Aug 2, 2016 12:13 PM

Why Highschool DxD is one of the best ecchi-series ever, an analysis of ecchi and harem series

DxD as an ecchi-series



Magic works by focusing strongly on an image, world-inducing .



. Issei is a pervert who thinks about naked girls all the time, character-inducing .



. Asia just happens to find him while he’s practicing, situational.



DxD as a harem-series



Keep the harem small.



Use a big harem, but keep the characters rather generic and maybe only focus on the main girl.





The protagonist doesn’t realize he’s in a harem. He doesn’t know he can have sex just by asking it. This is a rather lazy way out. Just how stupid do you have to be to not realize something so obvious?



He can’t pick. This is also an easy way out. The MC doesn’t want to hurt any of them by picking one above the others and he has feelings for all of them, so he doesn’t make a choice ( Kiss X Sis plays this perfectly by using twins). This is clearly a good point, and it seems to solve the problem. However, again, how believable is that? You might care about their feelings, but you can’t love all of them equally. Also, it doesn’t make much sense none of the girls make a serious move. Either you accept someone’s feelings or you reject them, you can’t keep fluttering around and expect everyone to just be fine with that. Eventually, people want a clear answer.



plays this perfectly by using twins). This is clearly a good point, and it seems to solve the problem. However, again, how believable is that? You might care about their feelings, but you can’t love all of them equally. Also, it doesn’t make much sense none of the girls make a serious move. Either you accept someone’s feelings or you reject them, you can’t keep fluttering around and expect everyone to just be fine with that. Eventually, people want a clear answer. Situational blocking. Just like you can create an ecchi situation, you can also get out of one. Something happens which defuses the sexual tension once again. This can be done in different ways. Maybe the plotline comes along. A sudden battle breaks out and the characters have to focus on that. Or they sabotage each other. But that leaves your viewers frustrated and it’s usually bad storytelling.





Insecurity: actually he does want to make a move. But he doesn’t have the courage to actually take the step. The trauma with Raynare gave him a massive insecurity-complex. This is a quite clever way out, because it also creates an interesting theme. Insecurity and bonding fears are problems a lot of teenagers cope with. Using ecchi to talk about this and show them is a good way. Of course, to a minor extent, this suffers the same credibility problem.

But DxD solves this in book ten when Issei gets over his fear. Eventually, he does move forward, but he doesn’t go much further than kissing.



Ultimately, Issei’s fantasies are a boy’s fantasies. He never seriously thinks about having sex. He’s in that pre-puberal stage. Despite his age, he acts like a thirteen year old. His obsession with breasts is kinda childish if you think about it. Surely there’s more than breasts out there. Issei is a boy with the boy’s dream of a harem. He’s not ready for a serious relationship.



