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.

The Invitation

The Invitation is a short story by InCase, the author of the previously-recommended Alfie. I have nothing to say except that I like it and I think it's good.

Fei

In my last post, I mentioned that I’ve been looking into female artists, and mentioned that I’d get to Yonekura Kengo. So this time, I’ll be talking about…

Fei!

The Yonekura Kengo post will be coming in due time, have no fear. But I wanted to talk about Fei first because it was such a surprise to find out they’re a woman - though that’s really down to my own prejudices, I suppose. As you can see from the images, Fei’s stock in trade is voluptuous women with long hair, pillowy lips, soft bodies, and… kind of weirdly small heads. Her male leads range from boringly handsome to youthful and cute, but are universally vigorously endowed - a trait by no means unique to her work (side note: I wonder if big penises are just more fun and/or easier to draw?). Her stories include a lot of messy, vigorous, squishy sex, frequently including fingers pressing into yielding flesh. Some of her storylines are notably cruel to their female protagonists, featuring dubious or even outright refused consent, or betrayal and tragic consequences; in others, it’s the men who are played with and overwhelmed by their lusty partners. The style obviously sets aside a certain amount of realism in overall body proportion, but is occasionally closely observed in certain details; particularly, Fei’s large-breasted, large-bottomed women often also have soft bellies, backs, thighs and so on. I have seen rumors to the effect that she uses herself as a model; I wouldn’t be surprised.

If you’re looking to get on the Fei train, you could do worse than start with her series of Highschool of the Dead doujins: 1 2 3 4 5 6 (zombie apocalypse violence, but only consensual probably-over-18 sex). Or, if you’re looking for original work, try Please Help Yourself, Master!, a story about a pair of busty maids servicing their young master (which raises the consent and age flags, but wait, there’s more! And by more I mean incest. Rich people are weird?).

Next time, Yonekura Kengo - unless I get distracted again.

Sex and porn in Japan

The following extended quote is from supacat on Tumblr. I am reproducing it here in its entirety for archival purposes as the original livejournal posting has long since been deleted, Tumblr's new content rules may make it inaccessible in the future, and I can't find another source to link to. My commentary follows the quote.

“homasse asked about the differences in flirting styles in the different countries I’ve been in, and Meg asked the same question only about sex (-_-);;; um, I don’t travel the world treating it like a smorgasbord of guys, sampling various ones from each country (tragically). But I can talk about Japan, and it’s pretty different. So…”

Flirting in Japan

Flirting seems like a misnomer. It’s more like an absense of flirting. If you like someone in Japan, there are a couple of different ways of showing it and/or approaching them, none of which really resemble flirting in the west. 

1. Nanpa (the “pickup”)First off, only guys do nanpa; in the rare case that girls do it, it’s called gyaku-nan (“reverse nanpa”), but I never heard of gyaku-nan actually happening, it always seemed like it was more of an amusing theoretical idea, rather than something girls really did. 

Nanpa only refers to the case when you don’t know the other person at all, and you want to pick them up. Nanpa is direct. “You’re cute. What’s your name? Do you have time? Let’s go somewhere.” That is the classic script of nanpa. It can be shortened to just: “Kawaii yo. Jikan aru?” If you hear that, you’re being nanpa-ed. Of course, if you are a non-Asian foreigner, you will probably never hear that, because Japanese guys are too shy to try and nanpa a white or black woman. Most Japanese guys are too shy to nanpa at all. If you ask a Japanese if he has ever done nanpa, he’ll probably say, “ZOMG! No way! I’m too embarrassed!” since nanpa is direct, and mostly, if you are Japanese and you like someone, you embark on a series of subtle, indirect stealth manoeuvres, because liking prohibits action, especially for women, but also for men. 

