The same day you posted that my local newspaper (not in Japan) posted a rather positive story about 10-year-old girls in mixed martial-arts tournaments. And how it apparently empowers them if they ignore a bloody nose...
A friend of mine lost a finger and almost lost his hand doing routine maintenance on a tank tread - it was just a moment of absent-mindedness, but the kind of thing that comes to mind when I tried to watch that anime. A bit of difference between being maimed for life doing ROUTINE work and a broken nose or even limb during a violent competition.
It's like... There's anime that has a grounding in reality, or establishes rules that are relatively close to reality. You don't expect the characters in Ouran High School Host Club to suddenly sprout guns from their asses or become planar-traveling sorcerers or battle ghosts with flung charms - it's about a really rich group of people and a poor scholarship student.
Girls Und Panzer has as its defining statement that these are real tanks, either originals or replicas mostly indistinguishable from the real thing - has the art to back that up - and that these real tanks are being driven in competitions which are treated very seriously.
Then it pulls a reality-breaking stunt like "Oh, this tank has been underwater for years, we're going to pull it out and salvage it in a day or two!" when it would be a rusted-solid hulk barely useful for scrap metal. Or has the girls operating the tanks in shirtsleeves, bare hands, and no helmets, and actually being able to HEAR anything after firing the main gun with the hatch open.
It is PANDERING. Blatant fanservice. "You like tanks? You like schoolgirls? Well look no further!"
Feh.
A bit of fanservice is fine, in its place, when it has
plot and
characters and
worldbuilding backing it up. Everything in GuP is just about how much schoolgirl and tank they can cram into it with a minimum of anything else.
The only difference between it and something like the Queen's Blade anime is the direction of the fanservice.
Or maybe I'm just getting annoyed by fanservice in my old age. When the Strike Witches anime shoved a little girl's crotch in my face in the first thirty seconds, I was
done. If I wanted to look at little girl's crotches, I'd be reading lolicon manga. When I watch a war anime involving magic, I want something like, well.... Saga of Tanya the Evil.