#and that also comes with the caveat of female authors being far less respected - look at nadezhda khvoshchinskaya - but still

[lesbianaglaya]

revoking people’s right to talk about the tolstoy marriage until they write and turn in to me a ten page essay on complex relationships

[d-dumais-blog]

Keijo!!!!!!!! Review: I Like Big Butts & I Can Not Lie

Keijo is awesome! It’s insanely stupid and yet, somehow it succeeds at nearly everything it attempts. Keijo’s success is quite honestly an anomaly.  A quick glance at premise, studio, and staff would suggest this show should have been forgotten before it even finished airing, and yet somehow it stuck around and resonated with fans, particularly in the West, in a way that no one involved saw coming.  Its success in the West isn’t only a surprise to me, it appears to be a surprise to license holder Funimation that currently has NO merchandise available for purchase. No posters, no key chains, no announced bluray release.  So let’s talk about why it works and why I love it so damn much.

Let’s start with the basics; this show is not for everyone.  Keijo is a show about girls fighting each other in bathing suits using only their boobs and butts atop a variety of floats in an Olympic sized pool. Yes it is as dumb as it sounds. Yes there is an obscene amount of fan service focusing primarily on the girls’ butts.  I completely understand why some people might be turned off by its objectification of the women portrayed.  You might consider the show sexist, and you might consider me sexist for my enjoyment. A quick note on that, I’m a fan of all fan service both male and female.  I’m a straight male with a particular affinity for the female rear end, check the title of this review, but you bet I appreciate some well drawn men in various states of undress.  Anime has the opportunity to unrealistically portray human sexuality and I think artists are free to draw all manner of people however they’d like.  I hope this helps you to understand why I won’t be talking about the sexism debate that surrounded this show.

 Keijo’s fan service is excellent, and a show so focused on fan service would never succeed unless it was good, really good.  The show focuses on a few girls, but has a great ensemble cast full of all sorts of girls of varying shapes, sizes, age, and color.  Two points of clarification, there are very few different colored women, none of which are black, and that’s a bummer, and two while they vary in age all girls in the series are over eighteen years of age which we’ll discuss further down this post.  Back to the subject at hand, how to properly handle “tasteless fan service.” Keijo’s fan service is omnipresent, leaking into every scene.  This means it’s not a major shock when a butt fully envelopes the screen, it’s expected and not even that distracting.  This differs from a majority of shows that feel the need to randomly insert their characters in compromising positions so that the viewer gets a better look at their body.  It’s low hanging fruit but let’s compare this to Sword Art Online, it makes an easy comparison because pretty much everyone has seen it and most know its flaws.  SAO II episode one while introducing new female protagonist Xion pans up her body while she lays down in a sniper position.  The camera literally stops and does a quick zoom on her ass before finishing the shot.  It’s disgusting, it’s distracting, and it feels completely out of place in a show that intends to be about technology and coping with grief.  

The other most important thing about the fan service, aside from the age, is the fact that all of the girls are complicit in the fan service.  They might be shy, and a bit embarrassed, but they are never forced into a compromising situation against their will.  There seems to be this prevailing idea in anime that anime characters are cuter if they are pure, but we also need to see them without clothes on because of course we do.  This results in a number of horrible tropes that need to stop, the most prevalent, light novel guy walks in on light novel girl changing.  It’s almost always the establishing shot for their relationship over the series and I just hate it.  The other trope is somehow even worse, girls in fan service shows need to stop being raped! People generally consider Asuna’s rape scene in the second arc of Sword Art to be the beginning of the decline which is absurd considering Silica was sexually assaulted by a plant in the first twelve episodes and no one seemed to care.  It’s so gross and so often over looked.  There’s nothing wrong with a girl being okay showing her body, and if an anime character is going to be undressed, I hope that character is willfully undressed. This goes a long way to help make your characters actual characters and not simply objects.  I think the girls are surely still being objectified, but there’s a difference between looking at a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and looking at leaked celebrity nude photos.  The context matters and Keijo gets the context right.  Our secondary protagonist Miyata even admits that she started Keijo because she wanted a cute swimsuit made custom for her and I think that’s something all of the viewers would also like!

