Charger Girl (Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!!) is a manga series by Bow Ditama, legendary manga artist of kiss×sis and Mahoromatic. This is decidedly more Fanservice-laden than the latter but not nearly as outright adult-oriented as the former. The manga was serialized in the seinen magazine Comic Gum from 2006 to 2013.
Plug, our heroine, works for Neodym, a corporation in "Life Core", an alternate universe with hyper advanced technology compared to ours. Having discovered an alternate universe next door — Earth — Neodym developed technology to teleport between the worlds and help depressed people.
By electrocuting them until they cheer up.
A 10-episode anime adaptation aired in 2009. The anime has been licensed by Crunchyroll, and can be viewed here
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Character page is a work-in-progress.
Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!! provides examples of:
- All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: Happens a lot to Millie in the Show Within a Show. She seems to enjoy it too... The show itself doesn't do too much to alleviate this perception, either, with all of the fanservice.
- Alternate Universe: Plug's universe, "Life Core".
- Batter Up!: Sento uses a baseball bat as his weapon so he can whack either Plug or Arresta in the face.
- Battle Aura: Arresta forms one at the end of episode 7 after Plug forced her to do largely humiliating things, promising to delete the video of her crying, but showing it to the other girls anyway. Plug totally deserved whatever happened despite recovering in the hospital.
- Beach Episode: Episode 5.
- Beginner's Luck: When Arresta challenges Sento to a duel to see who can zap more people, he manages to beat her simply by looking at visual cues rather than being over-reliant on the technology the charger girls use. Which apparently was something they were taught but likely forgot about due to over-relying on the technology.
- Berserk Button: Do not ignore Sento, even if you are a pair of cute magical girls getting into an extremely
Les Yay catfight. - Breast Expansion: Millie's Dark Magical Girl nemesis gets a quickie augmentation to prepare for battle.
- Bland-Name Product: Plug and Sento pass a Wc Donald's in episode 4.
- Blue with Shock: Happens to multiple characters, but Plug does it the most.
- Butt-Monkey: Oddly, Plug seems to be both this and Morality Pet for Sentou and Arresta, at the same time.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Arresta gets mad at Plug in episode 8 when she finds out the latter managed to charge someone on her own (despite Plug not being able to use her hands/arms since they were still recovering). Then hears how Sento helped her out, and imagining the two charging up. Arresta really loses it when Plug casually mentions getting a massage from Sento as well, although all he did was massage her hands a bit, not that Arresta cares by that point.
- Clothing Damage: Usually occurs to Millie, the anime character in the Show Within a Show, but happens once in a while to Plug and Arresta.
- Color Failure: Happens to several characters on occasion.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: In episode 10, Rona Elmo makes quick work of both Reika and Kuran.
- Crystal-Ball Scheduling: The Show Within a Show usually mentions things that are relevant to the plot of the current episode, such as when the bad guy steals treasure from a town in episode 4, in which a thief stole the student council's funds from the school Hakone and Iono attend.
- A Day in the Limelight: Episode 7 focuses largely on Arresta in a Meido outfit.
- Darker and Edgier: The manga, mostly because the anime ended before the Wham Episode of a genuine antagonist that wants to murder the cast to cover up his corporate crimes, and performs actual, non-comedic rape upon his unfortunate assistant. Despite the attempts to keep things comedic to a degree, it only gets worse from there.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Happens to Arresta, the Discharge Audit ladies, and the little girl who was draining people's power.
- Determinator: When it comes to life or death, Plug is serious.
- Digital Piracy Is Evil: The anime has various characters warn you of this at the beginning of every episode.
- Epiphany Therapy:
- A variant and a subversion. Neodym's technology can forcibly make someone cheerful, but you find out later that it's only temporary, and unless the underlying issues are resolved, it's not permanent. This makes Aresta's attitude to the whole affair rather terrifying.
- It gets worse, which Plug realizes in episode 2: What happens if the person is dealing with stress via being depressed instead of, say, going postal? Or if they're depressed due to them making bad decisions — and cheering them up will just keep them making the bad decisions? And so, Arresta's casual mentioning of "repeaters" (people who have had to be charged up over and over again) appearing more often gets even worse...
- Eyes Always Shut: Kuran.
- Fanservice: The manga has a few discreet instances, that need close attention to be noticed. The anime... well... can you say "nothing else on the screen"?
- For the Evulz: Seems to be Rona Elmo's motive for draining people's power at random, because she gets bored due to them not being able to notice her and play.