Sturgeon's law states that 90% of everything is crap. In ecchi and harems, you can make this 99%. Butis not crap. It’s extremely popular with over twenty books, manga adaptations and three seasons of anime and lots of people stated that this is the best ecchi ever. So, what makesso different from other ecchi?Usually ecchi series are also comedy. The only notable exceptions would be things likeand. Here, ecchi is used as a way to relax the audience from the otherwise dark and violent storyline making it more ‘digestible’. Looking at twenty minutes of violence is hard, but if you throw in some fanservice every once in a while, it gets a lot easier.But usually ecchi=comedy. Obviously, there is a reason for this.Look at how fourteen year old's deal with sexuality. They tend to make a joke out of it to hide their insecurity. This is a common reaction, and ecchi aims at that.So, the best underlying theme for an ecchi would be things like insecurity and bonding fear. If you could sneak in those, you could create a powerful story. And that is exactly whatdoes.One of the biggest problems ecchi faces is creating an ecchi-scene. In real life, things like that don’t happen much. So how do you create ecchi without being too ridiculous? A few common ideas have been developed over the years.: this is the easiest method. Instead of trying to sneak in ecchi, you make sure it naturally follows out of the premise of your story.probably does this the best. If you make their source of energy breast milk, you have a perfect excuse to show boobs every ten minutes.However, you create a risk known as. If your premise is ‘boob sucking power-ups’ you already lost 90% of your potential audience. You have to be able to market to a certain audience to exist in the first place. But this creates a massive problem. You’re not marketing to a regular audience unless you are PG-13, which you are by definition not, but you’re not hentai either. So what are you?This has always been a massive problem in ecchi. Too extreme for mainstream, not extreme enough for hentai.In short: if you use this method, a careful balance is required, which only a few series manage to capture.Along with world-inducing,is the most used. What are the odds you trip and accidentally grab the heroines boob?Pretty high apparently.Of course, this usually doesn’t make much sense and kinda distracts from the story, or the lame excuse that has to pass for a story usually encountered in ecchi. It can be used, but being sparse with it is the key. Unless you plan to go over the top situational for comedic effect.did that quite well. But you risk the same problem. Without a real story, you can’t fill much more than twelve episodes.Lastly, you could use the characters themselves. Maybe they just have a perverted nature.However, this requires carefully fleshing out your character. After all, the MC can’t be an asshole, so if he’s already perverted, he would have to be 'kind of a pervert, but an overall good guy.'is famous for doing this.Unless you plan to revolutionize the world of ecchi and come up with a new way, you are stuck with these three, along with their obvious problems. DxD knows this, and tries to solve it by combining all three methods. In the creation of Dress Break we can clearly see this:This is pretty smart, since you don’t suffer that much from the downsides this way. Relying on one method is usually digging your own grave in the world of ecchi.Lots of series are mediocre and they don’t mind. They don’t want to be the best, they just want to be. Take. A by-the-book cliche harem anime. It’s like the creator took a manual and followed it exactly. There’s nothing special about it,. It doesn’t try to stand out from the crowd by using some wild idea no one ever did before. It wants to be ‘just another series’. Something to fill your Friday night with. Since anime is dominated by series who all try to stand out and be unique, this is a refreshing, non-arrogant approach.goes a bit like that too. It mostly draws inspiration out of different mythologies and the stories themselves are quite standard.So, nothing special. But for ecchi, this is very important. Something as silly as ecchi shouldn’t try to make complicated observations about the human nature, cause no one would buy it. At the surface, you have to appear like a silly cliche story.Lots of good ecchi failed really hard because they tried making a real plot and it just didn’t work out. If you’re an ecchi series, no one will take you that serious, so you have to keep that in mind when you come up with your plot.Dealing with tropes is always hard.Stories, especially anime, try to stand out from the crowd. They want something new, not something like everything else out there. This means diverging from the traditional tropes.But, this creates a problem: risk.Producers don’t like risks. They want what works, not what you dreamed up one drunk night out. Highly experimental series are a big risk. Whether you like it or not, companies can’t invest loads of money into something that might not sell.So in a way, you have to use cliches to secure an audience.But if you want a really good series with an actual fanbase and not a bunch of casual viewers, you need to dominate your tropes. You need to use them in the way you see fit. Unlike, which drowned itself in tropes,gives its own twists to the tropes. It doesn’t force in the norm just because it is the norm. Try to find a tsundere in. Oh, there is one, don’t worry. Ise’s alarm clock, or Asia’s boobs. Similarly, there is a Zettai Ryouki in...worn by Gaspar.is cliche, you can’t deny that, but it’s only cliche whenever it suits the story. A pointless tsundere would ruin the story, which is why it was completely left out.Let’s first define a harem.According to Wikipedia, a harem is “polygamous or love triangle relationships characterized by a protagonist surrounded amorously by three or more