I'm watching this anime series at the moment that goes by the name of Bamboo Blade. Yes, especially to someone who isn't hopelessly jaded by the sheer volume of misconceived anime and manga titles, that's a bit of a corny japanimation-y title, but Shakespeare rightly said something about a Rose being just as okay a flower if it were called some other arbitrary selection of letters. Anyway, yes, I'm watching this show. When I started it off I would have immediately described it as a generic shounen love anime. It had all the usual trappings of the genre, after all. The male to female ratio is embarassingly unlikely, the female characters all have generous proportions and are all very likeable, and the art style is by all rights leaning more towards classic shounen conventions than shoujo (read: the characters don't look like they fell out of a fashion magazine and stuck wispy mops on their heads). To be entirely honest, I was really only watching the show because the voice actor for Kamina from Gurren Lagann (a.k.a. the baddest dude to ever not exist) voices one of the few male leads. Now that I've seen 15 episodes, though, I am glad that I hung in there (baby).

You see, episode 15 was a bit of an eye opener. I was sitting here, happily watching away when the characters (who've quite grown on me, if not for their refreshing originality, then for their genuine sympathetic qualities) decided to go to a public bath. For those of you who don't know (and if you don't, I'm honestly suprised you've read this far into a rant about anime) Japan has public bath houses for people who may not necessarily have these utilities available to them at home. It was at this point in the episode when I rolled my eyes and thought Well, here we go. Fanservice time. Time to degrade my beloved characters by having them prance around naked, making played-out jokes about bust size to appease the lonely 13-year-old demographic and waste the time of people who *gasp* are looking for story progression . . . But a funny thing happened. Upon arriving at the bath house, there were one or two transitional shots, indicating to us that the bath has been had and the characters have now left, and then we move on to other things. I was genuinely surprised by this. My mind was thoroughly blown, which begs the question of how much integrity my beloved medium has. And for that matter, what does fanservice have to do with integrity?

Upon asking myself this question, I first had the thought that maybe I'm just a tight-assed, prudish kill-joy, but then I realised that while that may be true, there's more to it than that. When we consider that the whole point of an anime series is to tell a story, the answer becomes kind of obvious. Meaningless deviation from the plot like this is quite simply a form of pandering to a certain demographic in order to increase (or maintain) viewers. And as we all know, pandering to a certain demographic is a textbook example of selling out, which is to integrity as kryptonite is to Superman.

So does Bamboo Blade have integrity? You bet your shinai it does! Does it really matter, though? Would I still enjoy the show if it went ahead and had done that played-out bath house scene? Well, yes, but it wouldn't have made as much of an impact on me. You see, this way, I've put the show up on a special pedestal reserved for things that aren't trite and obvious. It's a pedestal I call respect and it goes a long way in making me remember things fondly. And of course, it's in the studio's best interest to have its productions remembered fondly! I guess the only problem is that there are a lot fewer artsy, stuck-up idiots like me in the world than there are lonely, 13-year-old idiots. And in the end, all of us different kinds of idiots are ruled by the almighty dollar.