The Unbreakable Mold – Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms Spoiler Review

You know, I often try to start these with some kind of pithy introduction, or by relating this week’s anime somehow to my experience as a reviewer or as a person. But what am I really supposed to say in that phase about Mecha-Ude? I mean, I could spin a yarn, but I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that just like people looking for recipes don’t want the cook’s life story, you don’t want mine. So what’s Mecha-Ude?

Well, if I may be permitted to speak trailer-ese for a moment: In a world where alien symbiotes – taking the form of mechanical extra limbs – have arrived on Earth, an otherwise normal boy becomes the crux of a conflict between various factions, catapulting him into the world of the Mecha-Ude and their wielders. His life will never be the same again.

Put that way, it really seems like one of those boilerplate winners. Like it’s engineered to be a blockbuster, and moreover the kind of blockbuster that despite winning big probably lacks staying power because even if it’s bringing out a lot of new stuff, that new stuff all has the same meaning as stuff we’ve seen a million times before, in this case in other Shonen battlers or Urban Fantasy “new world of wonder and threat” setups.

But on the other hand, I probably could have spun up a similarly uninspired trailer for Bubuki Buranki, which was at least crazy enough to be extremely memorable. I actually deliberately wrote that trailer-ese before viewing the show in its entirety, so it’s reflective only of the pitch, not the content. When it comes to idea, there’s a solid core. When it comes to execution there’s a world of difference between a great like Shakugan no Shana, a weirdo like Bubuki Buranki, and a failure like Taboo Tattoo.

That said, there are some pretty obvious expectations that the pitch for the show sets up, and most of them are set to be handled in the first couple of episodes, if not the first episode.

My soul is prepared! How’s yours?

So, Mecha-ude does start us off pretty bog standard. Sympathetic nice kid witnesses magical mayhem, gets involved, you know the drill.

Specifically, our normal idiot this time is Hikaru Amatsuga. He sees a mysterious light in the night, so of course he goes snooping.

Oddly enough, he doesn’t get involved right away; he may hear a voice crying for help, but it’s a long way away. We are, however, treated to the source of the light, being a struggle between an action girl and her magic thighs and some obvious corporate creepers over a magic cube she’s trying to steal, which breaks containment hence the pillar of light.

The girl I alluded to is one of our other main characters, Aki Murasami. She’s a member of ARMS, your commonplace well-meaning terrorist organization, who oppose the local Megacorp, the Kagami Group, because the Kagami are using evil tech to turn Mecha-Ude (free willed extradimensional creatures) into mindless tools at their disposal. She’s a badass fighter with a pair of bonded Mecha-Ude of her own and a few notable grudges that she starts alluding to in this conversation

The camera also really likes her thighs. We’re not at Ryza levels, but much like Rin Tohsaka having a few particular pieces of magic that get us some shots for which no small subset of the audience is very thankful, she’s got her Mecha-Ude attachment points up there to be focused on while sliding the fans a little service on the side. That doesn’t explain every scene that wants to know what angles they can get without provoking a panty shot, but suffice to say she’s got feminine charm on her resume.

At least, when it comes to her visual design. In terms of personality she’s both an airhead and kind of a bully. I think Shana was more ladylike. We learn more of this the day after the fight, when Hikaru once again hears a voice begging for help and thus ditches school to visit a construction cite that the police have sectioned off. There, he finds the cube and touches it, releasing our third real main character to be introduced, Alma – the “Trigger Arm” and now Hikaru’s Mecha-Ude partner. Alma bonds to his hoodie rather than his body, which is weird, but aside from that is totally amnesiac, not even knowing his own name much less where he comes from or what he’s supposed to do.

Quickly, they’re set upon by Kagami goons, including an eccentric clown of an enforcer. They’re also set upon by Aki, who doesn’t do a very good job of explaining she’s here to save them, instead threatening their lives. Ultimately, Hikaru is able to tap into Alma’s true power, fend off his various attackers, and escape.

Naturally, Aki transfers into his school the next day. The empty seat in the class is not next to him, but she picks up the desk and slams it down next to his anyway. This results in the one girl in the normal friend group shipping them (she also discovers that Aki is incredibly weak to being bribed with food) and results in them being trapped in the abandoned school building. This is the setting for the next action piece as a Kagami sniper team attacks, inadvertently causing Alma, Aki, and Hikaru to become allies for real with their “kill Hikaru first ask questions never” approach to getting Alma back. The irony that if they’d just apologized for the murderous drones the previous day and asked nicely, he probably would have worked with them at this stage.