- Genki Girl: Plug.
- Guilty Pleasure: For reasons similar to the also fanservice-laden Queen's Blade.
- Heroic BSoD: Iono goes through one after a thief breaks into her school and steals the student council's money and her gift to Sento because she forgot to lock them up even after being told to.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Sentou and Arresta, the 'good guys', are quick to express themselves through extreme violence, yet never seem cross the Moral Event Horizon.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Rona Elmo's motive for draining people's power when they can't see her.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sento.
- Knight of Cerebus: The leader of Neodym Corp., General Manager Invar, who manipulates Plug from behind the scenes, and then gets Sento warped into the Parallel World he's basically in charge of to get the main cast murdered to cover up his crimes. For an idea of just how serious this is compared to the rest of the story, his Bridge Bunny, Leak, is in a sexual relationship with him — until he gets irritated at the mere idea that there might be a Spanner in the Works when his spying is noticed, at which point he sodomizes her against her consent for letting it happen, and leaves a lingering threat that it'll happen repeatedly as punishment.
- Latex Space Suit: The charging outfit of Neodym, a skintight stripperiffic piece with a tail. The other main outfit they wear is a stylized (but still sexy) Office Lady outfit. Cleavage windows, front and back. The tail is actually important — it's a ground. It prevents leakages from damaging the suit, in cases of failed charges. (Then again, from ep. 2 after, no-one seems to use them anymore.)
- Love Bubbles: Aresta gets them upon seeing Sento for the first time, right before he hits her with a bat so hard she enters orbit. Amusingly, Sento didn't even notice it wasn't Plug until afterwards, when he realized hitting Aresta felt different. Don't worry about Aresta, though, she's apparently a masochist and... "doesn't mind".
- Magical Girl: An interesting take on it, as Plug works for a Magical Girl corporation, "Neodym," as a "charging lady".
- Megaton Punch:
- Rare example where a male does it to a female. While Played for Laughs, it does seem a bit more disturbing than when a woman does it to a man.
- Plug and Arresta both do this to each other as well. Often while in view of Sento, who then beats them both up.
- Mood Whiplash: Episode 6, unlike the ones before and after this one, it was dangerously serious for the series. Plug wanted to help charge a counter-current victim much against the company's advice but she does so anyways, by the end of the episode it was successful but Plug was taken in and is in CRITICAL CONDITION. Plug ALMOST DIED in the series!
- Ms. Fanservice: Although all the female characters are involved in a lot of fanservice, the first prize belongs to Millie from the Show Within a Show whose sole purpose is providing a naughty scene Once per Episode without even needing to tie it into the main plot somehow.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In episode 9, Arresta and Plug both run away from the Audit discharger ladies. They think they're clever, but Plug ends up getting caught, and Arresta luckily runs into Sento who thinks the audit ladies are bad, and defends both of the girls. Towards the end of the episode, once he learns who they are and what they were trying to do, he once again beats both of the girls up for misleading him and apologizes profusely for mistaking the situation.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: While Arresta isn't a bad guy (although antagonistic to Plug), during episode 4 Plug and Sento are both trying hard but having no luck whatsoever finding the thief who stole some money and Iono's gift from the school Hakone and Iono attend. Arresta sees that he's trying really hard to help Plug, but decides that she needs to do her job. Shortly afterward she zaps a random person needing a charge, who then puts on a hat and glasses, and decides to turn himself in, thus solving the crime and recovering Iono's stolen gift. Even Arresta wonders what she just did.
- Oblivious to Love: Sento, so much so that both Hakone and Plug berate him for it.
- Omake: Ramps up the fanservice beyond the plot-justified quotient with pinups in every Eye Catch, Moe and every fanservice trope in Teasers and Stingers, and molestation and rape victim Millie.
- Potty Failure: All of the girls frequently wet themselves in fear or pain. Plug does this the most often, however; every single episode will have at least one scene of her urinating as she is being hit or while she is unconscious. Millie also does this often as she is tortured and killed.
- The Power of Friendship: Happens at the end of episode 12 when the other charger girls show up to help Plug and Arresta.
- Pretty Free Loader: While they don't live at Sento's apartment, Plug often goes there to watch tv, with Arresta following her shortly afterwards.
