanks a lot... now I feel icky.

OT: Sexual fanservice (or as you say "fapservice") is merely a subset of fanservice as a whole, but is most noticeable because you don't even need to be a fan of the property to get why people like it. Everyone understands sex appeal, but few understand the greater intricacies of winks to the fandom. As mentioned above, Bioware does a veritable shitload of fanservice in their games, including sexual fanservice, but that is by far the minority, with winks to audience about previous games and several instances of memes ascending into the actual games from the fandom. I even hold up Mass Effect 3: Citadel to be the gold standard by which all other forms of fanservice are judged. It is funny, cheesy, meant to make fun of itself, and most of all, showed that the creators had respect for their fans and their work [footnote]insert snark about ending being terrible here[/footnote]. When creators just throw in some titties for the pocket-miners, they usually aren't doing so because they respect their fans, though there are some exceptions.

 

[Entitled]

The funny thing about "fanservice", is that it is almost always used as a negative term, even by fandoms. So even if formally it's defined as "what the fandom wants", in practice it refers to "what the creator thinks the fandom wants, and what everyone in the fandom thinks everyone else in the fandom wants except for them".

No one ever calls it fanservice when a character is genuinely appealing, a new plot direction is all that you hoped for, all the production values are respectably high, or even when a sexualized scene is seriously titillating.

It's always about the shallowest FAILED forms of pandering, as in "that thing that all the other suckers are blinded by instead of proper high quality".

 

[DarkhoIlow]

I like my fanservice (ecchi in this case) like the other guy (probably more than I should), but the japanese take it to a whole different level with dakimakuras (body pillows) and other accessories.

captcha: heart's content..I have a feeling that captcha is spying on me.

 

[likalaruku]

To me, fanservice is the same thing as Moe; ranging from a full cast of cliched G-rated character tropes to a single character wearing an NC-17 outfit, doesn't matter if it's pandering to men or women.

American fanservice just goes right over my head, so I'll have to use RPGs & anime for examples.

Pandering to men: Usually sexual. All the panchira in Blitz tactics Nazica, the massive boobs in Eikan, the clothing battle damage in Queen's Blade.

Pandering to women: Usually romantic. All the gay overtones in Hunter x Hunter: Phantom Rogue, shipteasing in Black Butler or Adventure Time, bumping the slashiness in GetBackers up to 11 in the anime adaptation.

Cast fanservice: Whenever a book/show is made up of a group, either made up entirely of the opposite sex of the target audience, or a harem/reverse harem/gay harem. Each character will be based on a popular fetish. There's always going to be a carefree badass, a short emotional person who looks half their age, a dumbass flirt who doesn't understand "personal space," a kuudere, a tsundere, a yandere, a yangire, or a nerd with glasses. In Western entertainment, it might just be an entire team of brain-dead scantily clad flirts with no personality who need to be rescued by a man, or an entire team of shirtless stubbled fashionable jerks with a heart of gold & a full wallet who just haven't been tamed by the right woman yet.

Event fanservice: This can be totally G-rated & sexless. Just stick the fanservice cast into some dorky outfits & make them do choreography to a catchy song. It could be changing the way she transforms into her battle uniform, or the suspense & visual effects every time he learns a new battle technique. It could also just be a super popular character who went from regular to secondary character making a cameo. It could be when a popular character who was killed off is brought back to life through popular demand.

One man's fanservice can easily be another's fan disservice. I really really detest the popular bug-eyed useless clumsy apologetic crybaby maiden characters, & they're in freaking everything.

 

[zerragonoss]

Yes it does in fact mean any kind but, the sexual kind when people bring it up as its the most noticeable and most likely for fans to not actually want.

The word fapservice sounds clunky and kinda crude, I would just stick with ecchi to describe sexual fan-service.

I think having the term by clunky and crude would be a great reflector of the content its describing. Than again anything that reduces that amount people use the stupid fap term may be for the best.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

It's true that it's usually used in a sexual context, but fanservice means anything that's just there to pander to fans. For example I find the Marvel movies (and TV show) extremely fanservice-y. Particularly the post-credits "stingers", but all the winks and nudges in general.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I always broke them up into two different groups myself, but I never realized it until you brought it up. There's Fan Service, which to me means anything done to please the fans, or as a slight nod to fans.

Garrus and Tali were romance options in Mass Effect 2 because fans kept asking for it. EDI and Jokers romance was something else fans would not stop asking for after Mass Effect 2 came out and was included in the third game. Varric is the fan favourite character in Dragon Age 2 and is making a return in Inquisition. The Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3 was pretty much entirely Fan Service from what I have seen of it.

There. A perfect example of what I mean (and you're right about The Citadel DLC, which is why it is amazing to me).

And then there's fanservice, which is Negima!, Strike Witches, Sekirei, Mayo Chiki, Monsters Masamune, Is This A Zombie?, and countless others. I think for me, fanservice (one word) is strictly limited to manga and anime.

