#gs thoughts

Something that I think is a pretty big element of Michiko to Hatchin is what I might call “underwhelming outcomes.” A lot of anime and manga have really big plots with really high stakes filled with really important people and really important victories and so on and so forth. The stakes are high, the bonds between characters are deep, everyone has a deeply compelling reason for everything they do, everything is connected, etc. etc. 

But Michiko to Hatchin isn’t like that at all. (And again, major spoilers here.) Who did Hashiro, Hatchin’s dad, turn out to be? Some unreliable guy who didn’t have a good reason for leaving his daughter and didn’t want to be with her after she found him. That’s all there was to him. How did the big scary bad guy of the show get defeated? Some nobodies shot him in a back alley. What happened in the epilogue? Hatchin had a kid with some no-name guy who wasn’t in the picture. 

And while it took me a while, I grew to appreciate that about the show. Nothing about what I listed above is gratifying, triumphant, or particularly inspiring. Nothing was a part of some bigger picture and nothing really happened for a reason. But it is realistic. And I really appreciate it when stories take something real and present it as something that can still be meaningful to us. I can’t relate to Gon from HxH fighting to defeat a bad guy even after his entire hand has been blown off and he’s had 8 concussions. That’s never going to happen to me or you or almost anyone. But how many people have a dad that isn’t there, and isn’t there for any reason other than because he didn’t want to be? Lots of people, myself included. And it’s nice to have stories where things don’t happen for a reason, and things don’t work out in some big dramatic way that makes for a happily ever after, because it’s real and helps to give recognition to real people and tells them that they can keep moving forward in life and that they still have meaning even if there’s no bigger picture that they’re a part of. 

Your welcome! (And sorry to other folks who’ve sent asks that I haven’t answered yet, but sometimes it’s easier for me to think of how to answer some questions than others and again time and energy are very limited resources for me these days) (And here’s the link to the preceding ask on my thought for what constitutes a sympathetic villain, how Scar is one, and how Wilson Fisk is not) 

And let’s see here. If I had to think of some more well-done examples of sympathetic villains… 

Meruem from HxH: amazing example. As someone not human, born not just socially, but biologically, to be king with the massive power to back it up and no reference point for what it meant to care or have feelings for others. And yet, he met someone who could best him in one thing, one simple thing, and slowly fell in love with her and through her uncovered the humanity no one thought he had. (Not to mention, he was manipulated by Pouf who tried to stamp out the love he had learned to feel and set him back on the path of a heartless conqueror, so we can also feel sympathy for his character on that front as well) 

Tetsuo Shima from Akira: this is possibly a more (lowkey) controversial choice. Because yeah, he’s a 15-year old asshole who got psychic powers and became an even bigger asshole. But I feel like he’s an incredibly understandable character precisely because of that. To me, he’s an exploration of the effects that insecurity, powerlessness, poverty, and environmental instability can have on kids. Take a kid who feels miserable and doubts himself and isn’t supported by the society around him who wants desperately to be respected and in control and give him power… He couldn’t control his powers well, they caused him massive pain and made him fear what they would do to his mind and body. He could control through fear but he couldn’t control himself and that pain and uncertainty and fear never left him. One of the elements of a good sympathetic villain to me is that their choices make sense. And Tetsuo is a character whose choices were almost all bad, but IMO make sense from the sad, angry perspective of the view he had and the world around him. (Long ago I made a cool graphic about him) 

Jasper from SU: now here’s an actual potentially controversial choice. Steering clear of the whole Malachite discourse and just focusing more broadly on her character, she was a huge jerk who beat the snot out of people and seemed to relish in it. She was the biggest villain in SU for a good long while, and there was little reason to think of her as sympathetic. That is, until we found out that the reason she hated the Earth and the Crystal Gems and was so fixated on strength is because thousands of years ago the Crystal Gems murdered the person she most loved and adored and the person she was literally created to serve. Then we start being able to see how her villainous beliefs and actions were shaped by the culture and society of the Diamond Authority that doesn’t give it’s members much in the way of choice or freedom. And then we also find out that the person who Jasper’s very existence was for had faked her own death and everything Jasper believed for the past 5000 years was a lie. Again, she’s a villain whose horribleness can be seen as a result of the circumstances around her, and we can see that if she had been told the truth and given different opportunities she perhaps could have been someone good instead of eventually devolving into a literal monster. 