Why is this the case? Japanese social interaction is all about intuiting the other person’s wishes without discussing them openly, at the same time that they are intuiting your wishes without discussing them openly, so that although nothing is ever verbalised, the two of you will always exist in a compromise position of equilibrium. If you like someone, that intuitive part goes into overdrive, because you should be able to understand everything about that person without them ever telling you, and you should be able to please them without ever asking how, even more than you would with a normal person. So it’s more important than ever to be indirect. Which leads me to: 

2. Negotiating through a third party 

Again, it’s not really flirting, but since flirting is showing your feelings openly–that is, pushing your feelings onto another person, which is direct and rude–it’s better to show no sign to the other person and meanwhile exploit the back channels. Sort of like in high school. So that convoluted human chain whereby: you like Hiro and you tell Junko that you think Hiro has a nice smile knowing that Junko will intuit that you want to know if Hiro likes you back, since Junko is friends with Goro who is friends with Hiro and Junko will talk to Goro and Goro will bring it up with Hiro etc etc etc etc etc etc. Once everything is confirmed, Hiro will ask you out. (The girl ask the guy out? Ahahahaha. Be serious.)

If you don’t have a third party to negotiate for you, you may be forced to use other methods, all of them so subtle that a westerner may not even notice them at all.

3. Subtle signals

- Shyness. Pronounced shyness is form of flirting, since it’s a sign of liking, especially from girls, but also from guys. She interacts with everyone else more than him, she doesn’t sit next to him, she doesn’t talk much to him, she doesn’t initiate anything with him. 

- Attentiveness. You make life easier for the other person without being asked to. For example, when you got to a restaurant in Japan it’s normal to share food, so flirting means not ordering what you like, but ordering what s/he likes, which you already know without asking, because you’re observant. Stuff like that. 

- Eye contact. It’s the opposite to the west, where you gaze deeply into someone’s eyes if you like them. Direct eye contact is a bit rude in Japan at the best of times. If you’re flirting you look down and away a lot. 

- Indirect compliments. I can’t think of a good example. It’s pretty rare to give direct compliments and even more rare to compliment someone’s looks. (It’s especially rare for guys to compliment girls directly.) I wish I could think of a good example! I’ll come back to this one.

Sex in Japan

It’s really different. It’s just so completely different. The first time I had sex with a Japanese guy was easily the most bamboozling experience of my entire life. 

Before I launch into anything, I should say that while I lived in Japan for five years, I have had sex with only a select few people, and that was within long term relationships, so it’s not as if I have personally taken a wide sample. But I had a network of Japanese friends (mostly female) and every time I encountered a cultural difference I immediately pumped them all for information, asking my millions of questions. I make generalized statements only when something that I personally experienced was confirmed as The Norm. 

The biggest difference is that sex in Japan is not a mutual sharing experience with both partners spontaneously doing whatever they feel like or enjoy whenever they feel like doing it. Sex has rules and sex has roles just as every social interaction in Japan has rules and roles. There is an active partner and a passive partner. Active means moving; passive means unmoving. In heterosexual sex, the active partner is always male, and the passive partner is always female. In gay sex you work out your roles beforehand: the seme is active, the uke is passive (for gay guys); the tachi is active, the neko is passive (for gay women). If you are familiar with seme/uke conventions from yaoi manga, you can use them as a way of relating to what I’m talking about, because those conventions are not a fictional construct, randomly decided upon by a group of yaoi mangaka. Straight people have sex like that too, in reality. 

So there is an active partner and a passive partner, which causes various flow on effects. You can’t have “Whoo-hoo! Go for it!” sex because both partners are constrained by their roles. The passive partner (obviously) because she can’t move, and the active partner because he has to take care of the passive partner, instructing her on what to do and exerting himself so that she has a good time. 

Japanese guys are generally more stressed out by sex than western guys and that is because they are responsible for the sex; as the active male, the sex is their burden, they have to do everything, it’s all up to them. Sex equates not only (sometimes not even primarily) with ‘fun’ or 'pleasure’, it also equates with 'work’ and 'obligation’. 

I also can’t emphasise enough just how passive the passive partner is. The way a woman kisses is by submissively opening her mouth, not moving her tongue unless she is cued to do so; if she’s really feminine she won’t open her mouth at all, until she’s told to. Sometimes women will move around a (very) little during sex, but mostly not at all. The slang term for a woman who lies completely still in bed is maguro (tuna). For me, with my western sensibilities and preconceptions, calling someone a 'tuna’ in bed sounds like an insult, conjuring up images of cold dead fish, but in Japan that word has a very positive connotation. Tuna’s an expensive delicacy.

