Fairy Tail / Kenichi – This One Goes Up To Eleven

I’m surprised these characters know the word “shame”.

Fanservice in manga and anime is like the government in dystopian novels: it’s always there, no matter where you go, but if it does the job it’s supposed to you shouldn’t notice. Of course I’ve seen far too many examples of it being used in both good and bad ways, but there was always one series that went further over the top with it than any I’ve read. That was History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi, which started as a Panty Fighter and spent over 450 chapters pushing it’s own limits. Reading that series has actually produced an interesting effect in that it caused the fanservice in other manga to feel tame and wholesome by comparison. Nami’s outfit in the current One Piece chapters seems much more acceptable when you see Miu’s spandex, which I can only assume is vacuum-sealed. For a while I assumed I would never come across anything worse than that, or at least not willingly.

Recently, something strange has been happening that I never anticipated. Somehow over time, Fairy Tail has accomplished what I considered impossible and made the fanservice in Kenichi feel more acceptable! It managed this by taking a slightly different path from what that series did in terms of extreme content. Since it can’t compete in terms of ridiculous outfits or ways to remove those outfits, Fairy Tail went to the furthest lengths to make every situation it could as absolutely perverse and uncomfortable as possible.

Fairy Tail – Chapter 261

I could have selected a more suitable image. I chose not to.

Here we find ourselves in the middle of a training arc. It’s something we haven’t actually seen from Fairy Tail yet, which is more than a little surprising. You would have expected a series that’s primarily about the daily lives of an adventurer guild to spend some time on their combat preparation. Hell, the last arc dealt with the S-Class Exam, which sounds like something you’d do a little training for. But now everyone has been warped into the future, and they need to get their strength back up to compete with the other guilds. I would spend some time talking about the bizarre choice of splitting up the time skip and the training arc when they could have been done simultaneously, but I think everyone who reads this series already knows all about that. Moving seven years ahead was a poor choice in general, and while a part of me still thinks there was a point to it, it hasn’t done a good job at proving that.

Mahou Sensei Negima – Chapter 343

I'm not sure which part of this image to explain first...

So there I was, reading the latest chapter of Negima and getting ready to write a post about the way fighting is portrayed in it when something else caught my eye. The last chapter hinted at Asuna and Negi coming up with a concrete plan to defeat Evangeline in a fight. It turned out there was no real plan, but that didn’t stop them from kicking an enormous amount of ass. I know it has nothing to do with what I’m about to discuss, but let me just say that the shot of the two of them frozen in a crystal of ice, both smiling because they’re just that confident they’ll escape, is the sort of thing that made me fall in love with this manga.

So the fight goes on for a bit longer, and just when I’m wondering how long a training fight can last for, Negi accidentally strips both Asuna and Eva naked. Yup. I thought Negi’s sneeze from a few chapters ago was just a call back to the early chapters, but it turns out I was wrong. A big, badass fight scene getting interrupted by gratuitous fanservice, and there’s only one thought that comes to mind.

Why am I not bothered by this?

Kenichi vs Change 123 – Review

Because if there’s one thing they know, it’s competition.

I managed to make this one in half the time of the previous review, despite it being two manga. It’s still a little short of 2 weeks, which is the time I’d like these to take. So while I was going to do Chobits next, I decided to pick a series I knew back and forth. It still might be a little more than 2 weeks because of my English work, but we shall see.

In terms of actual production, I learned that I need to be a little more careful during recording. At one point, I accidentally gave the protagonist of Shijou Saikyou no Deshi Kenichi (or whatever it’s called today) the wrong last name, and it caused a rather noticeable difference in my voice where I edited it. Also, gathering the pictures for this was annoying as hell. Two series, and I own neither. Should have thought that one through a little better.