Eric Killmonger from Black Panther: he was someone who fought for a cause he believed him, and that was righteous and justified in his eyes. He grew up in poverty, his father was murdered, and he lived his life on the outside of a great society of wealth and equality, always aware of what they had but wouldn’t share with him or others who were also suffering. He looked at the imperialist, racist, oppressive actions of the world and thought, “Wakanda’s neutrality is acceptance of injustice. If the nation of my birth has the ability to reshape the world, punish the injustice of nations and societies, and give power to our oppressed people, we should do it.” T'challa’s view was that you can’t hurt and kill innocent people in the name of justice. Killmonger’s view was that harm, death, and suffering were constantly happening anyway, and that T’challa’s stance was accepting and tacitly endorsing this injustice. Again, his villainy came from a place of understandable suffering and genuine belief that fighting fire with fire was better than standing on the sidelines and simply watching the fire burn. 

And two final characters: 

Donquixote Doflamingo from One Piece gets an honorable mention. He could have been an amazing sympathetic villain, but for some reason Oda took a character who was born into a culture of ignorance, corruption, and greed, who lost everything and was tortured by angry mobs who blamed him for sins he hadn’t committed, who was then raised by a group of older boys and men who again groomed him and lead him down a road of villainy…. and then said, “Hey, this guy? Doflamingo? He was just born evil. Yeah, that’s it. He was born evil. So don’t worry so much about all the environmental stuff, because he was born evil anyway. Even his brother said so.” (Again, here’s a graphic and analysis I did on the subject for those who have forgotten) 

Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke. (I also wrote a big post about her and the overall movie and how great it is.) She isn’t a sympathetic villain. Not really. She is both ends of the moral spectrum simultaneously in every move she makes. She was a monster, a destroyer of gods, an environmentalist’s nightmare who burned nature in the name of industry. She was also a savior, a humanitarian, a veritable saint who took in the sick and the downtrodden of society and gave them respect, empowerment, and a home they were happy in. And all the while… we never actually know what she’s thinking. One could argue that she’s still a villain (rather than simply an antagonist), but the key point here is that she is not sympathetic. Does she help others because she cares, or because through helping them she ultimately benefits herself? We don’t know for sure. The story does not invite us into her internal world. She’s not a sympathetic villain because we’re never asked to sympathize with her. Instead, we’re asked to think of bigger ideas. We’re asked to take a look at the ways human society can benefit itself, advance equality, and lift up the powerless by using and destroying the natural world around us. Is it worth it? What are the unintended consequences of these actions? Can humans harm nature without inevitably also hurting ourselves? Lady Eboshi’s thoughts and feelings and true motivations don’t matter. We don’t know, and we can’t know, and at the end of the day does it matter either way? Even if she was calculated and selfish it wouldn’t change that she’s helping people, and even if she was motivated by love and compassion it also wouldn’t change the harm she’s done. She’s a representation of ideas, forces, and choices larger than herself. Those ideas are what’s important to the film, and they are explored without ever diving into the mind of Lady Eboshi herself because what the thinks and feels has no bearing on the consequences of her actions. 

A villain is someone who hurts others who do not deserve to be hurt. A person is sympathetic when we feel for them. Villainy is external. That person harms others, so we hate them. Sympathy is internal. We feel another’s pain, and understand the reasons for their choices, which includes the possibility that they never even had a choice at all. Lady Eboshi is so interesting to me because she is completely external. We are tasked with viewing and judging her based entirely on the consequences of her actions without factoring in what she thinks, what she feels, and why she’s doing it. We don’t have sympathy for her, rather we have sympathy for the people she helps regardless of whether Lady Eboshi is doing it out of kindness or doing it to benefit herself. 

