After surprising us with faintly visible nipples in episode two, Strike the Blood has so far opted to avoid additional nudity on blu-ray through the first four volumes.
Here’s a quick recap of some of the more interesting scenes from episodes seven through twelve.
No wet T-shirt fun this time
No changes : (
Obviously, it doesn’t bode well that we still see upper body censorship on BD. Normally, that would be a dead giveaway that nudity just isn’t in the cards, though I still hold out some hope for future volumes. Here’s why:
First off, the scene that remains censored is not a fanservice oriented scene. It’s a bit on the creepy side, and the girl in question is a bit loli. It’s totally plausible that they may have felt that showing nipples in that instance would have been too shocking for a lightweight shonen series like this. Or at the very least, they didn’t want the first instance of full frontal to be in such a context. Understandable.
What is a little less understandable is that after showing wet T-shirt nips in episode two (they were faintly visible even in the TV broadcast), they shy away from them in episode 10, despite having some deliberate closeup shots to show them.
As for the rest of the episodes, there were moments they could have redrawn for nipples if they wanted, but I wasn’t really expecting that. Usually if a show redraws for nudity, they will drop hints beforehand that redraws are coming, so I wasn’t really expecting anything from episode 11 other than a lot of butt shots.
Will volumes 5-8 be more generous? I think it’s less than 50% likely at this point, but I wouldn’t rule out nudity completely. Sometimes two cour anime will change the nudity level with each season. For example, there was quite a bit of nudity in the first season of Code Geass, and almost zero in the sequel season. Haganai is another example. Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere was nude free in season one but showed nipples in season two.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that all the heavily censored bathing scenes from this anime just happen to take place during the second cour (episodes 13-24, from the Winter 2014 season). Interestingly enough.
At any rate, even if this ends up being some brutal fanservice trolling when it’s all said and done, Strike the Blood has already given us one nipple sighting, which is one more than the light novel and manga had combined. Even without doing almost anything, this show has already exceeded my expectations. But after teasing us so much, it would definitely suck if that early series surprise ended up leading to false hope.
