Panty Fighter

The high frequency of Panty Shots and Clothing Damage is justified artistically.

"The spirit of the legendary San Gokushi Period (panties) is alive and well within a secret (panties) system of High School warriors, skilled (boobs) in varied styles of martial arts and constantly (panties) at war with one another. [...] And yes, that's exactly what watching this show is like."

— JesuOtaku's summary of Ikki Tousen

Basically, any series with a heavy emphasis on nubile teenage girls involved in martial arts or other forms of combat. Their age can vary from highschool to college. Either way, they'll mainly fight in school uniform to further entice the audience. Also, expect Clothing Damage to be frequent and inevitable, as will upskirt camera angles, close-ups of bouncing breasts, cleavage, and so on. If any of them favors kicks, so much the better.

The cast is likely to be predominantly female to facilitate as much eye candy as possible, or the setting will be at an All Girl School. The plot itself will usually (but not always) center around some sort of tournament, or an ongoing feud between different highschools to justify the need for so many combat ready schoolgirls. Though they can just as easily be junior agents serving under a team of adults.

Compare and often overlaps with Catfight because Girl on Girl Is Hot. Contrasts with Designated Girl Fight, which is when writers restrict females on opposing sides to fighting each other, to prevent violence between men and women. Compare Modesty Shorts, which has the girls wear shorts under their skirts to prevent this. Contrast Magic Skirt, the antithesis of panty shots.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Agent Aika, the cast is almost entirely female, most of whom wear ridiculously short skirts, which they fight in. And when any of them are knocked out, their bodies will usually lie in such a way that their panties are left almost fully exposed.
• Arcade Gamer Fubuki parodies this trope: Exposing her "passion panties" gives Fubuki magical video game playing abilities.
• A chapter of Bakuman。 introduced a new manga within the manga, appropriately named "Panty Flash Fighter". Apparently, there are girls competing in a tournament where the goal is to expose their opponent's panties.
• Cross Ange combines this with Mecha, an island full of outcasted girls, and occasional musical numbers.
• Freezing is a Darker and Edgier take on the genre. Clothes aren't the only thing that get shredded...
• Great Teacher Onizuka: Ai Tokiwa gives quite a few panty shots when using her tae kwon do. She's the only character to do so, however.

