Fan Disservice Dept.
Belinda (S1E1) posted her own mixed feelings about Queen's Blade, to which I replied, "It's the best-written bad show I've yet seen." That really does encapsulate so much of what's wrong with it: the storytelling (which is not bad at all) is at such odds with the visuals (which are deeply sleazy) that the show pulls itself apart. The writing of QB makes a stab at elevating the characters above the level of sex objects; the visuals of the show undo all that good work. Most bad shows are uniformly bad, but this one's such a disarming mixture it's hard to appreciate how the two halves were joined.
So far I haven't received much in the way of mail along the lines of "What's wrong with a little stupid fun?" Nothing, except that everyone's sliding scale of stupid spans different lengths. Mine tops out when I start feeling like I'm having my face rubbed in the material. Agent Aika had the same problem: it was like the filmmakers had a running bet with themselves that they could include panties in every single shot. (One shudders to think what the drinking game for this show consists of.) I felt less unclean watching the intimacy in In the Realm of the Senses than I did anything in QB, because the characters in that movie were responding more to each other than anything else.
A friend of mine has commented on how Japanese media seems to have this obsession with sleaze. That led into a discussion about the country's contorted censorship laws, and which seem to have simply produced a whole subculture of titillation based on end runs around actually showing anything. Hence the way most every major character in QB is a fetish object of one kind or another. And because there's almost no male characters of consequence anywhere in the show (Aika was like this, too), it's all the more about what's being paraded in front of the camera for us. You'll forgive me if I didn't feel blessed.
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