Part of what was so bamboozling the first time I had sex in Japan was that I didn’t know there was a Way of Sex, with strict gendered roles, and I just was happily doing my own thing, throwing my partner into total confusion. Seiji told me much later that dating me made him feel like he was gay, because I was active in bed, and he couldn’t connect that with anything except masculinity.

When it came to the guys I dated, even though it was completely outside their experience, they sort of (kind of) eventually adjusted their thinking and accepted the fact that I was active (because I was Foreign and Foreign Women Are Different) but the thing I could never completely change was the fixed idea they had that someone must be passive. Yes, I could be active in bed, but they had no template for how to react to that other than the female/passive/uke template. So at best we could alternate “active periods”, and though the lines between active and passive blurred a little over time, they never blurred completely. And total shutdowns still happened: thirty seconds tick past and my partner hasn’t moved at all … oh, okay, I get what’s happened. 

If I’m making cross-cultural sex sound like a bit of a nightmare: yeah, it was. In this case, once I worked out what was going on, I thought all my problems could be solved by a simple conversation or two, explaining the more free-form nature of western sex, and encouraging my partner along the lines of, “You don’t have to act a certain way, you can act however you like! You can relax! Enjoy yourself! Doesn’t that sound great?” but that was also a failure to understand the Japanese psyche. It’s not liberating for a Japanese person to be told there are no rules, it’s frightening. I was inadvertently terrorizing my partner by dropping them into the middle of a scary foreign wilderness and telling them to make do without a map. 

Sex and hygiene

Sex in the west can be spontaneous, but sex in Japan isn’t, or at least, not in the same way. In Japan, you can’t get in the front door and immediately start stripping each other’s clothes off in the hallway. Well, you can, and your Japanese partner will probably acquiesce because they are Japanese, but deep down they will be hideously uncomfortable and thinking, “Sex? But I’m not mentally prepared! I haven’t done my kokoro no junbi! And she hasn’t had a shower! And I haven’t had a shower! This is kind of gross!”

Shower is important. You should shower directly before and after you have sex. Before is more important than after. This makes me sound like I only ever dated people with OCD, but it’s the norm. The way I first found out about this was in conversation with my friend Natsue.

Me: I was at Seiji’s place hanging out and he randomly told me that I could use his shower if I felt like it. Don’t you think that’s weird? 

Natsue: *cracks up laughing* Cat, that means he wants to have sex with you! If a guy mentions having a shower, he is saying that he wants to have sex. 

Me: But isn’t it kind of rude to imply I needed to shower first? Like, it was a date, obviously I had showered before going over to his apartment! 

Natsue: Well, I suppose so… *sounding unconvinced* … but didn’t you say he lives in Yokohama? 

Me: What does Yokohama have to do with it? 

Natsue: Well, you went on the train to get there … it’s better to have another shower. If a guy had sex with me without showering first, it would make me really uncomfortable.

Sensing yet another cross-cultural disaster in the making, I began the investigation, hitting up all the usual suspects for information, including my friend Tomoko, who was dating a western guy called Andy.

Me: Sorry to bring this up suddenly, but does it weird you out that Andy sometimes initiates sex without showering first? 

Tomoko: YES! I’m so glad I finally have someone to talk to about this! Cat, are all westerners like this? It’s so dirty and I can’t relax! It makes me feel like we are just animals!

After I heard basically the same story from all my Japanese girlfriends, I went back to Seiji.

Me: First of all, westerners don’t always shower or have a bath before sex. However, I will try to accommodate you on this because the idea of sex without showering seemed to horrify everyone I talked to right down to their very bones. Secondly, when you suggested that I shower the other day, and I said no, I was not rejecting you. I didn’t understand that it was your Japanese signal that you wanted to have sex. If I had understood that, I would definitely have said yes. 

Seiji: *spits tea all over the table* 

Me: …this is one of those deeply unspoken Japanese things that I’m not supposed to talk about directly, isn’t it. 

Seiji: Yes.

