Toumei Shoujo Ea

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 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 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.

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Tropes used in Toumei Shoujo Ea include:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Fan Service: For obvious reasons.
• First Girl Wins: It's not Ea, although it's close.
• I Can Explain: The girlfriend is not happy to discover Ea appearing in his room, nude.
• I Just Want to Be Normal
• 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.
• 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.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: This series was never released on DVD in Japan. (However, even though the original visual novel Machi is out of print, it was later re-released on PSP.)
  • It was, however, recently uploaded in full to YouTube, but it's no longer there
• 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.
• 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.
• Otaku O'Clock/Watershed: One of the more extreme examples — every episode has quite a bit of female nudity, and Scenery Censor is only barely in play.
• 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.
• Stunt Casting: Played with. The actress who played Ea is an inversion -- she was a complete unknown, picked because she was attractive and talented... but mostly because she was willing to stay nude the entire series. It was also a career-killing role, as she apparently did no other roles after Toumei Shoujo Ea. The rest of the cast was fairly well known at the time, both as musicians and as actors/actresses.
• Thanks for the Mammary: How the hero meets Ea. To be fair, she was walking in the middle of the sidewalk while nude and invisible.
• 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.
• 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 Men in Black's 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.
• 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.