• Highschool of the Dead often makes use of upskirt shots during tense scenes, or the girls' skirts will simply flare dramatically, both in and out of combat situations. Suffice to say, you'll be seeing almost as many undies as "not zombies".
• Ikki Tousen (pictured above) and its sequels are one of the most flagrant examples. Virtually every fight will feature rampant upskirt camera angles and Clothing Damage, along with frequent close-ups of the girls' panty-clad crotches. Which is the main reason the series is Best Known for the Fanservice.
• Kandagawa Jet Girls sort of zig-zags the genre. If anything, this series is more of a "Panty Racer" with combat elements involved, but not violent enough to be considered a "Fighter" per se.
• Keijo!!!!!!!! is about a fictional sport where swimsuit-clad girls try to knock each other off a floating platform using their boobs and butts. The sport was practically invented for the purpose of fanservice.
• Kill la Kill. For starters, heroine Ryuko Matoi and her rival Satsuki Kiryuin fight each other while wearing Stripperiffic Sailor Fukus. Then, the show introduces an evil clothing corporation bent on world domination and a resistance movement named "Nudist Beach" who oppose them while wearing nothing but strategically-placed bandoliers. Then.... it gets weirder. Luckily for the ladies watching, there's copious male nudity too.
• Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka sort of leans towards this with the designs of most of the female cast being rather revealing and all the gratuitous fanservice featured in most scenes, fighting or otherwise.
• In Maken-ki!, you'll be seeing girls' underwear fairly often regardless of whether they're fighting or not. And even includes an instance of attempted rape during one of the later fight scenes for the sake of drama and fanservice.
• Master of Martial Hearts, like Queen's Blade in premise; an all-female combat tournament with a variety of unique participants, each representing some Moe or fetish. Lampshaded in a Meido café episode, where Aya is declared Moe when she wins in a Cat Girl outfit. Also, the most shocking subversion of the genre: the final fight is quick, brutal, and ends in a bloody Discretion Shot. Flashbacks to earlier fights show more blood than the original scenes, and later fights include bloody gun violence and neck-breaking. There is also quite a hefty deconstruction in that the losers are turned into brainwashed sex slaves, and everything was created as an absurdly complex attempt at getting back at the protagonist's mother for vile things she did in the past. This is all presented in the last episode in a barrage of reveals that is as disgusting and horrifying to the protagonist as it is to the audience. Of course, as the show up to that point has gleefully indulged in every single trope of the genre, only to start wagging its finger at the audience at the literal last minute, this rings of a Broken Aesop writ large.
• Najica Blitz Tactics has its camera angle constantly well below skirt level, fighting or not.
  • Unsurprising, since Studio Fantasia created Aika as well.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi, has unsurprisingly done this at times. Notable was this being an Enforced Trope during the martial arts tournament at Mahora Academy. The organizer decides that Setsuna's and Asuna's fight would be too boring without some Fanservice so puts them in short-skirted maid outfits.
• While more subtle than others, Project A-Ko has A-ko's calf-length skirt flapping in the breeze high enough to consistently flash her white panties, especially in fights, but only for brief moments instead of a good look at them.
• The Queen's Blade anime makes sure that at least one woman's breasts are exposed in every episode, though not always necessarily through fighting (though it happens the most during.)
• The manga version of Rosario + Vampire focuses more on the Fighter element than the panties, but when it was turned into an anime, the amount of panty shots increased. Early on, at least, it seemed the manga went out of its way to avoid this trope, at least in the case of Moka. Any shot that would have flashed her panties is obscured by word balloons or debris.
• Ranma ½:
  • For Kodachi's first appearance, she's in her Catholic schoolgirl uniform, and her panties are visible during a backflip (both in the anime and the manga). Most of the time, though, she's instead wearing a leotard.
  • Rarely with Akane. In the episode "A Sudden Storm of Love", her white undies are seen better in a freeze-frame from above, as she fights off a track runner among the other sporty male students pursuing and harassing her, and she front-flips.
• Sekirei swings wildly between the fanservice aspects and serious fighting, with 108 beautiful aliens fighting to be the last one standing. Clothing Damage is a viable tactic, since it exposes an opponent to a One-Hit Kill.
• So, I Can't Play H!:
  • Not a fight goes by without Lisara's battle gown being dissolved by enemy attack, or as a result of her powers being drained. Which gives Ryosuke and the audience ample opportunity to enjoy the eye candy.
  • It also happens to Iria both times she's defeated by Lisara. The second KO shreds Iria's leotard; leaving her sprawled on her back, in only her panties.
• Strike Witches, because none of the girls are wearing any pants. But they're not panties, so it's no problem.
• Always in To Love Ru and with all the girls, especially when are involved Lala and Yami.
  • Averted in Yami's first appearance. She also block the view to her panties to Principal.
  • Exaggerated in sequel "Darkness". Such as when Lala battled Yami's (Darkness form), during which she was forced to destroy her own panties and 'go commando' for the rest of fight.
• Usagi-chan de Cue!!: Almost every female character wears ultra-short skirts, and the combative Action Girls, namely Inaba and Koshka, routinely high-kick and gymnast flip. It'd be hard not to notice that Inaba's panties have a frilly pocket on the front, as it gets shown many times. Koshka's skirt has a slit up the back to accommodate her swishing tail, so her panties are constantly exposed from the rear and yield a complete view while Inaba has her in a wrestling clinch.
• Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid is by the same people who brought the world Senran Kagura, and it follows in its predecessor's footsteps with great enthusiasm. Between the steamy Yuri makeout sessions that are actually needed to prepare for combat and the Clothing Damage-prone combat itself, there's plenty of titillation for the audience to enjoy.

