Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

I fling this word around like monkeys fling poo, so I guess it’s incumbent on me to offer a definition other than ‘I know it when I see it.’ I realize it’s very subjective. To me, pandering is where somebody said ‘okay, how can we make this more appealing to pathetic nerds’  even when it doesn’t come naturally out of the context of the show. If it makes sense for the show, then okay. It all boils down to is it calculatedly gratuitous?

You might consider Hellsing’s gun porn, ultraviolence, and style over substance to be pandering, but I get the feeling that Hirano (the manga author) really, truly, loves this stuff and is just writing what he thinks is goddamn cool, so it’s not pandering. This is what he loves, there’s no compromise of principle.

To me (and you may legitimately disagree) Horo’s omnipresent nudity in Wolf and Spice is less pandering than the crotch shots in Strike Witches because in Wolf and Spice the nudity is treated like it’s nothing – just another outfit, no lecherous loving pans over insanely detailed flesh. Whereas in Strike Witches it seems like the guys writing the show had the crotch shots as their primary directive and they show up at the most ridiculous times – rubbed in your face, so to speak. You can tell they consider this the primary selling point of the show.

Lucky Star isn’t bad once you get past the stultifyingly boring first episodes, but the character of Konata is too obviously calculated to appeal to pathetic otaku guys. Pani Poni Dash is generally okay except when they throw a completely gratuitous bromide in your face – and even worse make it a pull-out pan with sparkly highlights to rub it in your face! Shows like Akiba-chan, about maid doll girls in Akihabara, are entirely cynical ploys. Hell, anything with ‘Akiba’ in the name, period.

Other things are harder for me to pin down. Akamatsu’s Negima! has an unprecedented buffet of girls that’s undeniably extreme pandering, yet the plot and dialogue is less pathetically desperate than his previous Love Hina.  As above, some people see Wolf and Spice’s nude wolf-girl scenes and go ‘Holy crap, where did this come from’ and I can see that – to me it flows naturally when you involve a fertility goddess, but that’s just gut feel and I can’t objectively argue against it.