It’s odd that I spent the most time in this ask about sympathetic villains talking about someone who I think isn’t one, but I think that it’s both helpful and interesting to dive into how a character can completely subvert and dodge the label of a sympathetic villain while still fully capturing their contradictory essence. We hate and condemn the actions of sympathetic villains while also understanding them, respecting the “why” behind what they do, and potentially even loving them. With Lady Eboshi, we’re not supposed to care about the why. We’re not supposed to care about her. While I do love her, that’s not the part that matters. Instead, that same contradictory dynamic takes the form of the audience loving who she she helps while also loving who/what she hurts in the process. The thing’s we’re supposed to care about are entirely outside her. 

Anonymous said to grass-skirt:

What do you look differently now about BNHA? and what other series makes you feel that way, makes u gag

I’m grouping these two asks together because the answers to them overlap. When it comes to “is Berserk worth it?” well, that’s not really a question I can answer. I don’t know if this is one of the Berserk posts of mine that read, but a few months ago I got asked if Berserk can still be considered a masterpiece (here). My answer to that was that there is no real answer to that. It just depends on your own priorities, how you feel about certain things, and how you as an individual feel when there are significant parts of a story you really enjoy that disappoint you or do things you disagree with. 

This leads into that question about BNHA and other series that have made me gag. Included are some links that explain my issues with them in more detail

BNHA - really disappointing treatment of female characters and a really gross and disappointing arc about redeeming a violently abusive father/husband (X, X, X, X, X, X) 

Fairy Tail - overtly gross treatment of female characters for fanservice along with really creepy treatment of a little girl (X, X)

One Piece - I’ve written enough on this topic to fill an entire encyclopedia. Whether it’s really shitty treatment of Rebecca or S*nji being gross or the transphobia, etc. etc. (X, X, X, X, X) (I could give you 5 million more links, but I’ll leave it there) 

 Ancient Magus Bride - the entire premise is incredibly skeezy and I wound up dropping it pretty bitterly (X) 

Ran and the Gray World - Gorgeous and very interesting manga with a massive blemish in the form of a super creep who gets obsessed with the main character of the manga–who is 10 (X) 

Air Gear - I knew there was non-stop fanservice in it when I read it in early high school, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I took another look at it and felt repulsed enough by it’s cause use of rape in the opening chapter that I couldn’t make it to chapter 2 even (X) 

So, there are 6 examples of manga that I have serious issues with. 2 of them i dropped hard out of disgust, 2 of them I read through to completion, and 2 of them I’m still reading. I also still read the new chapters of Berserk when they come out once each year. Clearly, just because I think a piece of media has major issues in it doesn’t mean that I won’t read/watch it or think that other people should never read/watch it either. However, sometimes I do just put the thing down and go “Yeah I want nothing to do with this ever and honestly I’m going to be wary of or disappointed by people who love it.” It just depends. 

To start off, Berserk came out in 1989. The thing is 29 years old at this point, and times have changed. There’s been more discussion in recent times about how sitcoms from the 90s, like Friends, haven’t aged well because more and more people are looking back on them and going “Jeez that sure was sexist, stalkerish, homophobic, or whatever else.” There is still a lot of media out there and a lot of problems with a massive amount of it, but things still feel different now.

There has always been progressive media, because progress is a relative term. Star Trek aired the first interracial kiss on American TV back in 1968. The first same-sex kiss on TV didn’t happen until 1991 in L.A. Law. The first time a same sex kiss happened in something from Disney was in 2017 in Star vs the Forces of Evil (between some background characters). That is to say, I don’t actually know how different things are now from how they used to be. Things are very different in an absolute sense, but are they different in a relative sense? I don’t know. Is the portion of progressive media being created at the moment greater than it’s ever been before? Are we progressing faster than we have in the past? I’d like to think we are, but I have no idea.