Anyway, the building gets trashed, the clowns from Kagami get fought off, and Hikaru is taken to ARMS where they tell him… that he’s useless, worthless, and will never amount to anything. He’s just a rider for Alma, who is the one of the two ARMS cares about at all. Alma tries to stand up for his new buddy, and even Aki does so in her own meathead way, but there’s a theme in this show’s early episodes of really trying to enforce how much of a not-special nobody Hikaru is, with really heavy repetition on words like “You don’t need to do anything” or “you can’t do anything”. I think this would get under my skin even if it weren’t just setting up a contrast with every other young adult urban fantasy where the leading boy is the most special thing ever, when clearly thanks to him being bonded to Alma this is going to turn around and have Hikaru be the special, or at least a solid half of the special unit.

So, Aki tries to train Hikaru. Or, rather, she trains Alma. Hikaru can just sort of be dragged along. He also gets dragged along when she wants to follow up on that grudge I mentioned her having earlier, as she’s looking for the “Worm-type” Mecha-Ude wielder who killed her family. She hauls Hikaru along to go snoop a potential lead when they encounter some biker clowns from Kagami, and also a mysterious little green boy.

Green boy is an asthmatic kid who we saw earlier. He’s from Kagami – in fact, he’s a member of the core family, Jun Kagami – and he believes that Alma the Trigger Arm was promised to him. When Alma was stolen, he went and stole an unfinished artificial Mecha-Ude called Ouroboros and started to go on a little wielder-hunting spree. Once he realizes who Aki and Hikaru are, Hikaru is away, so he thrashes Aki, rips out her Mecha-Ude, and uses that as bait to draw Hikaru in (since in addition to the fate of the symbiotes themselves, severance can be fatal to the host if not treated well).

As funny as it would be to have Hikaru respond that, at this point, Aki is a lunatic terrorist who’s been forcing him into harrowing situations rather than “someone really important” to him like Jun taunts, Hikaru of course goes against the orders of ARMS (who seemed content to leave Aki to die in order to get a new guard on Alma) to face off against Jun.

In the fight, he manages to once more go super with Alma, getting Jun on the ropes when the magical mystery butler arrives to spirit the young master away. Jun still drops Aki’s partners, so all’s well that ends well, leaving Aki really willing to stick up for Hikaru and feeling much closer to him, given that he went and saved her life and all.

Oh, and Jun goes and transfers into their school and starts acting weird towards Hikaru, wanting to train him up so they can have a real fight where he’ll destroy his new rival, and so on and so forth. Normal girl, of course, senses more shipping.

Since this also means that he and Alma have a better idea of how to work together effectively no matter what the ARMS test scores say, they end up joining ARMS on operations rescuing bound Mecha-Ude from Kagami. There, we get more hints of that worm-type user, who is transparently Aki’s little sister. She even ambushes one of the ARMS operatives who Hikaru briefly interacted with, totally shattering and killing said operative’s Mecha-Ude. Harsh.

Aki manages to track down the worm-type user, only to make the discovery that was blindingly obvious to the audience the moment they put her on camera. To be fair, this would be a pretty serious revelation to the character.

Naturally, it turns out that little sister and her partner aren’t exactly malicious. The whole dead parents thing was a lab accident. However, little sis is sick – she can’t create her own science babble spirit energy (called Arbitrium. It’s the stuff that Hikaru tested low on, and it leaking is why someone with a partner forcibly detached can die). Her partner can siphon it from others, but that’s no longer keeping up.

Well, maybe there’s some malice, as they say that curing little sister will cost Hikaru his life, but at least they seem straightforward and regretful about that. However, matters are muddied when worm-spawn start popping up, driving people berserk en masse to create chaos. Also the whole murder thing. But all that aside, this results in Aki being a temporary enemy. Again. We have Jun and a captured and then basically converted Kagami clown as allies instead, because Aki decides she has to brawl even when Hikaru (admittedly unknowing) was just willing to come with her.

Rather quickly, Hikaru calms things down, but his happy willingness to help gives Aki second thoughts. She returns to her little sister, only for the worm to turn around and reveal that it is an evil mind-controlling parasite, using the sister as a puppet. Aki gets tormented a while until Hikaru busts in to save the day and deliver friendship speeches like a real protagonist.

