04.26
Earlier this year, Kyoto Animation released a teaser for a potential new project. It featured a bunch of shirtless dudes swimming, complete with the crazy camera angles and energetic animation KyoAni is known for. This 30 second video started a fandom all on its own, spawning third party projects such as the wonderful Swimming Anime Dating Sim, the beta of which I actually did a reading of earlier this month. Today, the release of a PV has confirmed the swimming anime (now officially called Free!) as their newest TV series, along with a statement announcing that it will begin airing in July. This was the internet’s response.
Wow, that’s a lot of links.
No shirt, no shoes, FANservice!
Basically, people are mad about the production of Free! because… because. I mean, this is really just a gender-swapped version of K-On!, one of Kyoto Animation’s past works, and it certainly looks more watchable than last season’s sleep-inducing Tamako Market — perhaps the most banal anime of the past few years — so I’m not too sure where, exactly, the complaints are coming from. Now, in terms of actual content, it’s probably not going to be anything too special. But neither was the aforementioned K-On!, or its predecessor Lucky Star; people watched those shows for the cute characters, not whatever sort of plot or action they may have had.
What I’m getting from this is that it’s cool to have utter pap like Queen’s Blade and Ikki Tousen, because that lets dudes ogle women, but the same type of thing mustn’t be allowed to happen in reverse, oh no! I can practically feel my delicate male body being objectified from across the internet tubes! This is clearly setting a dangerous precedent; soon we might start having actual female characters in anime who amount to more than just bland archetypes (haha, yeah, right)! Rarely have I seen a woman who wasn’t completely insane complain about a female fanservice show, so I’m very disappointed with the general response to this anime and how bad it makes male fans look. Is there truly anything wrong with sexy men appearing in a cartoon?
Outside of a few blatant yaoi series (and that awful Prince-sama shit), there aren’t really many anime which give the viewers a chance to check out some hunky guys. It’s true that fanservice almost never adds to a show’s quality, and it can be creepy at times (see: Higurashi Kira), but it’s okay for it to exist, and it should go both ways. If for some reason you’re angry about Free!, you clearly aren’t part of its demographic, so you should probably just ignore it. I can understand being upset that KyoAni is doing this new project instead of continuing Full Metal Panic! or Haruhi, but I think it’s time we all accept that TSR and Disappearance are never getting sequels.
I don’t think Free! is going to be a particularly great series, not at all. It really does seem like it’s just going to be male K-On! after all, and I hated K-On!. But that doesn’t mean it has no right to exist, and if it helps to eliminate the double standard when it comes to fanservice and slice of life shows, then I’m truly glad to see it happen. Kyoto Animation is taking a risk for once, a risk that probably shouldn’t even be a risk, but I sincerely hope it pays off for them, and has some sort of impact on the medium in general.
— Foggle