2020: Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt

 

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt was written in October 2010 by Geek Fleet and Studio Gainax. Panty and Stocking is about the titular angels Panty and Stocking who are thrown out of Heaven for their sinful natures who must destroy the ghosts hauntings Daten City to collect Heaven coins and return to Heaven. The two angels are less then repentant however and much of the series is a comedy about the two's viceful nature. The series is well known for for having a large amount of western influences for an anime and for being a perverted adult comedy. Given my generally timid personality, it can cause some humorous reactions when I bring up this series but I do really like it.

3 Reasons I love it:

1: The series is just really funny. Given that the series is mostly a comedy with some cool action scenes, this point is probably the biggest in the grand scheme of things; but yeah I personally think the adult humor of P&S is really funny. While embarrasing for me in real life, I do have to admit that kind of humor is one I find really funny in general and Panty and Stocking is particularly good at using it, I think in part because of the second point I put below this but also because the adult humor is coming from someone you wouldn't expect. In most ecchi you expect the adult humor to star a perverted human male character whose relatively low in the social hierarchy whereas in P&S the adult humor mostly comes from Panty, a really pretty looking angelic woman whose stylized to look like a cartoon and acts as a de facto superheroine (if an amoral one) of Daten City; a list of things that are usually viewed as less sexual which makes the humor feel relatively novel and in a weird way more relatable.

2: Part of the reason it's humor works so well is another one of the series' strengths, that being it's versatility and tendency to do completely random assorted things the writers just felt like doing. Panty and Stocking incorporate numerous types of humor and even it's adult humor is used in a variety of things from innuendo, sexual insults, aberrant forms of sexuality etc. Likewise the series episodes have very little in common, sometimes not even having ghost fights and 1 episode barely even containing Panty and Stocking. The series has some episodes that are mostly serious, it has episodes that are just parodies of other series (in particular there is an episode that is a Transformers parody and one that is a bunch of western animation references), there one episode where every single line is an innuendo of some sort. Part of what makes the humor work is that it incorporates is the variety; it's not a similar type of joke often.

3: One of the things that apparently caused some surprise is that the series has sizable amount of female fans despite it being a raunchy echi comedy. There's numerous reasons for this but one reason it's unironically a good magical girl series, just with the magical girls acting more adult. The series is full of feminine iconography and while it's in a crude sense Panty uses and enjoys her femininity in terms of her sex appeal. For a lot of us, Panty and Stocking's viceful desires towards things like lust or gluttony are actually fairly relatable adult problems, even if obviously exaggerated and played comedically here. Panty and Stocking are the kind of friends I would want to have in real life because despite almost being cartoon characters and being completely they're just very affable and enjoyable to spend time with due to their endearing flaws.

3 Flaws:

Number 0 is obviously gonna be the fact that there's no season 2 and there never will be 😢

1: I mentioned P&S has a lot of sexual humor, but it also has a lot of gross-out humor and I definitely don't like that nearly as much. I don't like gross-out in general nor do I understand the appeal of it. While Panty and Stocking's doesn't make me feel disgusted because the art style is so abstracted, it's neither pleasent or funny.

2: This is a rather unpopular opinion for fans of P&S, but I actually am not that big a fan of Scanty and Kneesocks. In general I'm not fond of villains that are evil counterparts to the protagonists, but beyond that they just lack a certain malice. They were quite intimidating in their first episode and they were clearly menancing when Panty was by herself and without her powers, but Panty and Stocking beat them so thoroughly in every encounter that I didn't feel any sense of threat when they arrived and their affable evil shtick I didn't love, I thought was fine but I wasn't super in love with it like some people to be. The bigger reason I don't like them that much is I thought the biggest strength of P&S was it's versatility and ability to just do any nonsense it wanted and when Scanty and Kneesocks showed up the show got regular plot elements that limited what it could do that episode.

3: I know it's deliberate and all, and this is a taste thing but the world of Panty and Stocking is a bit too amoral for my tastes. Panty and Stocking are heroes in the loosest sense of the world who would screw over others for their own amusement, and the world they inhabit is a hormonal anarchic world of people screwing each over. I'm kind of saccharine in my tastes, if my other favorite series haven't demonstrated this already, and the world of P&S seems so chaotic that it disconnects from me at times.

My Favorite Part:

My Favorite ep is Ghost: The Phantom of Daten City. I thought it was a really sweet story about how love makes people want to better for their loved ones, and it was one of the few eps where Panty and Stocking try to tell a more serious story. I think it was really effective, especially as prior eps did set up that Panty and Stocking do care about each other as sisters. It's also the only time a ghost was beaten not by violence but just through showing compassion which was sweet.