- Punch-Clock Hero: Arresta. She will not go one second past what she needs to do to get her paycheck, even literally aborting a charge when her shift ended. On the flip side, she's frightfully good at her job. Arresta inadvertently helps solve the problem in episode 4 while doing her job. Plug was trying to find out who broke into the school and stole the student council's funds along with Iono's gift. After Arresta zaps the perp, he suddenly decides to turn himself in.
- Rock Beats Laser: Variant. In one episode, Sento and Aresta have a competition to see who can find more depressed people. Despite the fact that she can fly and thus cover more ground than Sento can, she loses because she relied too much on using the Life Checker (a tool that tells the wearer how depressed someone is), while Sento looked for the physical signs of depression and just used the Life Checker to confirm his findings.
- Running Gag: Someone will end up losing bladder control. Sento will beat the everloving crap out of Plug and Arresta. Arresta's a real masochist. The Millie Show Within a Show will get more and more risqué and over the top.
- Millie insisting "I won't lose!" in tears while restrained and physically abused and/or sexually violated. She's never shown winning in any encounter; every episode ends with her brutal rape and death.
- Scary Shiny Glasses: Sento's boss at the diner.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Seems to be Plug's motivation for apparently not zapping as many people as she should be. She does tend to suffer for it, however, usually in the form of reduced salary. The Boss does understand that she has an advantage over Arresta because she mainly has NO REPEATERS as a result of this trope. Her one true repeater (the counter-current target) is due to events that are outside her control.
- Shipper on Deck: Hakone seems to encourage Iono to ask her brother out, although the latter is a Shrinking Violet on that issue.
- Shock and Awe: Electricity, put to a decidedly more generous use than usual.
- Show Within a Show: Ai no Senshi Sweetie Millie, the naughty magical girl show that Plug watches. In public. On daytime TV. In Japan's version of K-Mart's Electronics Section.
- Shy Finger-Twiddling: Several characters, and when Plug's hands are healing from burns, she manages the gesture with her bunny ears, er terminals, blast it, whatever-those-things-on-top-of-her-head-are.
- Thanks for the Mammary: Sento accidentally does this to Arresta as she flies him into the sky to escape some police. Unlike most other examples of this trope, Arresta seems to enjoy him groping her.
- Theme Naming: Plug, Aresta (lightning arrester), Captain Pulse, and in fact all people from Life Core have surnames and given names related to electricity or electrical equipment. Reika Galvani's name refers to the Italian physicist Luigi Galvani, an important figure]] in the study of bioelectricity.
- This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: The foul-mouthed, angry plush mascot critter named "Bitch-kun" in the Show Within a Show.
- Too Kinky to Torture: That bat hitting thing? Apparently Aresta likes it. But only when Sento does it to her. When she does it to herself, it just gives her a headache. Did we mention the urine? Not to mention the hordes of naked Aresta angels flying to the sky the second time she gets hit with it?
- Transformation Sequence: Flashy and fanservicey, but as the narration explains, the actual suiting up occurs in less than a second, so the sequence is more for the amusement of the audience. Notably, Plug urinates when she transforms, possibly because of the tightness of the uniform pressing onto her groin and into her crotch. When Aresta finally does her own, Plug records it so Senta can watch the same scene the audience sees.
- Tsundere: Aresta, although she tries for a Sugar-and-Ice Personality, which fails.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Ai no Senshi Sweetie Millie, Plug's favorite TV Show from our world, is essentially a hardcore tentacle rape porno that plays on daytime TV. No-one seems disturbed by this at all, even when it's playing on all the display unit TVs in stores, on a TV with children around, etc., etc.
- Wham Episode: Episode 6 is already a nasty one where Plug carbonizes her arms due to an excessive leak of electrical energy and the safety suit prototype not withstanding it. The manga then follows this up at Chapter 22, where General Manager Invar reveals his true colors, rapes his assistant simply because he was agitated someone realized he was spying on them, and he forces Sento, Plug and Arresta to be warped to their world where he can try to have them all executed.
- Would Hit a Girl: Repeatedly and without apology. Sento doesn't pull his punches, with either his bat or his words, which can be gratuitously blunt. In any other show this would be serial dog-kicking, but here it's played for laughs.
- You Are Not Alone: What this series are all about. Invoked by Sento in episode 12.
- You Can See Me?: The charger girls are quite surprised that Sento can not only see them, but he can also touch them as well, usually in the form of a Mega Ton Punch, or Batter Up!. In contrast, most people are generally unaware of their presence, and they can also go through walls and floors on Earth.