Another thing that is considered rather icky and unhygienic is ejaculate. Guys are really embarrassed by it. They will be desperately scrabbling for a tissue almost before you realise they’ve come at all, since it is really bad form to get ejaculate anywhere, without cleaning it up immediately afterwards (and immediately means immediately). This is yet one more thing that men are responsible for as the 'active’ partner. The more of a nice, polite guy they are, the more stressed out they will be about it. It’s also yet one more way that the sex is prescribed and controlled; the guy can never really let go, because even at the moment of climax, he’s already worrying about cleaning up, or trying not to make a mess in the first place. 

… okay, wow, I have been writing and thinking about this entry for more than an hour, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface, so I’m just going to stop here. Flirting in other countries I’ve been to should be easier to write about, I might come back to that in a separate post. Meanwhile, if there’s anything else you want to know, feel free to ask.

 This really drives home just how much Japanese pornography is about taboo violation. Everything described here is the exact opposite of how sex is depicted in pornographic media, and goes some ways toward explaining some particular fetishes I couldn’t figure out. Sexually aggressive women, people getting horny at the smell of sweat, and of course Body Fluids Everyfuckingwhere are all the exact opposite of the cultural norm.

In America, for better or worse (mostly worse), mainstream porn is aspirational and normative - nobody’s actually having porn sex (because it’s actually awkward and uncomfortable in a way that looks good on camera, among many other reasons) but it’s a fantasy that’s meant to be an ultimate heightening of reality - the “best sex”. Japanese porn, it seems, is strongly antinomian - everything is the opposite of how everyone knows it should be, and the violation of norms heightens the eroticism as it divorces the work utterly from any sense of reality - the “worst sex”.

It also explains why the Four Horsemen ride high: after all, if you’re already talking dirty, sniffing armpits, and leaking fluids everywhere, what’s a little incest among friends? It’s the slippery slope fallacy in action - if you’re not following all the rules, you may as well not follow any.

Hirame

Thus far I’ve been fairly hesitant to use gendered pronouns when discussing manga creators. As they frequently work from behind pseudonyms with some degree of anonymity, their genders are frequently up for debate if not entirely unknown. Personally, if pressed, I would tend to assume that creators whose work I enjoy are male. However, of the creators I’m a fan of, there are two who I am fairly sure are women. One is Yonekura Kengo, on whom more later. The other is Hirame (also known as Fishine or Karei).

Hirame has thus far produced mostly erotic fancomics. Working in the circle Turtle.Fish.Paint, she drew porn parodies of Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats, as well as fan comics for KantaiCollection, Dragon’s Crown, Kill La Kill, Street Fighter IV, and League of Legends. At some point the Turtle.Fish.Paint circle dissolved, and she has since published work with the Bear Hand circle: a pair of Overwatch fanbooks and a Kemono Friends book.

In terms of content warnings, Hirame leans into noncon and young characters. Also note that the Kill La Kill book goes pretty hard into the canonical relationship between Worst Mom and her daughters, which I can easily see being a hard pass for some. That said, in general her work is marked by a loopy cartoony style on top of solid fundamentals that often lends an air of mischief and hijinks to what could otherwise be some pretty nasty material. The Bear Hand works in particular find time to mix in some solid comedy moments alongside the action. Her page layouts have become steadily more dynamic and busy, with characters frequently breaking outside panel boundaries for full-page poses. I find her free talk endnotes to be particularly charming; her dismay after drawing a book full of some of the more complex Overwatch designs will surely be relatable to many.

Oretama

Oretama, plotted by Harada Shigemitsu and drawn by Seguchi Takahiro, has a plot that is such a transparently dumb excuse for hanky-panky that it might just wrap around to brilliant. Through a series of unlikely events, the prophesied harbinger of the apocalypse is sealed in some useless jagoff’s testicle. If he can avoid ejaculating for a month, the world will be saved. Naturally, a parade of sexy devils and the best dating luck at the worst possible time conspire to make this extremely difficult.

The series runs for 41 chapters, long enough for Shigemitsu to fully explore all the humorous debauchery that can be wrung from its premise, and unlike some longer running series (Yuria 100 Shiki I’m looking at you) it manages to come to a logical and satisfying conclusion before overstaying its welcome. Takahiro has all the chops necessary for the job, able to smoothly switch between lewd gags and slapstick (a powerful erection smashing the upper border of a panel is a particularly clever touch) and the occasional moment of genuinely affecting tenderness and yearning.

