About this blog and a general content warning

So what are we doing here?

I like a lot of low-culture trash, including but not limited to outright pornography, and I like to think about it, and I like to write about it, and I'd prefer not to do it in such a way that everyone who knows me has to be thinking about the stuff that may or may not turn my crank. Hence, this somewhat anonymous blog.

And what's the content warning?

You had to click through an adult content notice to get here, so first of all, if you decided to lie about whether you're legally allowed or psychologically ready to see some wild stuff, this is where I tell you that was a bad idea and you should really have taken it seriously. I may post here literally anything that the terms of service could possibly permit, and I may not give sufficient (or any) warning beforehand. If there's anything that you will not be okay after seeing, then I beg you to take care of yourself. Go look at something nice. No hard feelings.

Takashi Nishikawa

The thing about a lot of anime porn is that it’s made on a tight budget, and that frequently means cutting corners. Framerates are low, animation cycles are recycled, and so on. What makes Takashi Nishikawa notable is the way his distinctive style works around those limitations to make surprisingly dynamic animation. To give a powerful impression of movement, he exaggerates the extremes of motion to an almost absurd degree. Breasts don’t just bounce, they fly. A forceful thrust sends a shockwave of compression through a body. The same sequence of frames is played at longer or shorter intervals to create variation, and sometimes parts of a loop are stuttered back and forth like a record scratch to introduce a new take on an existing sequence. Nishikawa also knows where not to cheap out: most motion cycles are full cycles, not the same set of frames played forward and backward. While playing a sequence back and forth for cyclical motion seems like an easy cost saving measure, it often gives a sense of cheap fakeness. A full cycle, even with fewer frames and less smooth interpolation, lets Nishikawa play even more with exaggerated squashing and stretching. The result is never even the slightest bit realistic, but it conveys a sense of lively motion that, to me at least, conveys a greater impression of enthusiastic sexual activity than a more reserved take would.

But hey, judge for yourself. Baku Ane: Otouto Shibocchau Zo is probably the best example of all his techniques at work. Fair warning: it’s incest porn, and that’s a plot element, but not taken very seriously. (Of his work that I’m aware of, it’s also the one with the least offensive premise and material… as previously mentioned, porn is problematic.)

Nana to Kaoru

Nana to Kaoru by Ryuta Amazume is not, I suppose, strictly speaking, porn - but it is a seinen romantic comedy about S&M, so it may as well be. It’s also a personal favorite. The comic follows the burgeoning relationship between two childhood friends, grown distant and now in high school, who through sheer coincidence (the engine that drives a significant portion of the plot!) discover a shared interest in S&M. High-strung high-achiever Nana likes the freedom from responsibility and self-control that comes with submission, and crabby slacker Kaoru likes using his fetish gear on the girl he can’t quite admit he’s always had a crush on.

If there’s one thing Amazume is brilliant at it’s tension and managing pacing - he’ll create long sequences of multiple small panels featuring tight shots of details, faces, hands, and scattered dialog bubbles, thought bubbles, and captions running in parallel as characters hesitantly, stutteringly move toward some resolution, then throw down a half- or full-page spread as the moment of impact hits. This style works well with his psychologically introspective story, getting fully into the troubled minds of his angsty protagonists. Not to give the wrong impression, though, this is a romantic comedy and the intense bondage sessions are separated by - and sometimes leavened with - moments of keenly observed humor. It’s not just an S&M comic, but a comic about people who enjoy S&M, and it helped me understand why people do enjoy that kink (which is not really my kink) in a way that makes sense to me. It’s also (while problematic in ways that are actually fairly realistic for experimenting teenagers) a way, way better depiction of S&M than Fifty Shades. Where’s my English release, you cowards?

I recommend reading the whole thing, but if you’re looking in particular for some Relatable Content™ then I will point you to this arc in which Kaoru helps the student council president find back one particular porn clip, and if you can’t relate to that then I’m not sure we’re ever going to be friends…

Marui Maru

Marui Maru has made a career out of one very specific groove: giant piles of girls with cute faces and hourglass figures who really, really want to get pregnant. He’s produced three full tankoubons on the theme: MuchiMuchi ♥ Cream Pie, Fuwataro ♥ Jusei Chuudoku, and Shita no Okuchi de Chu ♥ Chu ♥ Shiyo. It’s interesting to watch his rendering evolve over time into almost a parody of itself, as the faces get rounder, the torsos get shorter, and the hips get wider. I feel like this particular rendering of the female form is strongly influenced by the foreshortening effect produced when looking from behind at a woman on hands and knees, which, probably not coincidentally, is a favored perspective in Marui Maru’s work.

