The Yuribou Guide to Fanservice for Animators Disclaimer: All art here is taken from various image boards and image searches and appears without artist’s permission. If you are the artist and wish your art to be removed or your work credited, please email me on the address below Brought to you by Yuribou at Yuri to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito (http://yuribou.net/blog) Introduction 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! The Reverse Breast Grab (or RBG) - One of the advanced Welcome to the Yuribou Guide to Fanservice manoeuvres that can make or break a seasoned fanservice for Animators. Anyone can draw a cheap animator’s career. panty shot, but how can you make it appeal to the masses who just shrug this off as just There are four things that are the most an everyday phenomenon? How do you important in fanservice - make your moe super-moe? What differentiates a boring glasses girl from • First and foremost - art quality desirable meganekko? When is it appropriate • Character (both designs and to insert token yuri? And most importantly, character) how can you make an anime that Yuribou will • Situations - a good mix of cheap and watch? well planned • Overall storyline and character Granted that last one isn’t too difficult. interactions We begin with an introduction to the genre Art quality is obviously the most important with some salient examples of the qualities thing in fanservice. It is always refreshing to present in great and classic fanservice see a well thought out scene of fanservice productions to date. with good art, but then equally an anime with great art and character designs will usually succeed at delivering good fanservice. 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. 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! Breasts, Brains and erm…Bonus yuri - fantastic combination… Coming a very close second, characters are extremely important in fanservice. Perhaps Case in point: He is my Master not to the hardcore fanservice/moe otaku, but to the general anime fan who is not In addition to having great situational averse to a bit of fanservice, having an fanservice (which we’ll get to in the next interesting character to follow the story of point), it demonstrates great characters - with elevates any fanservice scenes that that the strong willed (and large chested) Izumi character gets. challenging the borders of the tsundere stereotype, the mischievious loli sister Citing earlier on, it is important that you draw Mitsuki and the born again lesbian Anna a very careful line between fanservice and lending context to fanservice and making this softcore pornography, since although very anime very watchable indeed. close in theory, in actuality they have very different audience implications. Situations is something that we’ll come on to plot of a fanservice anime has similar in later parts of the guide, but in reality, there implications in terms of how the overall feel are only a finite number of situations in which of the finished product comes across. An fanservice may occur. These include such animation with a strong overall storyline will crude scenes as the skirt/wind flip + panty buoy up mediocre quality fanservice whereas shot through to yuri-snoggage, onsen scenes even good fanservice will not shine when and behind breast grabs. It is the duty of the plots are absent. 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. 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 Magipoka - catering for futanari fans since 2006 another good example of this point. 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 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 Yuribou guide to fanservice for animators. Later, 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! and Accessory misc. for those novel things Chapter 1 that just don’t appear often enough to get their own category. This list is by no means exhaustive, and if we get enough Major personality types suggestions, an updated list will be produced! So you’ve worked your way to chapter 1 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 “WTF?! Man 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. 1 - Major personality class Tsundere 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 Kaname Chidori (Full Metal Panic!) - an archetypal new type tsundere. Beware of the fan ^_^ Although the term was coined fairly recently, tsundere (violent at first, soft later on) type 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. However, these days, the term has come to include girls who are both violent and soft at the same time (e.g. Kagami from Lucky Star) Kanako Ohno (Genshiken) - your typical normal girl. Otaku and so tsundere has become one of the girl. Who likes cosplay. Hmm. major personality types. Minor traits that go well with this class include “Unexpectedly No overriding major personality type - just embarassable (naive)” and “fighter”. 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.