Alright, let’s get back to Berserk. It definitely deserves criticism for how it treats the women in it. I don’t think that should be up for debate (some people want it to be, I’m sure, but I don’t care about the opinions of people who want to defend it). What is up for debate is what kind of impact that issue should have on how we view the work as a whole. And I’m a little conflicted about that, and there’s no simple answer. It depends on what kind of view you take of media. Do you take a holistic approach that tries to assess quality by viewing it in it’s entirety, or do you take a building-blocks style approach and view media as a something that can be broken apart into distinct elements that don’t necessarily influence each other?

In the building-blocks style approach, you can argue that the gratuitous sexual violence in Berserk is a problem in the area of how progressive it is, but that the issue is distinct and different from the quality of its writing and character development and art--Berserk is still a masterpiece even if it isn’t progressive. In the holistic view things are more interconnected than that. How women are treated and how sexual violence is depicted do have a bearing on the overall experience readers have with it so of course it influences whether or not its a masterpiece. People don’t just do one of these--we do both. I spent a long time being very vocal about how many issues I had with One Piece’s treatment of women while simultaneously arguing that it was still phenomenal despite it... until I couldn’t anymore, and the series stopped being something I could invest that kind of interest and passion in.

I don’t think there’s a single answer to your question because the very premise of it is unstable. Lets take Robinson Crusoe. It’s okay if you don’t know it--it’s just some 300 year old book about a guy who gets stranded on an island. It’s amazing that it’s stuck around for so long, and I had to read it for AP English in high school. Clearly my teacher (who I had a lot of respect for) thought it was a book with significance and merit. I thought it sucked and constantly struggled to stay awake while reading it. So is it a masterpiece or isn’t it? That depends on a lot of things. Whose opinions matter more? Those of English teachers or those of the students? The kids I went to school with are old enough to be teachers now. If we still think it sucks, does that invalidate the opinions of those who taught us? Are we only still reading it in school because of it’s historical significance, and not its literary quality? When we look at works like this, do we say, “We need to respect this as the masterpiece it was for the time at which it was written,” or do you say, “Sure, it was one of the first pieces of realistic fiction in the English language, but that doesn’t make it good--especially not by present day standards”?

And when it comes to something like Berserk, how you view it depends a lot on what your priorities are. The people who don’t care about how much sexual assault there is in Berserk are going to view the series differently than the people who do care. I think what’s different these days is that we’re losing the idea of consensus. Or at the very least, I am. Consensus doesn’t feel like it exists in the same way it used to. There have always been divisions in every culture, and the bigger it is the more room there are for differences to exist. In the 21st century, we’re able to critique things faster, more publicly, and more directly, and more harshly than ever before. Maybe in the past, maybe back in the year 2000 even, I would have tried to answer this question from the perspective of, “What is the average opinion of Berserk? What is the hypothetical consensus on it?” But I don’t know if that works anymore. I’m too keenly aware of how wildly different the various people who read it are to try to consolidate all of our opinions into one because there is inherently no way you can do that while continuing to accurately represent them all. It’s like with the She-ra reboot. People like me love it, and creeps who are mad about the characters not being sexy to them and review bomb it on Rotten Tomatoes clearly hate it. There isn’t just one consensus--there are multiple, wildly different ones. There can’t be one consensus anymore, and instead any consensus people express is inherently framed within who is saying it.  

It’s been a while since this subject reared its head. Last time I think I talked about it was Here, along with a few follow up asks. But those were centered around minors, specifically. A 19 year old isn’t a minor. There’s nothing illegal about it, but it’s still super sleezy on the part of the 30 year old. One of the things I hit on a lot in that post I linked to was how adults who pursue relationships with minors do it because they want control over the other person. 