I mean, everybody still gets put on the ropes, but that’s fight scene 101.

After what is admittedly a pretty good fight, with everyone getting some serious hits in rather than just Hikaru/Alma doing the uber punch for the win, the worm is seemingly destroyed, but not without having recriminations for Alma evidently causing the death of the Kagami founder and the current state of the Mecha-Ude.

This causes Alma to get his memory back, but before we can really dig into that, we of course have to deal with more random clowns making a fight of it.

Alma ends up running off (which he can do now for reasons not explained until after he does it. I’ll spare you the “changing the rules” rant). He runs in with Jun, and then they both get immediately captured by the Kagami Group. Oops.

Hikaru and Aki have their required emotional lows but get in on the search. The Kagami authorities (spearheaded by Jun’s cold and cruel big brother) waste no time in using the Trigger Arm for its trigger. But what is that?

Well, the history around the Mecha-Ude is explained while Alma is out. Their dimension was losing the energy that allowed them to live, so a group led by Alma and his ARMS-leading equivalent, Fist, dimension-ported in search of hope, primarily in the form of their progenitor entity, Ordela.

Thus, they ended up bonding with the Kagamis of their day, including Alma being bound to the famed Yakumo, who seems like he was a really nice guy. They found Ordela, but when they woke it up, something was wrong, and it was basically an uncontrollable unstoppable monster. Alma and Yakumo fought back, sealing Ordela away, but this cost Kagami his life and sent Alma into torpor.

Now, the Kagami Group hopes to awaken Ordela. One of the high ups thinks this is to open a portal to the world of the Mecha-Ude in order to plunder the population for profit, which would be a pretty good evil scheme, but when Ordela once again immediately runs wild, Jun’s big brother gives his best “just as planned” to the devastation, so something else is clearly up with him.

As everybody else evacuates the experiment site, Hikaru and friends catch up, resulting in an emotional reclaiming of Alma, and Alma and Hikaru agreeing to take on Ordela together despite Alma’s trauma regarding the proposition.

There are still four episodes left at this point. If you smell a rat at that fact… good! One or maybe two after the dramatic reunion would be normal if there were no twists, so milking this exact setup for four (more) half hour slices would be pretty impressive and probably a pain point.

Sure enough, we beat Ordela in one episode, with Alma getting big enough that he’s like a drill from Gurren Lagann

In the tail of this, it’s revealed that the worm-type from earlier was controlling Jun’s big brother, and in fact every Kagami Group head for a while now. But we know from a purposely enigmatic scene earlier that she didn’t seem to be top dog.

The answer turns out to be Fist and his partner, the masked leader of ARMS, who appears to be Yakumo Kagami. This is the obnoxiously resilient worm-type’s boss and our real main antagonist.

Actually, it turns out that while the human is Yakumo, he’s just a corpse, animated by Fist and cybernetic technology to be some kind of robot zombie suit that has thus far let Fist blend in. His plan, of course, is to take over the world. Technically, he wants to absorb the power of Ordela for himself, turn the other Mecha-Ude into beings like himself and Alma who can produce their own Arbitrium, and then take over the world because blah blah blah humans stupid we rule.

He takes Alma, but it doesn’t take long for Hikaru to reclaim his buddy. They trade matters back and forth, with Fist proving surprisingly flimsy, until he goes ahead and fires off a large laser and Hikaru gets cored for his trouble.

Well, even though there should be pretty much no coming back from that with most of his center torso evaporated, and thus at least seems like a big “hero is dead” beat for right before the final inevitable triumph, it deploys just half way into the first episode with Fist as our antagonist.

Speaking of which, I’m not opposed to surprise antagonists, even if they are overdone in animation these days, but Fist is pretty profoundly mediocre on that score. He, in both his supposed personalities, was a grump who didn’t really give Hikaru the time of day so it is not that surprising, and there were scenes that told us there was a surprise antagonist worming around, but he’s just not really that interesting. In terms of the trope, it’s small potatoes.

They actually reveal that he’s only mostly dead and on life support. This gives us time to bring in more eccentric weirdos, have Aki team up with her sister to take down the worm for good, deal with even more eccentric weirdos in the form of the school gang we barely met, and then get everybody together to raise Hikaru from the mostly-dead by pumping him full of transferred Arbitrium. Not sure how that fixes a gaping hole in the chest, but sure, fine, whatever. Fist takes One Winged Angel form, then just ditches it to possess and overwrite Jun at the moment he finishes the resurrection, leading to both Fist-Jun and Alma-Hikaru having crazy fire wings going for a final battle.