 This show did far better in the west than in Japan, and that’s largely thanks to the way it was adapted. Xebec isn’t exactly known for its great adaptations; in fact I’d argue they generally suck.  Their best known for To Love Ru and Shaman King; two shows that don’t do a lot to improve upon their source material.  Most recently they were responsible for the horribly bad Clockwork Planet.  Apparently that’s actually a pretty good light novel, which should be no surprise considering it’s written by Kamiya Yuu, the celebrated author of No Game No Life. I can’t speak to the actual quality of the Clockwork Planet books because the first episode of the show turned me off of anything that has to do with it.  Point being adaptation is not a strength of Xebec, hell Xebec doesn’t honestly have a ton of strengths aside from their willingness to get smuttier than other studios if that’s your thing.  

This is entirely different in Keijo, the adaptation is immaculate, and makes it far more appealing to a western audience.  For starters, the anime skips the entire first arc where our two female leads are still in high school and under the age of 18.  The girls first appear in their bathing suits in the anime after entering the Keijo training school.  In the manga there are multiple battles that take place before this while the girls are learning Keijo for the first time at the stadium event shown at the start of the first episode.  This arc is also gross for western fans for a number of reasons on top of age.  For some reason at this point in the manga guys are allowed to compete in these non official Keijo matches.  Guys of course only compete for the opportunity to rub up against girls in swimwear.  Girls who, I’ll reiterate again because it’s important, at this point are underage.  There’s also a ton of guys in this manga, which is weird considering there’s really only one in the anime and he’s less of a creep more of a sports fan.  The men in the Keijo manga come to watch and gamble on Keijo and are depicted as perverse onlookers.  Nozomi’s teacher is one such male who has a gambling addiction and comments on his underage student’s physique more than once. The anime made the right decision removing him from the series.  This first arc also has an extremely uncomfortable and short lived love interest in the form of Nozomi’s brother.  They might actually be cousins, the translation I read wasn’t exactly clear on that, but still something western audiences always frown upon.  His feelings are never reciprocated by our star Nozomi, but the whole situation is uncomfortable, especially since he’s eager to jump in and battle her in her first mock Keijo match.  There’s also more preliminary try outs the anime totally skips and that’s to the show’s benefit because again the girls are underage, and it cuts out a plethora of characters that don’t matter at all.  The adaptation also does a great job with its references, choosing series that are particularly popular in western fandom. Attack on Titan and Fate/Stay Night are popular around the world, but really struck a chord in the states and Keijo very obviously references these shows multiple times to great effect. Other references to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, One Piece, and Dragon Ball are all also greatly appreciated and largely absent from the manga.  

Keijo performed very well in weekly viewership numbers, both legally and illegally, but was quickly written off by most.  Everyone who watched it seemed to enjoy it, but wrote it off as “just another fan service show” and that’s unfair.  It stands out among its peers, and should be celebrated as such.  It was ranked the fifth most popular show according to Myanimelist, beating out shows with more popular appeal in pedigree like Occultic;Nine, Izetta the Last Witch, and season 2 of Ajin.  It also beat out several truly spectacular shows in Sound Euphonium season 2, Flip Flappers, and the fifth season of Natsume’s Book of Friends. This wouldn’t have happened if it was “just another fan service show.” If you’re still in need of proof that season had just another an service show, it was Brave Witches, a fairly tasteless follow up to a reasonably successful show about young flying military girls who don’t wear pants for some unknown reason.  People talk about Keijo as if it’s like Brave Witches, and no one talks about Brave Witches because no one cares.  It might be easy to right it off if you don’t watch a lot of fan service shows, but let me tell you Keijo is special.  I’ve lived in Trash Mountain for some time and am an expert in awful anime fan service, please don’t compare Keijo to that garbage; it’s far too good for that. Keijo is excellent! End of statement, no caveats no excuses, it’s really great.  The show is easily the best thing director Takahashi Hideya has ever helmed. It’s arguably the best series Xebec has ever produced solo, inarguably the best this decade.  I love Keijo, and I hope someday fans look back on it with the respect it earned.  

 8.5/10