As for the impregnation fetish, it seems to be less about pregnancy and childbirth per se (Marui Maru rarely draws pregnant women or babies) and more about the same desire for the forbidden that informs other fetish themes in Japanes porn, like sweat smells and free-flying semen. Japan’s birth rate at the moment is notoriously low: with the economy in an ongoing funk and little availability of childcare, women are electing to stay employed and child-free instead of giving up a career and the associated income to become stay-at-home mothers. I expect Japanese men are frequently being told to wear a condom, not to come inside, and above all not to do anything to risk a pregnancy - and enough of them are frustrated by this to seek out in pornography what they can’t get in reality. This fetish includes an entire subgenre of science-fictional premises involving radical policy innovations by the Japanese government to elevate the birth rate (notably excluding the simple expedient of offering more and better-subsidized child care and pregnancy leave).

This also presents an interesting contrast to Western pornography, where the risk of pregnancy and its associated responsibilities is generally elided entirely. Perhaps the Japanese assumption is that a woman who is willing to get pregnant is also willing to take on all the childcare duties. Good luck with that, guys.

Queen

The “Queen” series by Shimimaru concerns the (rapidly escalating!) feud between two women to be the center of attention of a comics club. It has that easy-going blend of filth and humor that I greatly enjoy, as illustrated above.

I feel like I can’t just post this without addressing the elephant in the room, though: the premise is built around the idea of the “fake nerd girl” - a woman who hangs out with unpopular people with esoteric hobbies and professes interest because they enjoy the attention (usually, though not here, with the implication that they don’t have any serious interest in the people or their hobbies). I have an annoyingly nuanced take on this whole thing which will please no one:

1. I don’t think this happens as often as some people think it does, but I do think it happens more often than never.
2. Going to lengths to interrogate people’s true motives for participation in nerd stuff can’t possibly result in anything positive. If they’re not faking, they get the hassle of having to prove themselves and may just leave rather than put up with it. If they are faking and you find them out, uh, great - you successfully discovered that they went to a fair amount of trouble to pander to your tastes, and now they won’t do that anymore. Either way, good job, way to ruin it for them and for the rest of us.
3. To the extent that there is a problem here, the problem is not with the people who may or may not be doing the pandering but with the people who have unrealistic expectations about what that means. When someone decides to do something that you like, maybe just accept it and be happy instead of building up an idea of who they should be and what they should do in your head. (This advice is applicable in other contexts as well, fandom)

Anyway, please enjoy this comic about some ladies who don’t give a fuck about dorky shit but do care about who gets more dick.

Futsu no Onnanoko

Gesundheit is a weirdo.

Futsuu no Onnanoko (Nonentity Girls) is a series of absurdist porn short stories by Gesundheit. Each story opens by asking the reader to buy into one of the unlikely premises common in porn catering to a particular fetish, but then immediately piles two or three more twists on top until the reader no longer has any firm idea of where this all is going. It’s a potent mix of content intended to shock and to arouse, and none of it has any pretense toward seriousness - the bare content is probably enough to put off some readers (as always, folks, take care of yourselves!) but the sheer cartoonishness of the goings-on undercuts some of the nastiness, at least for me. If you’re in the mood for something that combines well-rendered attractive (and/or grotesque) people fucking each other’s brains out with a “lolwut” moment on every other page, you could do worse.

It’s certainly not boring.

Yonekura Kengo

At last here’s that Yonekura Kengo post I’ve been promising. This is a creator who’s been on my radar for quite a while; her Pink Sniper tankoubon is one of a small set of eromanga (along with Sesshu Takemura’s first volume of Take On Me - though, for obvious reasons, not the second! - and Isutoshi’s Slut Girl, on which more another time) translated by Studio Proteus (the translation house also responsible for the US version of much of Masamune Shirow’s comics output) and published by Fantagraphics’ porn imprint Eros Comix. However, it wasn’t until recently that I found out that she is, to the extent that such things can be ascertained, a woman, which prompted me to take another look at her body of work.

As far as I can tell, her erotic work (at least under the name Yonekura Kengo - there may be other work under different pen names) comprises the following titles:

• The Yellow Hearts: an ongoing erotic drama about the lives of a circle of delinquents and criminals and their significant others. Chock full of sex and violence, but the focus is always on the characters’ emotions and relationships. 
• Evergreen: a one-shot tankoubon erotic melodrama about the sexual relationships between a student, his best friend, and his two sisters, in which reality (surprisingly for the genre) actually ensues. 
• Warau Kangofu: a collection of short stories, many of them revolving around an older woman dominating a younger man. 
• Pink Sniper: a series of humorous and fantastical short episodes about a brassy school doctor toying with a proud but masochistic student at a school also attended by animal people for no particular reason.

I’ve shown some of her work to friends with a much stronger background in woman-created erotica than mine, and they say that they can perceive a woman’s touch in the focus on faces and the attention paid to the men in scene composition; I’ll take their word on it. All I can say is that Kengo’s art is well-rendered and appealing, and I particularly like her voluptuous, predatory mature women.