They have a punch battle that’s not quite as good as vs. Ordela, but that’s still at least trying. It makes the matter all about Fist’s grief regarding his original human partner, and though they kind of have to break him, they make it clear that “save” is the long term plan. The show then gives us a tail showing where everyone is in a bit, dealing with a new clown group of enemies while a group sets out to the Mecha-Ude world to restore the broken (except that worm, presumably) and there are lots of new details… but also a split between Hikaru and Alma, going their own ways as more complete people I guess. The end.

So, breaking down Mecha-Ude. This is the point where I turn around and reveal that I did have some pre-existing knowledge. It’s not much, though: I happened to sit in on a panel by the group that originally localized Mecha-Ude, Azuki. Looking it up there’s some confusion of whether the manga came first or the anime, but either way there is that material as well. I actually had a chance to snag the first print volume as a give-away item, but I decided on something else instead. Interestingly enough, the English print edition is published by Scholastic, a company that at least in my day was impossible to avoid while growing up bookish because of their direct-to-school book order system and massive library of things everybody and their brother read, like Animorphs.

That… actually explains a whole lot. While Scholastic does theoretically handle all grade levels, it’s pretty inarguable that they focus more of their effort on the late elementary through middle school sorts of reading levels, the ones bookish kids hit around second grade and less inclined ones stick with all the way through high school. That’s their wheelhouse, and they chose to pick up Mecha-Ude for their catalog.

I know technically anything I review that could be flagged “shonen” is technically for younger readers or viewers, but Japan typically has different media standards than the US, resulting in quite a few Shonen series that wouldn’t be considered kosher for minors stateside, and a separate but overlapping number that seem to be written with more intelligence and attention than most “young adult” material gets on this side of the Pacific. There are exceptions in the Western canon, but there’s also certainly a lean. That lean means that for something to end up on Scholastic’s list, it’s going to be a lot more like what Westerners think of as “Children’s” or “Young Adult” than the mean or median of Shonen.

So, with that out of the way, let me break down a few topics when it comes to Mecha-Ude.

Let’s talk about the art.

There’s a… very particular style to Mecha-ude. At some points it seems cheap and sloppy. For instance, characters often lose facial features at fairly close ranges, something I griped about quite a bit when reviewing I Want To Escape From Princess Lessons. Here, though, because there’s a more general style that’s pretty flat and a little sketch-like, relying on simple lines and colors and focusing on conveying movement, it seems like more part of a meaningful choice rather than just cheapness.

If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably done this way to emulate the style in the manga, but again I haven’t actually read that so I don’t know first-hand.

Let’s talk about the clowns.

This is a choice that, while a valid choice, is still a pain point for Mecha-Ude: the antagonists we deal with for most of our running time are the entire circus.

This is something that’s often done in media for the younger set. You make the bad guys bad, yes, but also exaggerated goofballs who are fun to watch and who, because they’re insane. Most kids are going to enjoy them rather than being scared of them like they would be of an antagonist with teeth, but few kids are going to admire or emulate them because, hey, they’re nuts and also failures. At best, they tend to be kind of pathetic. But more are about as sympathetic as they are effective, which makes for great comedy when they fail, since you don’t feel for them.

However, there is a tradeoff. If your antagonists have a very clown-like face, especially for a lot of your running time, you lose the ability to build menace and atmosphere. This isn’t important for every show. I’m going to start referencing some western Saturday Morning Cartoons, because I think most of my audience would be passingly familiar, but here goes.

In Wacky Races, Dick Dastardly is a clown. He might be the Ur-clown-villain of animation, or at least one of them alongside Wile E Coyote. You never feel sorry for him, you never “like” him, but his capering and eventual comeuppance are entertaining. But Wacky Races is an exercise in visual gags, it doesn’t even really need a villain.

Then we get something like The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. For the record that’s the more comedic and really less quality Sonic show that aired in the 90’s. It technically has a meta-plot. It needs an antagonist. And its antagonists, Robotnik and his creations (particularly Scratch and Grounder) are clowns. They’re not very threatening, they aren’t sympathetic, and their failures to stop the fastest thing alive are the grounds for a lot of the show’s comedy. The whole show though, is fast and surreal running and bouncing, with limited continuity. It’s not trying to tell an epic story or create an atmosphere with real weight to it. There’s not much if any emotional work done with the characters, there are no real arcs. It doesn’t need better.