“Young women’s lack of experience, maturity, education, and money allows them to be readily manipulated. Adult men who pursue underage girls, or girls who have barely reached adulthood and still can’t do things like support herself, don’t just do it because they want a physically young girl. They want someone who they will have more influence and power over than a woman their own age.“

While it’s not as drastic of an imbalance as someone who is a minor who hasn’t graduated high school even, a 19 year old is still going to be very different from a 30 year old. Education, money, resources, maturity, experience, and more are all things that a 19 year old is going to lack compared to a 30 year old, and it’s going to inherently skew the dynamics of that relationship. Heck, our brains aren’t even done developing until we’re 25 and as a result 19 year olds still are more impulsive, take greater risks, and don’t plan or think critically as well as they will by the time they’re 25. 

30 year olds know this. While it’s not illegal at all, as a 26 year old I’d look at any 30 (or even 26) year old who is dating or trying to date a 19 year old as a major creep who should not be trusted. Even if they haven’t actually thought at all about how sketchy and sleezy these dynamics are (which also reflects very poorly on them), a 30 year old trying to date a 19 year old absolutely does not want to be in a relationship with someone who is their equal, and is instead looking at people who are barely done with being minors--people who are legal to be involved with, but who are still years away from establishing themselves as full adults. 19 year olds are just not the equals of people who are 30. Whether they are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether or not they would admit to that being part of their motivations, these are still inherent dynamics of this kind of relationship. So no matter what the 30 year old says it’s going to be sleezy and sketchy and creepy and run a high risk of being or turning into something manipulative. 

However, I’m unfortunately not surprised to have eventually run across someone calling her “a miserable cunt” and a “shitty little shit bag” who is “demoralizing [Link] into oblivion” with over 100 people liking/reblogging their post. 

There are a couple of things to say in response to this. For starts, Jesus christ calm down. It’s wild to me how ready people are to hate characters for almost anything (and it overwhelmingly happens with female characters--jeez I wonder why). And second, did we even play the same game? Because you know what the WORST we ever saw Zelda acting towards Link was? 

That’s... that’s it. She told him she didn’t need an escort and shouted at him to stop following her. And this wasn’t just the worst that Zelda ever acted towards Link. It was also the ONLY time we saw her shouting at him or being mean to him. Was it rude/crummy/something Link didn’t deserve? Totally. Was it her being ~a miserable shitty little shit bag cunt that fucking destroyed Link’s sense of self worth~? Hell no. How the hell do you extrapolate THAT MUCH out of such a small scene? 

Just to help paint a larger, and more negative picture of Zelda, let’s talk about another memory. In the first memory, which was of Zelda preforming the ceremony to appoint Link as her knight, Zelda was acting very clearly depressed during the whole thing. That would have conveyed to Link how unhappy Zelda was with him being her knight, which would have surely made Link feel shitty. So there, that’s something else people who hate this Zelda can point to. But you know what? If you want to analyze things like this, Link also made Zelda feel shitty. Oh, sure, we all know that Link made Zelda feel shitty because of her own insecurities about being a failure of a royal princess while Link had successfully become the master of the Master Sword. But Link’s own behavior also made Zelda feel shitty. We saw in the third memory that Zelda would try to talk normally with Link. Talking casually and cheerfully about making adjustments to one of the Divine Beasts because that’s what she was passionate about! But Link... would never say anything back in response. He was silent. He was her appointed knight, but he wouldn’t even talk to her when she tried to talk to him. In fact, at that point Link had NEVER spoken to Zelda, as she expressed in her diary 

Imagine if their situations were reversed, and we saw Link talking to Zelda and Zelda refusing to respond to him and just staring at him with a blank expression--and then Link wrote in his diary about how stressful that was for him and how it made him feel like she thought he was a failure and hated him. The people who hate BotW Zelda would be jumping on that as an example of what a bitch Zelda was to Link. Even though when Link did it to Zelda, there’s no problem whatsoever apparently. Link was just a smol little precious angel that was cowering beneath Zelda’s “toxic belittling and dominance,” as one person described it. 

