With over 4 million articles, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, whether you're throwing a term paper together at the last minute, or looking up horrific disease pictures to see if it matches what you have. But follow enough links, and you get sucked into some seriously strange places. We explore some of Wikipedia's oddities in our 4,272,039-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This Week’s Entry: Anime Bath Scene Wiki
What It’s About: This technically isn’t a Wikipedia page, but an independent wiki hosted by Wikia.com. But when reader PugsMalone suggested it, we couldn’t look away. The site is an exhaustive list of bath and shower scenes from all forms of anime—comics, films, even video games. The link above is to the censored version, but there is an uncensored version (NSFW, obviously). However, the main page insists, in bold and all caps, that this is NOT A PORN/HENTAI SITE. A quick browse of the site affirms this, as while a few of the bath scenes have romantic overtones, and a few even have some (cartoon) nudity, many are simply one character or another having a good old scrub.
Strangest Fact: First, that this exists. Second, while the site has numerous entries covering specific anime works, characters, and scenes involving the bath, it also has entries like “Towel” “Shower” and “Shampoo,” explaining what those things are and how they are used.
Controversy: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that this is the Internet, there are maddeningly detailed discussions on how the site should be arranged. Says user Watermaiden15: “there is [sic] too many categories dedicated to just episode #s. Having something like "163rd Episode Shower Scene" and "163rd Episode Bath Scene" is too much when both of those would probably only have 1 thing. Merging them to "163rd Episode Bathing Scene" is more efficient because then its covered all of it one as well.”
Thing We Were Happiest To Learn: Childhood favorite the rubber duck has an entry, with 34 listed appearances in anime ranging from Powerpuff Girls Z to Soul Eater. The site also breaks down separate lists of male and female characters who have bathed with a rubber duck. And, for some reason, there’s a list of 10 “Luckiest Rubber Ducks,” with users allowed to vote on which rubber duck “you wish you were.” Upon closer inspection, “Lucky” in fact means “used to cover up parts of the female anatomy,” and now we’re suddenly unhappy to learn innocent childhood favorites like the rubber duck and the Powerpuff Girls have found their way onto this (NOT A PORN/HENTAI) site.
Thing We Were Unhappiest To Learn: Maybe “Unhappiest” isn’t the right word here; it's more like “most disconcerted.” Classic arcade game Street Fighter somehow managed to spawn not only a Raul Julia-starring film, but an animated series, which ran for two seasons on the USA network, and a Japanese-made animated film, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. The animated movie has a nude scene (which takes place in the shower, naturally). Kudos to the filmmakers for appealing to 13-year-old boys on every possible level, but there’s something extra unseemly about seeing nipples in a cartoon about a video game about hitting the right combination of buttons to make your guy shoot a fireball.
Also noteworthy: There’s an “Off Screen” category, for baths that are merely implied. Lots of links to characters in bathrobes with towels wrapped around their heads, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: Virtually every anime mentioned has a link to its corresponding Wikipedia page. Sadly, there’s no link to the Wikipedia pages for Towel, Shower, or Shampoo.