Yuribou Guide to Fan Service for Animators Found on Ixthedamned Tim Woo Reposted Without Permission
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Yuribou Guide to Fan Service For Animators Found on http://www.yuribou.net/blog/ ixthedamned Tim Woo Reposted without permission and incomplete at time of compilation. | The Reverse Breast Grab (or RBG) - One of the advanced manoeuvres that can make or break a seasoned fanservice animator’s career. Hello young animator! You’ve fought through the ranks of artist wannabes and failed otaku sycophants and have finally won your way into the midst of greatness. But the first thing to decide - what type of anime would you like to make? Fanservice did I hear you say? You choose to walk the thin pink g-string between gratuitous service and softcore pornography? Good choice! Then you’ve come to the right place! Welcome to the Guide to fanservice animation (a Yuribou production). Anyone can draw a cheap pantie shot, but how can you make it appeal to the masses who just shrug this off as just an everyday phenomenon? How do you make your moe super-moe? What differentiates a boring glasses girl from desirable meganekko? When is it appropriate to insert token yuri? And most importantly, how can you make an anime that Yuribou will watch? Granted that last one isn’t too difficult. We begin with an introduction to the genre with some salient examples of the qualities present in great and classic fanservice productions to date. There are four things that are the most important in fanservice - • First and foremost - art quality • Character (both designs and character) • Situations - a good mix of cheap and well planned • Overall storyline and character interactions Art quality is obviously the most important thing in fanservice. It is always refreshing to see a well thought out scene of fanservice with good art, but then equally an anime with great art and character designs will usually succeed at delivering good fanservice. | Girl’s Bravo - excellent art and characters. Gotta love the gravity defiance ^_^;; Case in point - Girls Bravo. Especially in the second season, this anime had surprisingly good character art (although not too surprising, since the manga was rather beautifully drawn anyway) and apart from a few minor things (Kirie’s gravity defying oppai being one of them at times ^_^) was a fantastic fanservice series. Not to mention that the storyline and characters were also memorable. As a side point, another thing that elevates fanservice scenes is the variability of underwear. I’m sure your audience aren’t the only ones tired of the same old “white cotton pantie shot”. Go on, go wild! Do something with stripes and strings, they’ll appreciate it! Coming a very close second, characters are extremely important in fanservice. Perhaps not to the hardcore fanservice/moe otaku, but to the general anime fan who is not averse to a bit of fanservice, having an interesting character to follow the story of elevates any fanservice scenes that that character then gets. Citing earlier on, it is important that you draw a very careful line between fanservice and softcore pornography, since although very close in theory, in actuality they have very different audience implications. Lacking characters with any kind of depth or backstory will most likely devalue fanservice to the level of late night cable preview territory. Fanservice associated with a memorable character is a bit of fun. Fanservice for no reason is difficult to take as a bit of fun. If you want to go all out Green green : Erolutions, then by all means, but beware that there are some things that even hardened fanservice fans will not watch. | Breasts, Brains and erm…Bonus yuri - fantastic combination… Case in point: He is my Master - In addition to having great situational fanservice (which we’ll get to in the next point), it demonstrates great characters - with the strong willed (and large chested) Izumi challenging the borders of the tsundere stereotype, the mischievious loli sister Mitsuki and the born again lesbian Anna lending context to fanservice and making this anime very watchable indeed. Situations is something that we’ll come on to in later parts of the guide, but in reality, there are only a finite number of situations in which fanservice may occur. these include such crude scenes as the skirt/wind flip + panty shot through to yuri-snoggage, onsen scenes and behind breast grabs. It is the duty of the animator and the storyboard artists to make sure that these stereotypical and predictable scenes don’t become boring by adding some spice to set them apart from the rest. | Magipoka - catering for futanari fans since 2006 Case in point - Renkin 3-kyuu Magical Pokaa~n - The onsen scene later on in the series definitely had something that put it apart from the rest. I’ll leave it to your long term memories/imagination to work out what I’m talking about ^_^ And lastly something that is perhaps not the animator’s responsibility, and relates back to my second point about character depth. The plot of a fanservice anime has similar implications in terms of how the overall feel of the finished product comes across. An animation with a strong overall storyline will buoy up mediocre quality fanservice whereas even good fanservice will not shine when plots are absent. | Koikoi 7 - I laughed. Only once, but I did laugh. It’s gotta have a redeeming feature ^_^ Cases in point - Koikoi 7 - episode 1 had a great fanservice scene in which the protagonist is being shown around the school and on their way through visiting the various facilities they happen across two girls doing the ditty in the nurses office but shrug it off as just a matter of course. Unfortunately, the overall storyline is so weak that the anime is pretty much unwatchable. (Not to mention the annoying protagonist and awful animation quality). Chokotto Sister would be another good example of this point. | Zero no Tsukaima - sadly, not a scene in the animation. DAMN YOU. On the other hand, the half-hearted fanservice in Zero no Tsukaima was sucessfully ofset by a well developing storyline which (thankfully) was further removed from the Harry Potter (R) ™ ((C) JK Rowling) franchise than expected. And that concludes the introduction to the Guide to fanservice animation (A Yuribou production). Keep a look out for further parts - we’ll be discussing character types, cut and paste situations for easy insertion into scripts and the role of fanservice in different genres, amongst other things, so stay tuned! Ganbatte kudasai animator-kun! Character Types Part 1 Author’s note - I have been getting back into the old Infinity Engine RPGs of late - namely Icewind Dale 2, so please forgive this article if it seems a little Dungeons and Dragonsey ^_^ So you’ve worked your way to chapter 2 then have you, young animator? Hopefully by now you will be able to avoid the pitfalls and pratfalls that separate the wheat from the chaff of this cutthroat world we call fanservice. But what is the next step? You must now design a suite of character that will be alluring and appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Or, even better still, invent new character traits never before seen that people will look at and go “wooooahhh that’s new!”. As anyone who has watched anime for a number of years knows, there are at the moment only a small set of character stereotypes that can describe the vast majority of female characters, although many of these stereotypes overlap and merge to produce seemingly new characters but based along similar lines. Building a memorable character is very important, but then well worn character stereotypes also make an impact if placed within the guidelines of an excellently written storyline. (Yuki from Haruhi Suzumiya no yuuutsu pops to mind as a prime example) Therefore, always keep in mind that in all probability it is easier to make a familiar personality interesting than an interesting new personality. Here at Yuribou productions, we like to make things easy for you. We have therefore worked long (20 mins) and hard and produced a chart for personality building - for well established personalities only, of course. You will see that we have included Trait misc. and Accessory misc. for those novel things that just don’t appear often enough to get their own category. This list is by no means exhaustive, and if we get enough suggestions, an updated list will be produced! Female character personality types creator v1.0 Major personality class These describe the character’s overriding personality. They are generally exclusive, with characters occupying one distinct type. The excepting to this is “Strong-willed” which is a main character type but may coexist with many of the other major class. • Normal |Ohno - your typical normal girl. Otaku girl. Who likes cosplay. Hmm. No overriding major personality type - just your ordinary girl-next-door type. Likes going out and hanging out with her friends. May or may not have a secret crush on someone - you know the drill. Normal girls make up the staples of fanservice anime as they can have any minor personality traits or accessories and are not limited in terms of storyline potential. It is always orth having at least a couple of normal girls to keep things sane in an animation. • Tsundere |Chidori - an archetypal new type tsundere. Beware of the fan ^_^ Although the term was coined fairly recently, tsundere type (violent at first, soft later on) characters have been knocking around in animation for almost as long as yuri itself. Early examples include Naru Narusegawa from Love Hina and Lum from Urusei Yatsura.