A six-episode Japanese Live-Action TV show based on a Visual Novel, Toumei Shoujo Ea (Invisible Girl Ea) is about a woman who, um, turns invisible. However, clothing tends to make her invisibility fail, and she can't turn it on or off—it's almost always stuck on. In addition, bright lights, static electricity and several other random things can cause it to abruptly turn off.
Originally a proposed chapter to the canceled sequel to Machi, a Visual Novel game in Japan for the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, the script was picked up for a specific drama miniseries hour. Several other manga, dating sims, et alia got the live action treatment in this slot — "Hen" comes to mind — but Ea is one of the more memorable ones. It gamed some notoriety in Japan due to the nudity — it was a TV show past the Watershed hour, but still managed to show Ea completely nude in every single episode — the only exception being her pubic hair due to that being too much even for Japan.
Yes, Most Writers Are Male is in full effect here.
The story revolves around Youta, an Unlucky Everydude medical student who discovers Ea, and tries to protect her from the (quite literal) Men in Black who are trying to find Ea and dissect her to recreate her powers. The general flow of the series is the hero's Tsundere girlfriend not understanding and their attempts at finding a cure for Ea's condition, while the MIB constantly hunt them.
This game/series provides examples of:
- Accidental Pervert: The hero.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ea's cured, but she doesn't get the boy.
- Blessed with Suck / Cursed with Awesome: She's invisible. She can't turn it off. The power tends to turn off on its own. It might be killing her. The government want to cut her up.
- Chroma Key: Done very obviously in some scenes with Ea (a certain scene with a
supposed toweling off comes to mind), averted with quite a few others where Ea interacts with the hero or something in the scene directly. Amusingly, whatever Chroma Key technique they used manages to make her areolae very obviously stick out. - Contrived Coincidence: There are many common things which disable her powers and cause her pain:
- Static electricity.
- Bright light, such as light reflected off a mirror.
- Being touched (by clothes, for example).
- Being photographed via flash photography, minus the pain, which is a good thing when trying to take a memento photo in a booth on a date.
- The couple times Kyouko sees Ea, Ea happens to be completely visible and she doesn't become invisible in front of Kyouko. It's particularly odd since Kyouko read Youta's notes about Ea and was understandably skeptical that Ea turns invisible.
- The lightning that strikes Ea comes literally out of nowhere. It wasn't even cloudy before or after she's hit.
- Convenient Decoy Cat: In the first episode, the boy and the invisible girl are hiding from The Men in Black in a pile of very clean garbage bags. The Men in Black pass the pile by, then turn back and fire! But it's only a kitten.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: The epilogue shows Kyouko is now much nicer and openly affectionate towards Youta.
- Exposed to the Elements: Completely averted — it's almost winter, snow is starting to fall, and Ea is in danger of frostbite and hypothermia due to not having a safe place to hide.
- Fanservice: For obvious reasons.
- First Girl Wins: It's not Ea, although it's close.
- Food Slap: While in a club, Ea performs a stealth drink-to-the-face attack on Youta's girlfriend Kyouko, that escalates into a full fledged drink-based Food Fight.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Ea immediately starts acting jealous towards Kyouko. Rather harsh since Kyouko was Youta's girlfriend before Ea even met him. And, of course, Kyouko reciprocates the feeling when she learns about Ea.
- I Can Explain: The girlfriend is not happy to discover Ea appearing in his room, nude.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Ea, for obvious reasons.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Ea develops feelings for Youta, but she eventually believes he would be better with Kyouko, so she tries to push him towards her.
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Not intentionally, though — the invisibility formula prohibits her from wearing clothing most of the time. Still, her reaction to suddenly becoming visible is usually little more than a look of Dull Surprise. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, the hero walks past Ea, now perpetually visible and clothed, painting the dancing scene at a park. He doesn't recognize her. Which is fair, cause it's the only time we've seen Ea clothed the entire series. Subverted at least once when one of Youta's friends walks in while Ea is semi-visible. She quickly covers her breasts before fading to full invisibility.