Content notes: Lesser demon Elyse has a notably juvenile physique, and of course nobody asks permission to touch protagonist Satou Kohta’s junk. Elyse’s habit of puppeteering Kohta into groping her while he’s asleep is probably going to be off-putting for some; I find it intriguing, myself.

Maka Maka

Maka Maka by Kishi Torajirou is slice-of-life erotica. No high drama, no high stakes: this is Nana, this is Jun, they’re friends with benefits, these are some of the times they made out. The stories are grounded in small moments and closely observed details, like the condensation dripping off a bathroom ceiling. Nana and Jun are fully formed people with recognizable personalities and distinct aesthetics. The clean linework and restrained colors showcase the characters’ stylish fashions and reflect their daily lives as design students. The sexual content is playfully naughty, with emphasis on surreptitious play in public contexts.

No horsemen ride here, but it may be worth noting that the main characters have fairly lousy relationships with men that may be distressingly familiar to some readers.

Fue

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Secret Journey

Zappa Go: a mangaka with a fetish for dominant women! Po-ju: a mangaka with a fetish for beautiful young boys! With their combined powers, they produced: Secret Journey, a porn version of the Journey to the West with a beautiful young boy Sanzo and his traveling companions: sexy domme Goku, sexy domme Hakkai, and sexy domme Gojyo!

Let’s just acknowledge the obvious horseman warnings for dubious consent and some very prepubescent-looking characters, because it’s Zappa Go and Po-ju and that is how they do. Here are what I consider the high points:

1. The character designs. This volume has a great section at the end containing a bunch of character development sketches that show how the looks of the main characters evolved, and I eat that stuff up. I’m particularly into their brand of techno-fantasy look, with lots of machined metal decorative elements. Plus it’s nice to find creators as into fingerless opera gloves and thigh-high tights as I am…
2. The fact that this book is clearly a collaboration built around two creators indulging in their respective fetishes. It’s particularly hilariously obvious that at least one of them is super into glasses and will jump through any hoops required to wedge them in at least once, fantastic ancient world setting be damned.
3. There’s a lot of interesting fucking and it all looks great. This is a good quality in pornography.

(The next time I hear the specious argument that Western superhero comics indulge in equal-opportunity objectification because the male characters also have idealized physiques, I’m going to post beautiful Po-ju boys until someone cries uncle…)

Alfie

The artist known as InCase is … really, really good. They do lines. They do color. They do people of all shapes and sizes, including non-humans - which is a good talent to have when you’re drawing a fantasy porn comic. And that's what Alfie is: a fantasy porn comic about a halfl- (quiet boy, do you want to get sued?) er, havlin girl with a lust for (among other things) adventure, her embittered mother whose own dreams of adventure never came to fruition, an elf pervert (but I repeat myself), a pair of freewheeling caravan guards, an outcast from the horned people of the weird woods, a grizzled mountain guide, and many more. InCase can even put a story together, and the (copious, delightful) sex is as much part of that story as anything else.

Read Alfie, it’s good stuff.

The strange career of Takemura Sesshu

I cannot think of an artist who has accelerated faster into insanity than Takemura Sesshu.

Take On Me, which is as far as I know their first major work, is certainly lewd enough, but was sufficiently unobjectionable to be given an official US release (retitled Domin-8 Me for… reasons); there are some dubiously consensual S&M scenes and a character who looks a lot younger than her stated age, but as weird shit in hentai goes that barely pings the meter. I like it for the illustration style, which combines a solid anatomical base with interesting angles and the customary absurd quantities of fluid secretions, and for the pairing of a tall, quietly lustful girl and a short nervous guy. Also Sesshu clearly has a thing for glasses, and I appreciate that.