(And real quick... you know who was ACTUALLY “belittling” and “demoralizing” Link? Fucking Revali. You know, the guy who would walk right up to Link and go on a giant, passive aggressive and mockery-filled rant at Link about how he’s better than Link and Link doesn’t deserve the expectations that others have of him. I still think Revali is a solid character because it’s good to have a diverse cast with varied personalities and different relationship dynamics with each other. But for crying out loud, how is anyone going to hate on Zelda for how she acted towards Link early on when Revali was there being a straight up dick with 0 tragic character motivation behind him to make us sympathetic to why he acted like such a wad?) 

Of course I don’t believe that Link deserves any hate for being silent around Zelda for so long. Just like how I don’t believe that Zelda deserves any hate for the way she acted towards and felt about Link in the early memories. They were two youths who had the weight of the world placed upon their shoulders. Link’s ability to express himself was crushed by the weight of the expectations and judging eyes of everyone around him. Zelda lost her mother, was denied expressions of love from her father, was terrified that she was a failure who would doom the world to destruction because of her inability to access her powers, and was was stuck with a successful, brilliant knight who she assumed hated her and had no way of being told otherwise because HE WOULDN’T EVEN TALK TO HER. 

But despite all that the two became close. Link saved Zelda’s life. Zelda reevaluated how she thought of him and even apologized for her past behavior 

Zelda made an effort and kept talking to him, trying to get him to open up to her. And eventually he did, and she was able to learn the reason why he wouldn’t talk to her, or anyone, in the past. They traveled together. She examined his wounds after battle. They went out to collect specimens in the fields together. Zelda tried to get Link to lick a frog in the name of science. Link taught Zelda how to bond with her horse. They saw their home fall to Calamity Ganon and learned of the deaths of their family and friends. Their world collapsed. They fled. They defended each others’ lives, each saving the other. Zelda spent 100 years suffering alone to contain the abomination that destroyed their land while Link recovered from the injuries he gained protecting her. They fought together again. They freed Hyrule from 100 years of darkness and set out once again to rebuild their kingdom together. 

But yeah. Zelda was such a cunt, right? 

I mean, you can’t please everyone. That’s just to be expected. People are different. People have different attitudes and values, and like and enjoy different things, so there’s no piece of media that everyone will have the same thoughts and feelings on. It’s like how on the Nintendo eShop, BotW for the Wii U has 4719 five star reviews... and 21 one star reviews. You can’t please everyone. But again, jesus christ some people are just ready to violently hate Zelda for having extremely well developed character flaws and a rocky start to her relationship with Link that was the result of both of their individual issues clashing and preventing them from connecting and understanding each other even though they both felt nearly the exact same way. And even if you want to insist that everything bad about their early relationship was 100% Zelda’s fault alone, I wonder how Zelda could possibly make up for it... maybe putting in the effort to develop a very positive relationship with Link, saving his life just as he had saved hers, and spending 100 years in Ganon Jail would be enough to make up for it? 

The premise is decent enough for me. I like superhero stuff in general, so a story about a young woman who is struggling to do her best as a C-list superhero sounds like a story I would read. And the tagline for the comic also frames the comic as something that has potential, but is also something incredibly difficult to actually pull off right 

I’m here for ~sexy~ stuff, so long as it’s done in the right way and not, you know, all about teenage girls being molested and other stellar things like that. But the tagline indicates more than that, as does the title itself. It implies that the comic isn’t only sexy and funny, but that there are times when all the humor and sexiness is ripped away and the comic addresses serious themes and issues, which, given the subject matter the comic claims to be about, would include addressing issues central to women and they way they’re treated.