- Invisible Main Character: Ea, both taking the trope up to 11 and deconstructing it at the same time. She's invisible, but her powers aren't reliable enough to hide her from the audience for more than a few minutes at a time.
- Invisible Streakers Are Funny: One of the inspirations for the trope. Not only do Ea's powers not affect her clothing, but clothing causes her powers to malfunction and, er, expose her.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: Including cure a woman of compulsive invisibility, apparently. Although, to be fair, it was established fairly early in the story that her powers have something to do with electricity. In fact, Youta was going to try a more controlled, but extremely strong, electric charge to try to cure Ea before the lightning strike.
- The Men in Black: The two government agents, who can track Ea, have various stunning and invisibility-disabling weapons, and generally harass the main characters the entire series.
- Most Writers Are Male: Somewhat justified as it was originally going to be a visual novel scenario, which would have meant manga-style drawings, not live action. Still doesn't excuse the fact that any justification, no matter how flimsy, is used to show Ea's naked body on the screen.
- Ms. Fanservice: Ea herself — an attractive woman who has little reaction to being nude, and a justification/requirement to stay that way 24×7, often in very public places? Oh-kay.
- Never Found the Body: Ea's body, specifically. Mainly because she's not dead, the lightning bolt cured her invisibility... sometime later, apparently. Justified as the shocks that caused her powers to get weaker had a delayed effect in the past.
- No One Should Survive That!: While it is not unheard of happening in real life, Ea survives a direct hit by lightning.
- Power Incontinence: Ea has no control over her invisibility. It's always on, but it doesn't always work properly.
- Scenery Censor: Amazingly, not much. It's painfully obvious at first glance that Ea is actually nude; her breasts and butt are seen in every episode at least once; and the only thing they censor the entire series — using scenery, camera angles, CGI effects and posing — is her pubic hair. The ending credits even play over a barely censored but also very obviously nude Ea running around in a public park, albeit with extra CGI effect. Watch it yourself
. - Thanks for the Mammary: How the hero meets Ea, albeit unintentionally. To be fair, she was walking in the middle of the sidewalk while nude and invisible. Plus, she doesn't seem to really mind.
- They Would Cut You Up: The premise of the series: The Men in Black want to get Ea back, so they can cut her up and figure out how to duplicate her powers.
- Tsundere: Kyouko (At first. She appears to be much more openly affectionate in the epilogue.)
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Averted a bit — people do keep noticing when the hero stops to talk to Ea, and he constantly has to change locations. However, unless it's funny, no one notices Ea's rather frequent — albeit brief — lapses into visibility, and those who do notice never interact with the cast again, or handwave it off as a hallucination.
- Visible Invisibility: Every single modern variant is used in the series: When going visible due to her powers malfunctioning, Ea has a Predator-style blue or red CGI outline effect depending on her health; When under the effects of the villains' anti-invisibility raygun, she blinks between complete visibility and a green lightning effect; when her powers are temporarily wearing off due to emotion, she gains a translucent blue ghostlike feel to her; when her powers are completely on, she's invisible to everyone, including the audience; and in at least one scene they just attach a string to a garbage bag to show where she's supposedly lifting it.
- It is, however, important to know that due to the producer being male, even the scenes where Ea is invisible to everyone were shot with Ea standing around naked — they almost always have a split second of her powers malfunctioning while interacting with something in the environment just to justify it. Basically, if it was physically possible to include Ea's actress naked in a scene, they did it.
- Watershed: One of the more extreme examples — every episode has quite a bit of female nudity, and Scenery Censor is only barely in play.
- Weaksauce Weakness: Ea's powers. Her invisibility can be disabled by just about anything: Water, bright light, adrenaline, being touched, random chance, static electricity, wearing clothes...
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: A variant — The hero is back with the Tsundere oujo girlfriend, thinking that Ea was killed by the lightning bolt. However, the audience notices a fully dressed and visible Ea is in the park, painting the hero and herself dancing.
