Sometimes it's to keep the series more PG-13~ish. It's like ... tasteful censorship? Maybe. You see this most often in shounen manga where there's a female character that's topless and they either don't draw the nipples or they find some crazy blocking technique (some smoke or objects in the foreground). It's really funny to see how far creators bend over backwards to get away with this.
That's a topic for another day
Yeah, that's another issue that I find sometimes - I mean, most content that I've come across showcases guys with shaved armpits, albeit there are a lot of guys who do shave their armpits but I think this is more of an aesthetic decision.
We also have to consider like... what does adding nipples or bodily hair actually do to improve the quality of storytelling. It makes a lot of sense for artists that have a ridiculous amount of detail in their drawings to include these aspects as it helps with the overall milieu.
When I think about some of the more manga-esque styles that are predominantly cleaner or where the lines are more crisp, adding these details seems to - I guess, go against the overall aesthetic?
I think Kill La Kill sort of exemplifies that notion where they play up the nipples as a recurring joke.
Getting flashbacks to my figure drawing days where you would see a ton of people in the room over rendering every aspect of the figure but the genital region being predominantly blank or smudged. Good stuff.
Haha, I would love to see like a photo-edit where we retroactively add nipples to characters.
You know it