The current anime season continues to provide an incredible amount of fan service. This is probably welcome news for fans of sexy anime visuals, who love to see panty shots and jiggling boobs in their anime. Let’s explore why perverted anime is exploding in this blog post!
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Why Perverted Anime Exists: The Role of Fan Service
As I’ve written before, sexy fan service has been part of anime for decades and is probably older than all of us. Visual eye candy in anime serves several purposes, including:
- It lightens up any story, providing the potential for comedy. There’s nothing like seeing a haughty tsundere laid low by tripping and exposing her pantsu in front of her crush.
- A new anime has to fight hard for “mind-share” against dozens of competing shows. A well-placed panty shot in the first episode can give fans a dose of dopamine that keeps them coming back each week. I know a J-List customer who traveled all over Northern Japan because of this panty shot alone.
- Sexy fan service can create buzz for a show on the internet, as fans share their favorite clips.
- While most fan service is limited to an upskirt shot here or there, some series are defined by their sexy visuals and situations. This has made ecchi a genre unto itself, and fans love these shows for their higher budgets and better animation.
- Sexy fan service arguably made anime what it is today. Would the industry be the same if it weren’t for Lum’s famous nipple or all those Sailor Moon upskirt shots?
Can visual fan service go too far? Of course. If it’s inserted into shows where it’s not needed, it can be very jarring. And if it’s not done in a clever enough way, it’s easy for studios to appear like they’re patronizing fans. Even I’ve dropped ecchi shows without writing about them on the J-List blog if I felt the creators insulting my intelligence with poor-quality story set-ups.
Why Does This Season Feature So Much Perverted Anime?
We knew the current anime season was going to be different when Gushing Over Magical Girls exploded onto the scene, exploring every fetish we could think of and more than a few we didn’t know existed.
But the sexy anime kept coming. We got an anime about becoming a literal sex slave (Mato Seihei no Slave), a fun show about cute sexy GALs in a winter wonderland (Hokkaido Girls are Super Adorable), a harem in another world (Kekkon Yubiwa Monogatari), sexy moments in The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil, and more.
What the heck is going on?
Do Sexy Anime Make Money?
When I researched my post on popular anime studios that had failed financially, I learned a shocking truth: the companies that make the sexiest anime tend to go bankrupt the quickest. But how can that be, considering the popularity of legendary ecchi series like Agent Aika, To Love-ru, Ikki Tousen and The Testament of Sister New Devil?
What is the State of the Anime Industry as of late 2023? Read my blog post here!
While the overall economic challenges of making animation and the pressures of COVID-19 played a role, another reason these studios failed financially is that their back catalog was “too sexy for streaming.” While streaming platforms have revolutionized the way anime series are funded, providing much-needed capital to anime production companies, they’re not always as supportive of anime with sexy visuals.
Even when anime studios try to rely on Blu-ray sales to fund fan service-heavy titles, it can backfire on them. While most of us enjoyed the sexy fighting anime Keijo!!!!!!!!, literally no one got out their wallets for the ¥8800 Blu-ray disks, causing the series to crash so hard, the manga even got cancelled. Studio Xebec was dissolved in 2019.
Given the difficulty of monetizing anime that’s too sexy to be streamed on most streaming platforms, has something changed to enable this sexy anime to get funding? Perhaps HIDIVE, which is streaming Gushing with Magical Girls uncensored, is emerging as the go-to place for sexy anime offerings and will thus get more support from anime fans for this?
Let’s hope this trend continues!
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Thanks for reading this blog post about the rise of perverted anime in recent years. What do you think about fan service-heavy anime? Tell us in the comments below!
Happy New Year from your Friend in Japan, J-List! We hope 2026 is a year of happiness and peace for you. To get things off right, we’re having a huge site-wide New Year’s Sale through Jan. 6, giving you $15 off all in-stock products. Start browsing now!