But then you get something like the other Sonic show. Or to use a different example, Real Adventures of Johnny Quest. This is basically as close as a Western show is going to get to the tone and feel of your standard shonen adventure anime. Which is to say it has a different and more episodic setup that allows a strong appeal to status quo, in order to be more friendly to a syndicated format, but we’re globe-trotting, we’re saving the world, and we’re clashing with real antagonists who are menacing, and who even kill people. Most antagonists are one-hit wonders but even the recurring ones like Ezekiel Rage aren’t clowns the same way as these other shows, because the show needs a consistent tone that supports action set pieces with real stakes. They can still be theatrical, hammy, and fun to watch, but they aren’t clowns. There’s some real menace there.

The issue for Mecha-Ude is that it clearly wants to do some serious stuff that needs atmosphere and stakes… but it keeps sending in the clowns. Sure, we get some non-clown antagonists, like Aki’s possessed little sister or the finale villains, but the clowns keep turning up, even towards the endgame. They’re fun to watch, but they suck away the idea that our villain organization is competent. They even reduce what we feel for our heroes. There are some of what should be big, emotional moments for these characters, like Aki opening up to Hikaru or being faced with her fallen sister, or the break up and make up of Hikaru and Alma. But because so much of the groundwork for the characters is grounded in clowning around, both with antagonists who can’t hold up their side of the stakes and through screwball comedy around Alma’s status, these moments don’t feel as big or as strong as they could.

And yes, we have a surprise antagonist, but even he doesn’t manage to shoo out the clowns.

In short, Mecha-Ude’s self-aware decision to not allow its grunts to be legitimately threatening, instead making them colorful goofballs, ends up being at war with its more operatic notes. Onto the next topic.

Let’s talk about the fanservice.

Good talk.

Actually, you know what, I actually feel an essay on the topic coming on, so let me go ahead and drop a grade before getting back to this topic

So, for an actual grade, did I like Mecha-Ude? Eeh, kind of. Do I think Mecha-Ude would be good for either its intended audience or the cohort of Western anime fans? Sort of. Maybe. Would I recommend Mecha-Ude? I mean, there are recommendable parts to it, but deep down it really is just mostly harmless. I say a lot that any show, no matter how we’d like to deride it for being tired, could be somebody’s first introduction to the tropes and genre conventions that we’ve seen done a million times, and thus things need to be looked at with fresh eyes. When this is a property that Scholastic has a stake in, the odds of that being a real scenario go way up. This, or at least the manga, was very likely the first taste quite a few kids had of anything in the Shonen Action spectrum, or of Japanese media in general.

Still, I’m not going to say Mecha-Ude was really much better than standard anywhere along the line. It gave little offense, but also little meat. Maybe I’m just hungry and making food analogies because of it, but this one’s a chicken nugget of a show: heavily processed and not particularly good, but it does what it set out to do, and that demands a little bit of respect. That respect comes in the form of a C.

FINAL GRADE: C

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Now where was I?

Ah, yes. Fanservice.

Let’s get this out of the way first and foremost. If you’ve gotten the impression from this review and me using Aki’s thighs as a running joke that Mecha-Ude is “a fanservice anime” or any term like that, it’s really not.

The camera work admires Aki; when she’s badass, when she’s in peril, and sometimes just because. And though I think everyone is canonically attending middle school in this one, she’s drawn as a reasonably good-looking young woman. But that’s it. When I hear about “a fanservice anime”, it’s either going much harder than this, or at least integrating heavy focus on the assets into the bulk of the show. Or both, in the case of Rosario + Vampire and its similars. Mecha-Ude doesn’t indulge in boob grabs or awkward falls, nor does it go for panties, cleavage, fetishistic costumes, or more. It’s honestly pretty clean, just not overwhelmingly prudish.

And it would be fine if it went harder. There’s nothing wrong with being “a fanservice show”. You could aim that label at no few shows of quality and more that I’ve enjoyed or rated highly. It would be a different show, probably not one that would have its manga published by Scholastic, but it’s not like the overall quality would meaningfully change. You could probably call this unhinged, extemporaneous rant “In Defense of Fanservice” because that’s kind of the angle I’m taking. I like fanservice. It has a point. I don’t like it when unfit and awkward fanservice distracts from the quality of a story or tries to plaster over a show being garbage underneath, but those are rarer circumstances than a lot of people think.

