Stardate 20030805.1605

(Captain's log): A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a term I had encountered while browsing the web. Fan service is a term used by fans of Japanese animation to refer to places where they toss in gratuitous T&A, or gratuitous views of women's panties, or other kinds of gratuitous peekaboos both male and female characters solely to satisfy the adolescent in all of us.

I have been looking at a lot of web sites about anime. I have also received a lot of mail from readers who are fans of the form, who have made recommendations. I finally ended up going over to Fry's to see what they had; I took a list of candidates, and bought what I could locate there. I also bought a couple of disks by mail order, and bought more during a couple of visits to a local video store. I tell you, it's like trying to stop eating salted peanuts. This could really get out of hand. I thought I'd write about some of the things I've watched so far. (Experienced otaku may now laugh at my naïveté.) I'll try to avoid spoilers but some may creep in.

Many of these are series, issued on multiple DVD. A lot of them were originally made to be broadcast on Japanese TV, but some of them were made to be issued directly on video. Often they were 30 minute (e.g. 24 minute) episodes, and the DVDs will hold several of them. They almost always have additional special material, though sometimes there just enough so that they can claim it's there, while in other cases it's quite extensive.

We may as well start at the bottom and go upwards from there.

Strange Love: Boy, did this stink. Ye gods. There are two episodes on a single disk, which is all that were made, and there is nothing whatever worth recommending about it. Even the extensive fan service was terrible. I spotted it at the video store and bought it on a whim without consulting the review sites first. Now I've learned my lesson and won't do that again. A total waste of money.

Plastic Little: After having written about fan service, I confess to having been curious about the concept. I didn't really know what to expect, and wanted to see a few of the more notorious examples of it. I really wanted to pick up Agent Aika but Fry's didn't have it. But they did have this one, which was an earlier project by the same animator, and it was also listed in the reviews as having a lot of fan service.

It wasn't at all bad, actually. The fan service is good and it's very gratuitous, but it only really happens a couple of times, and doesn't really gum up the works. The story and characters are contrived and some of the character motivations approached the incomprehensible when I watched it. And yet, with all that, I really did enjoy watching it. It took me a while to realize that the character motivations I found most deeply puzzling, the unreasonable loyalty of the ship's crew for the girl who was their captain, actually did make sense to the Japanese. The previous ship's captain had been killed somehow, so his teenage daughter became the new captain. The other members of the crew are totally loyal to her and several of them at different times say they'd even die for her. Which is silly given what kind of ship it was and what kind of things they were doing, but isn't silly if one thinks of this rather as a daimyo and samurai retainers.

It's a fun film. The art is good, and the two girls who figure most strongly in the fan service are both babes, and there's a strongly implied but never explicitly shown lesbian attraction, at least by one of them. I wouldn't recommend buying it, but it's probably not bad to rent. You could do worse.

Agent Aika: The more I looked around, and the more people I talked to about it, including a couple who'd actually seen it, the more curious I became. Last time I actually posted some pictures from the series I'd found on the web which showed the apparent obsession with panties shots for the series. So I ended up ordering both DVDs by mail order.

When people talk about the panties shots in the series, they sure weren't kidding. The thing is packed with them. I can well believe that the director tried to put as many in it as he possibly could, and for those who might be more familiar with anime I can see how they'd end up being really distracting after a while. But what actually happened for me was that it became part of the ambience of the series; it was just part of the basic series concept, just as the characters and motives were.

Disregarding any value it might have as a source of cheap thrills, as a series it was middle of the road. It wasn't horrible but it also didn't really stand out. The villain in the first four episodes was truly creepy, but he was an example of a villain who's creepy because he's a villain and villains are supposed to be creepy. There's an attempt to try to explain his motive for being the umpteenth in a long line to try to destroy the world but it's not very convincing. On the other hand, the creepiness is very real. (Brrr...)

Anyway, he dies at the end of the fourth episode and I think that was originally where they had expected to finish the series, but they ended up doing three more of them. Where the first four episodes are part of a single story arc, the last three episodes all stand alone, and there's much less suspense or tension. I can't say I would really recom