The glimpse and fanservice in anime and manga: looking as a poetic

Fanservice is the random and gratuitous display of a series of anticipated gestures common in Japanese comics (Mango) and cartoons (Anime). These gestures include such things as panty shots, leg spreads and glimpses of breast. In their valorization they indicate a deep philosophical concern with the status of personal experience. These vagrant moments of libidinous possibility underwrite the anticipation of sensual fulfillment they indicate the genuine access of the personal to a realm and/or moment of reality in which the physical and the imaginative are coextensive. The connection between the eye and desire is re-established in defiance of the general requirement in society to deny the glimpse and its consequence. There is no power without freedom; no freedom that cannot be constrained; no constraint that cannot be subverted; no subversion that is not a prodamation of freedom. Such is the circle of power. Within this circle, the segment of personal experience stands out and offers to illuminate the whole through the ways of seeing available within the visual practice of the individual. Where society seeks to cover over the moment of personal seeing, by simply not talking about such things, the Fonservice picturing forth confirms the pathway to liberation that the senses can outline as a method (after-path). As such, the glimpse, in its mediated form as Fanservice, confirms the imagination as the dimension of the interpersonal: someone else also already understands the glimpse. This is perhaps the "darker" freedom because it offers to forgive the otherwise unique nature of vantage (I alone could see from where I stood). What I see you could also see; how I see you m1ght also see. This paper locates and expands the theoretical uses of the glimpse in the context of existing theories such as the gaze. It looks, in particular at the subversive aspects of the glimpse within an aesthetic dimension.