Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: The Nudefighters, or Fanservice as a Deadly Weapon

Here in the second of my weekend posts on plot threads that exploded in the Fourth Revision of Spanner Book 1 while I finish editing its penultimate chapter, there's the idea that I may have put into the Revision 2 version of Chapter 1 but didn't balloon into a central thread until the final version of Chapter 20: the concept of "nudefighting." In Chapters 1 and 3, it involved Shira and her martial-artist friends wearing minimal clothing that can be stripped off in a fight. In Chapter 6, they (and especially Jennifer) stripped down naked to make gangsters and cult priests irrational enough to beat. In Chapters 15 and 20, they took advantage of rainstorms because wet skin is so difficult to hold onto; if Shira had allowed Bart the traction clothes provide, she wouldn't have beaten him in Chapter 20's Team Challenge, and he knows it.

Like I said, wet skin, whether made wet by rain or sweat or other liquid, is very difficult to hold onto. Jennifer also explains that if one gets wounded by bullet or blade while fighting naked, fabric fibers don't get stuck in the wound and infect it, a traditional cause of soldier deaths.

But then from Chapter 21 on, the clothes stay off. The nudefighters leave even the minimal tearable clothing at home, neglected. They even come to school and spend the day as naked as they were when they fought off Klowns and cultists in Chapter 6. One reason given in Chapter 14 is that Jennifer got used to fighting nude when the victorious Conservative Revolutionaries made her a slave soldier and inadvertently made her a legendary warrior who killed 10,000 Caliphate jihadis and came back with a vendetta against the Party. And this dovetails with Shira's inborn perversity and the combination of hatred for her class and lack of prudery that Leila (now the anonymous beauty known as, among other things, the girl with the violet eyes) has. But somehow, as Brandi points out to Jennifer in Chapter 21, for them nudefighting has changed from a fighting tactic into a revolutionary stance against a Conservative Revolution already souring. And the nudefighters who have amazing superpowers use them to get away with it.

But of course it remains primarily a tactic to freak out raging men who hate women and drive them into the irrationality that spells easy defeat. No wonder Shira calls it "fanservice as a deadly weapon." But then, Spanner is after all a story of a revolution against a revolution...