Mecha-Ude, and the case of Aki and her thighs, is an example of passive and natural fanservice.

That is, here in Mecha-Ude we don’t manufacture circumstances or twist logic in order to create fanservice, and while I may comment on the camera’s admiration, most of the shots seem like… what the shots need to be.

Aki is just drawn pretty. In the pantheon of anime girls, probably not even exceptionally so. And I’m just going to come out and say it, but I think in general most folks would rather characters be pretty to look at than any sort of realistic average. Rage all you want about beauty standards, but at the end of the day it’s art we’re looking at, and art is always going to idealize what it has to work with because that’s what those who engage with art want to see.

And I know, she’s young. But she’s a drawing, not a real person. I’ve gone over this before but to me you can appreciate a drawing as a “drawing of a good-looking person” no mater what technical lore gets attached to it. I’m much more forgiving in general to the “Homunculus born yesterday but looks like an adult” or the perpetual “Schoolkid drawn to be attractive in an adult manner” (or in Aki’s case, just kinda good-looking) than the “Vampire loli is actually 500 years old.” Ya know, I find the latter to be more problematic. I’m not going to get too judgy at anyone for their taste in art, but if I was going to be bothered by one or the other it’d be by the one cleaving to canon against art rather than art over canon.

Changing track a little, the thigh shots. I know I made fun of this, because it’s a bit, but in general there’s a good reason: Aki’s Mecha-Ude partners are connected downstairs, so if the camera needs to focus on their faces when, say, they’re talking, it’s naturally going to include Aki’s thighs in the shot because that’s about the level they tend to hover at.

And you might say, this is a fiction, they didn’t need to be grafted onto her thighs. But, frankly, I don’t feel like fanservice would have been the deciding factor in putting them there compared to variety. In my first Aki screenshot, I included a caption about trying to kitbash her from mecha musume kits, and frankly the upper thigh mounting is… not totally uncommon as a place to put a connector. Actually…

Here’s a perfect example, a 30 Minute Sisters (Bandai Mecha Girl) kitbash that I put together. The colored rings on her upper arm, wrist, and upper thigh all have optional versions that feature 3mm connectors, in order to load on more mechanical gear. Hip connectors, and one or two back sockets are also pretty normal though preferences vary somewhat across product lines. And they’re not any more “fanservice-y” that way, I mean the default dress code is already a leotard or plugsuit arrangement because that’s what the aesthetic is. Hell, most kits that use the thigh connectors do so with armor gubbins that actually increase coverage, but I digress within my digression: this is done because it increases the visual variety to have options for designs that are more different than just pallet swaps or weapon exchanges.

Bringing things back to Mecha-Ude, if everybody only had shoulder or maybe back mounts, it would get pretty old. Adding more variance brings color to the setup, because even if you’ve got nothing else you can at least look forward to the next crazy design. And Aki’s design, with double (and thus symmetrical) partners, is pretty striking. She cuts a very different silhouette than other wielders, and the sudden emergence of her big metal battle arms at the faint rustle of a skirt creates a solid moment where danger can explode from her without worrying about any of her clothes taking damage. Like, would her busting her shirt every time be better? Didn’t think so. True, a lot of Mecha-Ude sort of snake out from underneath garments but Aki quick-draws quite a lot, something she can do freely because of the design that just also happens to lend itself to those shots I loved picking on.

I guess when you get down to it, and try to generalize it, there comes a bit of a question: What is fanservice? And another: Why does it matter?

To the first… it’s hard to produce an answer. It’s not just “anything that makes you feel jolly downstairs”. Gonna be honest, but for all that I’ve harped on her, Aki couldn’t conjure that kind of response, at least not from me. And yet I recognize some of her moments as fanservice. Why? Is it that they’re somehow hinting at something prurient, even though nothing prurient is happening and it’s not a prurient experience? Is it because there’s more attention than mere stagecraft would have produced? If so, that’s pretty broad, perhaps too broad just as the first supposition is too narrow.

And all of this ignores that the word “fanservice” has a lot of meanings and not all of them have to do with prurient matters. But let’s keep things focused on the fairly common variant that is fetching shots of lovely ladies. What is it doing?