That sounds great, but execution is everything, and I really don’t have the confidence in the comic and its author to pull it off. Why? (And it’s not just because it’s a male author writing something called “Empowered” about a woman, which is already a red flag.) I don’t have confidence because all I did prior to writing this post was open up the website and this was what I was greeted with 

This falls directly under the blanket of “stellar things” that make something meant to be “sexy” be gross instead. Fanservice that occurs via women being forced against their will into poses and situations is always going to be gross. At best the audience is supposed to simply ignore the woman’s distress and lack of control over what is being done to/with her body and find what’s happening sexy anyway, and at worst these things are meant to be part of what’s meant to be making it sexy in the first place. No matter what, it’s bad. 

So this is a comic with a female lead whose enemies fight her by shoving ball gags in her mouth, who is drawn with her nipples protruding out of her costume, whose already sexually revealing costume is also prone to falling apart and leaving her vulnerable and varying degrees of naked... With all that bullshit going on, either the comic is done in a way that makes it a constant, severe criticism of all its readers who would get turned on by what’s happening, or it’s a comic that only has occasional pit stops of [except when it isn’t] before going right back to having its heroine ball gagged for the enjoyment those who want to see women getting forcibly ball gagged. 

Because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have a situation of “Let’s force this woman into distressing and objectifying situations that make her feel like shit and take away her dignity and agency,” and then treat it as both something for dudes to jack off to and something meant to ultimately foster greater respect for and better treatment of women. Those things are mutually exclusive. So, which part of the premise of the comic is the part that’s fake and shallow and not really there at all? It is the ~sexy~ comedy part, or the “empowered” part? Because you can’t ask your audience to jack off to a woman’s suffering and then expect them to respect and empathize with her and the same time. Again, those are mutually exclusive things. If you’re doing one you aren’t doing the other. 

(follow up to this ask from last night about Fujiko Mine) 

I feel like there’s a little bit more to be said about the subject than just that. The first thing that came to mind is that just because something has a female main character doesn’t mean that it’s made for women. For example, Fairy Tail. Now, a lot of people wouldn’t count FT because they would say that Natsuo is the main character, not Lucy. Nonetheless, Lucy is the one we’re first introduced to. The story is presented, in the beginning at least, as her story. She’s the one we follow around on the street, we meet and see the guild of Fairy Tail through her eyes, and she’s the one with an actual goal/dream at the start of the story. In more ways than not, it’s Lucy that is framed as the protagonist of Fairy Tail at the start of the series. 

However, like some random guy I just found a comment by said, “Everyone knows Lucy just there for the fanservice.” Is that true? Obviously not 100%, but fanservice is absolutely inseparable from not only Lucy, but from almost the entirety of FT’s female cast. And that’s the point I’m trying to get at here. In series like these, it’s not so much that they created a story centered around a female character and then thought “Well, we should also add in some fanservice because that’ll help it sell.” Rather, in series like this, the fanservice is the often a main point of having the female characters in the first place. It’s a rather etymological matter. The thought process isn’t “Well, I’ve got this female character her so I might as well do some fanservice with her.” Rather, the fanservice is a fundamental part of having the female character be there in the first place. The fanservice isn’t an afterthought that is added later, but is rather a core, essential part of the reason for her creation and inclusion from the very beginning. It’s not, “Oh, this girl I made is sexy so I might as well do some fanservice with her.” It’s, “I’m making this girl to be sexy so I can do fanservice with her.” 

If a creator is thinking to themself, “I want to write a story about a woman that will speak to and connect with women,” they’re not going to also think “AND I SHOULD GIVE HER BIG OL’ TIDDIES AND HAVE HER GET MOLESTED A LOT TOO WHILE I’M AT IT. YOU KNOW, FOR THE SALES.” Rather, for stories that fit that kind of description, the focus and concern was never on a female audience. It was on a male one the whole time. (Though sometimes that focus may be more subconscious than deliberate. After all, this is a massive subject that takes on a lot of different forms and is present in a variety of media in an infinite amount different ways and degrees.)