 

[The Random Critic]

I think most of the media we've known and discuss here all try to pander to their audience one way or anther. Stuff that makes you laugh, stuff that makes you feel emotionally touched/anger/happy/accomplished, and stuff that makes your reproductive parts grows bigger/wetter/whatev. Since all these kinds of entertainment in general is created for people to absorb and appreciate, almost everything in general is considered a fan service by it's absolute definition. I mean, if I make a documentary about the sands in Africa, it wouldn't be considered entertainment for most people, it would be considered an an educational documentary about the sands in Africa. (which can be thoroughly enjoy for a total different reason)

Now, I am not saying that the things we enjoy doesn't teach you anything, or even distrub you in some ways. Praised work like Shakespeare which almost all the students are force to study today are considered as entertainment when it was first created. Most entertainment we enjoy and talk about here on this here forum, usually has a form of fan service one way or anther, for entertainment serves to entertain. It's just that some are more clear about weather or not this is meant to be seen as appealing to the fans, along with that there are a variation in the amount of material that is specifically design to appeal to the fan. (or things that are implemented specifically because of the complaint/request of the fans, such as the tidedire thing from Valve Corporation)

As for your question dear OP, it's because sex is the first thing that comes up in most people mind in terms of what they want.

 

[Tsukuyomi]

Maaan Fappy....please don't ruin that series for me. I find it weird that anyone who's SEEN the series wants to think of those two that way. There may be no reason not to, but to me it's just odd because when I see them I think of the types of people they are and their personalities, the blatant acts of sheer force of will, determination, and inner-strength that those two pulled off. Their curves have nothing to do with the matter to me. Seems weird that it ever does to anyone.

Anyway....

As far as fan-service goes? Yeah, it's a pretty broad spectrum, really. I feel like it's just that through the years, catering to the demographic that a lot of shonen does, fanservice became largely about sexual or quasi-sexual moments. Let's face it: you're appealing to teenage boys who are either entering, or in, puberty. There's a part of them that you can put your chips on the enjoying every time and win. At the end of the day the creators have to balance their artistic merit against creating something that will sell. Comics and Manga and, well, any form of entertainment, is not just an art, but also a business. So sometimes you have to do what's gotta be done to keep your business afloat.

Is there better ways than the now-ubiquitous undie-flash on occasion? I'd think so. I'd think if you as a creator REALLY listened to your fans and had enough wisdom to understand what would appease the majority the most, you wouldn't have to double-down on the safe bet of sexy-time moments. But doing that is a gamble and if there's one thing publishers of ANY medium are typically known for it's not taking a lot of gambles unless they pay off.

 

[Ghaleon640]

I do find it funny that so many people here are saying that 'fans hate fanservice.' Which fans are everyone talking about? The foreign afterthought, or the key demographic that actually gets a work started and keeps it going? In the case of Shonen manga (Most anime starting as successful manga)- Japanese elementary to high school boys. Apparently its popular in that age range and has been shown to be a benefit.

All I mean is, we can assume 'what fans want' by talking to each other on forums, (which are there really all that many middle schoolers on forums? Like... an actual significant percentage?) but whether its our age or nationality, a lot of us, and the people we talk to just aren't in that key demographic.

I don't know. Having read Bakuman, (the manga about characters making manga and the business behind it) at least from Shonen jumps side, a manga lives or dies based off of popularity surveys in each issue- to my knowledge, only in the Japanese market.

Just my thoughts.

 

[Entitled]

I don't know. Having read Bakuman, (the manga about characters making manga and the business behind it) at least from Shonen jumps side, a manga lives or dies based off of popularity surveys in each issue- to my knowledge, only in the Japanese market.

Having read Bakuman, you might have noticed the distinct lack of recgniseable fanservice in it. And that was quite a successful manga series.

Instead of taking the manga industry portrayed by Bakuman at face value, you should rather picture millions of middle schoolers who are all reading Bakuman, and smugly looking down at all that other dumb sheeple that are being manipulated by fanservice instead of classy industrial analysis like Bakuman (at least according to Bakuman).

By the way, most shonen jump manga tend to be relatively chaste anyways, (they serve as mainstream daytime anime sources), but when people talk about anime fanservice, they mostly talk about late night otaku anime based on seinen manga, light novels, and visual novels.

But the problem is similar with those too. You might find plenty of shows "educating" you about otaku culture, but these shows themselves are quite popular works aimed at actual otaku, who apparently have more interest in satirical portrayals of their own "interests" being negatively presented, than in the supposed interests themselves.

Plenty of the trashiest shows that western anime fans hold up as warning signs of the dirty Japanese otaku's preference, are actually considered quite trashy in Japan itself. While it's a unique feature of the local culture that such outlandish cartoons are allowed to exist, their actual popularity (as measured by disc sales) is shadowed by many of the same pretentious serious anime that western fans are dying for.