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Spice and Wolf
狼と香辛料
2008 · TV series · 24 min episodes · 2 seasons
AnimationDramaScience FictionFantasy
Lawrence, a traveling merchant searching for profit, finds a naked girl with the ears and tail of a wolf asleep in his cart. Her name is Holo – a harvest goddess with an untamed beast lurking inside who longs to return to her beloved northern home. Armed with his street smarts and her animal instincts, a simple peddler and a forgotten deity begin a journey through the wild countryside. Along their path, the riches of happiness shall be reaped, even as the bankruptcy which dwells in the human heart is exposed.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
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2 comments on Hacker News
There's a lot of good anime without fanservice if you find that sort of stuff icky, in all genres too.
* The Promised Neverland (Thriller / Shonen)
* Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle (Comedy)
* Spirited Away (And really, virtually everything by Miyazaki has no fanservice)
* Oddtaxi (Film Noir / Zootopia world)
* Little Witch Academia (Iyashikei / Healing genre / School)
* Full Metal Alchemist (Battle / Epic Journey anime)
* Fate / Zero (while the Fate/series in general has fanservice and/or harem tropes, Fate/Zero has none)
* Your Lie in April (Romance / Drama)
I know some people just find the fanservice scenes icky, so I try to keep an eye out for the fanservice-free shows for them.
There are also some kinds of nudity which are more artistic in nature rather than fanservice. I think Spice and Wolf handled that sort of thing well for example: Holo's occasional nudity is somewhat representative of her Wolf Goddess form / Pagan diety background, and I don't think it was really used too much for what most would call fanservice (and certainly fit the setting of "Pagan Diety travels across Europe with Merchant").
There's a manga called Monster by Naoki Urasawa. It's considered one of the best ever written both in and outside of Japan. Guillermo del Toro at one point tried to produce a film for it. It's a post-Cold War psychological thriller set in Germany and Czechoslovakia. It tackles quite a number of questions regarding the nature of evil. I believe it has a full English translation. If not, there's probably a comparable scanlation for it using some Google-fu.
There's a light novel series by the name of Spice and Wolf. It's fully translated in English. It's about a trader, a wolf goddess, and their adventures in capitalism-related escapades as they make their way across medieval Europe.
Both of them also have anime adaptations that are close to its source material in case your kids get bored (although Spice and Wolf's is incomplete).
And, while it's not a comic book, Anthem is a novella by Ayn Rand that depicts a world set in the future without the word "I" and how , in spite of this, one man rediscovers individuality.
The subject matter for all three of these works is thought-provoking enough and appropriately challenging for 13 year-olds