members of either the same and/or opposing gender, sex, and/or love interests”As you can see, the word ‘or’ is used a lot. In other words, harems are a broad subject. But despite this diversity, most harems suffer the same problems.A harem needs girls, obviously. But the more girls you create, the less focus there can be on each girl. After all, time is limited in anime. Especially if you have a harem series. You can’t just ask for an infinite amount of episodes, you’re notorIn general, there are two solutions to this problem.Most series go with the second approach. This is why they don’t really have a fanbase, cause the viewers can’t even name every girl in the harem.If you want to keep running for a couple seasons, you need a more clever solution. We can find one of these inLet’s call it. Instead of introducing seven girls at once in episode 1, we focus on one girl, and then move on to a different girl later on.does a similar thing, slowly introducing more characters as the series moves along and expanding the harem. In, every book is dedicated to one character. If they just introduced seven girls in episode 1, you wouldn’t even know all their names by the end of season 1.Harem protagonists are stupid. And they have to be in a certain way. Let’s face it, if you had a harem, what would you do? You would choose one girl, or all of them. You would doat least. But of course, a harem protagonist can’t. It can’t turn into a hentai. So despite being surrounded by gorgeous girls, he doesn’t do anything.If you want to be more than ‘’, you need to solve this problem one way or another. If the MC doesn’t actually pursue any of the girls, you’ll need some kind of reason for that. Some ideas have been developed over time.All of these answers share the same problem: credibility.Regardless of what excuse you make up, it doesn’t make much sense. If you surround a healthy teenage boy with a bunch of beautiful girls that adore him, he will take action eventually. You can’t keep using lame excuses to get out of this simple truth. No matter how nice of a guy he is, or how blind he is to their feelings, he will make a move eventually.So… why doesn’t Issei simply pick a girl?Well, there are two main reasons.While these are pretty clever ways out, ultimately, they can’t solve this problem entirely. But that’s fine.uses better storytelling than the lame excuse most ecchi comes up with as to why the protagonist never gets laid. And there’s always Rule 34 to help out the fans.Personally, I have never found myself surrounded by a bunch of hot girls who all fell in love with me, but maybe that’s just me.One girl falling in love with the MC makes sense, and we’ll believe two as well. But once you cross that line and make basically every female character fall in love with our not-so-very-special-protagonist, it’s starting to look like I’m reading your masturbation material. If you’re a hentai, you don’t need to come up with a reason for anything, least of all why every girl loves your MC, but ecchi does need at least some explanation.This is something that can’t be solved entirely no matter what you do. It does make sense the girls like Issei, after all, he’s strong, hard working and cares a lot about his friends. But even then, you can’t seriously expect all of them to like him. And that is because they don’t.I know I just said something crazy, but hear me out. They don’t like him. Clearly, Rias likes him a lot more than say Koneko. Most harems fail at this and make every character fall madly in love with the MC. By created different levels of affection,makes itself realistic enough for people to actually care about the story.Ecchi is not hentai. There are clear borders that cannot be crossed.for example actually has a ‘no sex ever’-condition from the editor. Even if Ichibumi-sensei wanted to, he couldn’t let Issei get laid cause they would not publish it.So how do you deal with this? As I said before, it’s only natural that things keep going further. People develop sexually, they go forward. So you have to block this at a certain point. Most series fail spectacularly at this, since this is hard and complicated to do.Despite the fact that he’s surrounded by girls who all want to bang him, he can’t actually have sex with them because then we have either, a crazy hentai or both.You can tell that evenstruggles with this. At various moments, Issei passes out from ‘blood loss’ because there was simply no other way out.But, as mentioned before, Issei is obsessed with breasts, and that is a very safe obsession. If he was obsessed with actual sex, they would be in trouble after two episodes.is actually really clever. They shove boobs in your face every five minutes, which makes you feel like they don’t really care about going too far. But obviously, that’s not the case. They know very well that if they let Issei get laid not evenwould broadcast it.is an extremely good and popular series cause it clearly understands the problems ecchi and harem-series face. Credibility, an actual plot without being pretentious, not being too cliche,manages all of it, but most importantly, it’s scripted like fan fiction.Whenever you watch or read it, it feels like fan fiction. As if Ichibumi-sensei was like “well, dragons seemed like a fun idea, so I put them in.”This is a very liberating feeling and especially in ecchi this works out really well. When you watch a Hollywood movie, you know that every detail is designed to sell. Movies with that amount of money involved can’t take risks, they simply have to sell. And this takes away from the experience, because you don’t feel like you’re watching what the creator intended. You’re watching a toned-down version which changed every detail to appeal to a large audience.In, you feel like you’re reading exactly what the creator intended, which makes these stories more real than anything else.Signing off now,Aren Luxon, August 2