Well, I think the name is apt, which is why I’m still using “fanservice” despite its arguable confusing alternate definitions rather than jumping on the bandwagon of the next neologism for content tangentially pertaining to the audience’s reproductive desires: it provides “service” (positive experiences that come alongside the desired content) to the “fans” (viewers). The aforementioned common subcategory is just one way of doing that, which has been unfortunately the target of certain controversy.

Which brings me to the question of what matters and why. Well, you could say that nothing in this crazy world really matters, but rather than going nihilist on you, I’m instead going to frame fanservice, whether natural and passive like in Mecha-Ude or even artificial and active like your stereotypical boob grab intro, as this: it’s a connection between the creator and the viewer, a moment where the creator says, “I have this thing that will make you a little happier, how about I give you some?” Like a significant other shifting a few extra fries onto your plate at the diner it’s a small gesture, and not so much the point, but it is still ultimately a kind gesture and should ultimately be welcomed as such.

And maybe you say that you are allergic to potatoes, so you don’t want any. It’s not like the creator knew that, it’s not like they could know that. I’ve never met the author of Mecha-Ude, heck despite going to cons where I could see somebody at a signing, my lack of ability to speak Japanese means I’ve never interacted one-on-one with a creator of any of the shows I’ve watched or manga I’ve read that I’ve brought to my blog.

They don’t know me and I don’t know them, so sometimes the fanservice fails to serve me. Leaving aside certain… extreme cases that go far beyond the normal pale and hit a whole lot of “nope”, though, I try to look at these things in the spirit that they are given, which is mostly pretty positive.

And I have complained, when I’ve felt that it was deployed at a bad time, or produced an artistic blemish. Perhaps I’ve even griped, once or twice, about particularly tired and bone-headed setups. But the more I think about it… the artistic blemish part is totally fair, if you’re feeling bad about a particular moment because it’s horribly distracting or badly deployed, that’s fair. But even the really tired stuff is, or at least was, a little like comforting junk food: even if it’s not good, it’s familiar and pleasing in some degree.

What it means to have some fanservice in your anime is that the creators were willing to pander, to give some love to the lowest common denominator. Not every show needs it, but even Shakespeare indulged in some ribald jokes or ye olde ultraviolence to fill the cheap seats. You can get weird about “objectification” all you want but it’s clear this is just another reflection of a primal element of the human animal. What it means to be a fanservice show is typically a self-awareness that you’re serving up that pandering as the main attraction.

To make a comparison, if your 11/10 masterpiece is a Michelin three-star experience that uses insane over the top artistry rather than traditional appeals, and a very solid show with some fanservice can be likened to a nice sitdown meal (maybe at a steakhouse or something) that happens to also include dessert, a fanservice anime is like your local ice cream parlor, serving up nothing but the sweet stuff and that by design. Is it as “good” as the three-star or the sit-down? No, but the creamery has its place too and it’s not right to knock it for not serving steak. Mecha-Ude, by the way, would in this analogy be a pretty basic order at a burger joint except with an ice cream shake because why not.

I think I may have let that get away from me a bit.

But even though I know that probably not a lot of members of the already small audience of this blog are going to stick around for a post-show ramble (Hi! Drop me a line somewhere if you’re here!), I’m going to go ahead and cut off the likely reply I see in my clairvoyance: Claiming that a broad swath of extant fanservice moments should be filed in the “blemish” category, or that fanservice of the type here being discussed is intrinsically unfit and distracting, that it somehow always diminishes the work its in.

Here’s the issue. If you go out into the world, and you meet a jerk at some point during your day, that’s the jerk’s bad, so to speak. If you go out and everybody you interact with the whole day is someone you see as a jerk, that’s become your problem rather than theirs. So is it with these complaints. If it’s bugging you sometimes I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe it’s the show’s problem. If it’s bugging you literally every time, your barometer for this kind of matter is broken. When you think about it, this is similar to why I always want to give shows a chance, even when I know they’re in a spectrum that doesn’t have the best batting average with me like Isekai or Video Game Mechanics Fantasy. I want to try to look at something clearly enough to at least be as sure as I can that I’m finding the problems rather than just bringing them with me.

And I know somebody who is hard-line against fanservice isn’t likely going to be swayed by that. I’m just another jerk for the pile in that case. But if that’s not you, the next time a character has an unlikely fall with an improbably soft landing or something of that sort… remember to smile, because it means that the creator likes you and wants you to be happy.