Comic Books

• The short-lived miniseries X-Men: Phoenix – Legacy of Fire, written for Marvel's MAX label, during the days when they thought they could do manga better than the Japanese. It bombarded pages with so much Fanservice that it all actually had a negative effect with readers.

Sports

• There have been several "Foxy Boxy" leagues since at least the 1980s. Traditional leagues such as WBC, IBA and IFBA tend to discourage the practice, unsurprisingly.
• Cage fighting meanwhile has the Lingerie Fighting Championships, which is exactly what it sounds like.
• Mixed Martial Arts fighter Dennis Hallman wore only a speedo for one of his UFC fights due to a lost bet, which resulted in the audience getting inadvertently flashed mid-fight. UFC president Dana White gave a special bonus to Hallman's opponent for finishing the fight early and getting the speedos out of the octagon.

Video Games

• Dead or Alive (which boasted "Jiggle Physics" when the first couple of games were released). Naturally, the series also capitalized on this by creating a few beach-themed spin-off games.
• The Final Fantasy series does this to several of its female characters. Most notably in Dissidia, where you can pan the camera around to view in between the girls' legs and up their skirts.
• Jingi Storm, released to arcades around the same time as Arcana Heart. It's basically Tekken combined with a softcore eroge. May qualify as a subversion since the players are all male, with their assigned partners providing the eye-candy. The stripping feature was removed post-beta (referred to as Location Test) anyway.
• Panty Party is a literal and parodistic interpretation of the trope. As in, you control floating sentient pairs of panties fighting each other. Interestingly the developers, "Animu Game", are from Taiwan.
• Rumble Roses is an all-girl wrestling series, where the cast dresses up in fetish-themed costumes and duke it out using sexually suggestive submission holds. Part 2 upped the ante with skimpier costumes and by adding "Queen's Match" mode, which allowed the winner of each match to "humiliate" the loser.
• The female characters of Samurai Shodown frequently expose their panties when they are killed. Add in the fact that in Samurai Shodown Sen, the girls usually die with their legs spread wide apart and/or propped up.
  • Mina Majikina is a prime example, as she exposes the panties she is wearing when she does nearly anything, and especially when she dies, where her body falls through the air with her panty-clad crotch and buttocks facing the screen.
  • Suzu from Samurai Shodown Sen also almost always exposes her panties when she is killed, given that some of her death animations involve her spasming with her thighs spread apart, and her body usually lies down with her legs wide open. Even when beheaded, her body staggers backward several steps before collapsing on her back with her legs propped up and spread.
• One of the very first in the actual genre, the Super Famicom Japanese-only Seifuku Densetsu Pretty Fighter featured an all-female cast in various outfits (police woman, gym student in volleyball attire, nurse, Magical-Girl, etc.) in a rather generic fighting game. Yes, there were panty shots, mostly during jumps, with some during kicks. The Sega Saturn saw an Updated Re-release subtitled X that replaced the pixel art with hand-drawn (but much less smoothly animated) sprites and added some new characters. As you may have guessed, the creators took advantage of the new artwork by throwing in quite a few more panty shots.
• The Senran Kagura series. The creator, Kenichirō Takaki, has been famously quoted as starting the series on the 3DS because he wanted to see 3D ninja boobs, and this sentiment describes the games almost perfectly.
• Skullgirls definitely seems unashamed of showing off the undergarments of its cast. It's also not afraid to show some of the more disturbing parts of its cast.
  • Parasoul, Filia, Cerebella, and Valentine are the characters who expose their undergarments the most. Other characters, not so much and/or "why would you want to?!" (Miss Fortune wears short-shorts, Peacock and Squigly wear floor-length gown-dress-things, Painwheel is horribly disfigured, and Double is an Eldritch Abomination).
  • Most panty shots have been patched out of the game. The official reason was to make the game more EVO friendly, though many people were quick to point out this hasn't stopped a lot of other games featured at EVO.
