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Glossary Entry : Fan-Service
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Fan service is an interesting term, generally taken to mean the displaying of things the average young male fan will want to see. Thus if a character has an unreasonably skimpy outfit, a tendency towards suggestive poses and lots of focus shots on these things it could be called fan service. This could be taken as a sort of very soft variant of Ecchi, and is very common. The problem is that this material is often unneccessary, taken poorly by people not familiar with anime and sometimes even tiring for anime fans (especially those not young teenage boys?). An interesting comment was that a lot of american comics are full of fan service, with the standard female super-hero outfit being the leotard, and that probably cut down. Any series aimed at young males probably has fan service, so examples should not be hard to find. The anime `agent aika' is supposedly an experiment in how much fan service (specifically panty shots) could be contained in an OAV series (with the answer being `far too many').
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:50 WST 2009