Right now, I’m looking for signs from Dragonar Academy. Blank boobs aren’t always a bad sign, unless there are a ton of them.
Often times shows that refuse to show nipples will compensate with huge doses of cleavage or blank boobs. Imagine this show with nipples and it would be a totally different anime. For a show like this, adding nudity would not be a small change. For that reason, I was starting to have my doubts, as this anime is beginning to look more and more like a series content to give us blank boob fanservice and nothing more.
I still had some hope though. While the light novel has non-nude illustrations, the manga adaptation is loaded with awesome nudity (nudity in light novels is actually pretty uncommon anyway). And usually, if the manga has nudity, the anime will too. Especially in the case of blatant harem-ecchi series.
However, with this being the first solo-venture by C-Station, its content is impossible to predict. The one thing I did hope for was consistency. If the blank boobs are going to add nipples later, then I don’t want to see girls arm-barring their boobs or witnessing spectacular nude shots from the manga being neutered into non-nude forms.
So my heart sank a bit when I saw Sylvia get blasted at the beginning of this episode. In the manga, her clothing is completely destroyed above the waist, leading to one of the manga’s best topless shots so far. In this version, it’s just a little rip down the middle, a glorified cleavage shot.
Now, it’s possible the anime could do a redraw of this later. But so far, we’ve seen minimal evidence that this will be a redraw based anime. After all, if re-draw was their plan, why all the blank boobs? Usually anime that go the redraw route avoid blank boobs. The whole point of the “paste on nipple” approach is that it is less expensive than redrawing an entire shot.
Anyway, I’m concerned. The nude-ecchi genre NEEDS anime like Seikoku no Dragonar that can stand on its own as a legit anime while still having nudity. I’ve been looking forward to this adaptation since last Fall, because I thought it had a very high chance to be Zero no Tsukaima with nipples. But now it looks like it will just be Zero no Tsukaima-lite. I really hope I’m wrong.
Doom and gloom aside, if my instincts are wrong and we do get nipples, this episode will be quite fantastic.
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| Might see a Maken-Ki! styled re-draw here for panty-shot clarity. |