• The Soul Series is also guilty of this, what with the design of some of its female characters' costumes. This was dialed backed a bit in Soulcalibur V (and earlier, with the creation of Hilde, a female knight who wears a full suit of armor in battle).
• The Japanese PC fighter Line-Kill Spirits takes this one step further: players will slowly regenerate damage from attacks unless they can snap a picture of their opponent's panties (exposed by knocking them to the ground or into the air), locking in attack damage.
• Street Fighter:
  • Capcom zigzags the trope with Sakura's character design. While a blatant attempt to appeal to fans of the trope, she technically subverts it by wearing red bloomers under her skirt. But to western gamers, they still look like underwear.
  • Chun Li's leotard (which somewhat resembles panties in appearance while under her Chinese dress) can be seen whenever she uses her Lightning Kick, or her Spinning Bird Kick. Though she subverted the trope during her SF: Alpha incarnation, where she wore a spandex track outfit instead.
  • Cammy fights while wearing a thonged leotard and is famous for her victory pose, where she turns her back to the screen and openly displays her buttocks. While in SSF IV, her pre-fight animation begins with a close-up of her legs, thong, and asscheeks.
  • Taken to extremes and lampshaded by R. Mika's Critical Art intro animation, from the beta version of Street Fighter V. Her thong is even smaller than Cammy's, best seen when the camera zooms in on her buttocks as she poses and smacks her own ass. It ended up actually becoming a problem when ESPN was broadcasting the EVO 2016 tournament, where in between rounds, a player was requested to change her into an alternate costume because her default one was way too steamy for primetime (which also resulted in the game later editing out her ass slap).
  • However, Elena is the series' biggest offender, given she's an African princess who fights in her tribe's native attire. Which consists of nothing but a sarashi tube top, a pair of panties, and multi-colored bracelets.
  • Ibuki in V takes over Sakura's asthetics as the schoolgirl fighter fighting in her uniform and her skirt is much less competent than it was in her similarly themed outfit from the previous game. Ibuki as Sakura is given spats as underwear also but in some outfits she gains panties rather than alternate underwear and the outfits rarely cover her in action. Averted in her original outfit where the question if she even wears underwear was answered as a bonus in her comic.
• Tekken has Julia and Lili frequently exposing their panties when they are fighting due to the short skirts they wear. In Tekken Tag Tournament their underwear is easily shown when they fail at bowling.
• Ayame from the Tenchu series tends to expose her white panties fairly often when she is wearing her kimono outfit, which isn't surprising given that the skirt of her kimono is very short.
• Vanguard Princess although it's a more serious stab at creating Fighting Games than most other examples of its ilk.
• X-Blades, which is basically an attempt to copy Devil May Cry, except the protagonist, Ayumi, is a girl wearing only a bra and a thong. The little of the thong's fabric which covers Ayumi's underparts is stretched tightly over her crotch, clearly accentuating the shape of her labia against the cloth. As the Zero Punctuation review put it, "[we're] not sure she doesn't just have white pubes."

Visual Novels

• Higurashi Daybreak: Female characters do this repeatedly. Lampshaded during Shmion's storyline.

Web Comics

• This is Jinky's go-to fighting style in Banzai Girl, giving she is usually clad in a highly abbreviated school uniform.
• The Panty Bear is downplayed in that it's only the protagonist, Lucia, that does any real asskicking. It's also justified due to her actually being given a pair of panties which gives her superpowers.

Web Original

• Whateley Universe: Team Kimba is not allowed to forget what they were wearing when they first fought the Yama Dojo Ninjas.

Western Animation

• The premise of the episode Grudge Match in Justice League Unlimited. To bring in more money for an underground superpowered fighting ring, the villains featured death matches between various villainesses and brainwashed super heroines.

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