The followup volume, Take on Me 2 (and for heaven’s sake don’t click that link until you’ve finished reading!) sees Sesshu handing their beer to a bystander and proceeding to perform a triple axel backflip into This Will Never Fly In America territory, opening with a story of two actual genuine prepubescent children just straight up fucking, before rolling right on into the crossdressing incestuous bisexual twins from Brazil, a straight-up no-fun violent rape, and sex on top of a building in a lightning storm (which isn’t offensive but is tied for “worst sex idea” with standing in a hammock…). The art is still as skillful as ever and some parts are what I’d still call good dirty fun, but cripes what a minefield.

As far as I know, pretty much all Sesshu has done since the two volumes of Take On Me are Idolm@ster doujins, which sounds about right.

Sei So Tsui Dan Sha

Sei So Tsui Dan Sha by Shiwasu no Okina: Three mean girls discover the boy they’ve been bullying has a magical detachable penis. Then things get weird. (content notes: definitely rape, probably pedophilia, weirdly ambiguous incest-by-proxy, punchline that probably has different racial overtones than the author intended)

Shiwasu no Okina is one of my more problematic faves. On the one hand, they’ve got great cartooning chops which serve them well when they go for absurd humor, as they do here. And they’re endlessly, perversely inventive in their scenarios and sex scenes, with a strong grasp of anatomy and an ability to actually draw more than one face and body type.

On the other hand, well, their single largest work is an eight (!) tankobon-sized volume series lavishly illustrating the members of an actual teen idol group being coerced by a demon into fucking their fans. Dude rides pretty hard with the lolicon and noncon horsemen. Their body diversity unfortunately extends alarmingly far down the developmental age range, and sometimes they really emphasize (slash revel in) how much a party is not consenting to the goings-on. As mentioned: problematic.

Still, worth looking at if you can hold your nose. Sei So Tsui Dan Sha is at least sufficently absurd that the humor can carry a hardy reader through the ick factor. And of the rest of their body of work, I can recommend Nudist Beach ni Syuugaku Ryokoude which, although it has some awfully young-looking and acting characters, is at least 100% consensual. (Plot summary: class trip to nudist beach. One young man has a boner problem. His female classmates try to help. cue porn bass)

Mizuryu Land

Mizuryu Land is Mizuryu Kei’s yearly doujin series centered around a sex theme park. As enormously lewd as it is, the Horsemen are notably absent; there’s a throwaway line in volume 3 suggesting incest, but other than that it’s all consenting adults. Like all of Mizuryu Kei’s work, the consistent theme (slash fetish) is that humans, and particularly women, are just horny animals driven by sexual urges. Enjoyment of the work is very much contingent on one’s tolerance of (slash appreciation for) the ahegao face and other over-the-top expressions of mindless lust. Personally, I’ll take women with a voracious sexual appetite asking for and getting what they want over women having sex forced on them…

Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5

Koyanagi Royal on quantity

Quantity has a quality all its own.

Koyanagi Royal, Orgy Treasure Mansion Gold

(warnings: incest, pedophilia, rape)

ShindoL on sexy people with disabilities

Not unrelated to previous post, here’s a pair of stories by ShindoL: Barrier Free and Fragile and Tough. While these are cute and fun, be aware that if you dig deeper into ShindoL’s body of work, all the content warnings apply.

Monster girls as metaphor

I like monster girls (act surprised). I would be lying if I didn’t say that a big part of the appeal is simply the xenophilic appeal of basically-a-pretty-girl plus exotic features. But there’s also something else going on there that I think is worth picking apart because monster girls (and boys) actually have something useful to say about our real world.

Monster girls are not humans. That means all assumptions you make about humans don’t apply, and that means two related things are foregrounded: accommodation, and communication. You have to ask a monster about their body, how it works, what it needs, what feels good and what to avoid. And when they tell you, you should believe them and provide them what they need, because they’re the experts on their own bodies and you care about them. Sometimes that means adaptive technology and sometimes that means reshaping the public environment for accessibility. And we find this easy and even fun to think and talk about because it’s fantasy.

Now suppose we were to apply the same mindset to actual people with different bodies and needs, whether due to disability, gender, or just being a unique individual who knows the particularities of the body they’ve lived in their whole life.

(It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m also into adaptive technology…)

Takemura Sesshu on the appeal of corrective lenses

Glasses: hot.

Takemura Sesshu, Take On Me

Ryuta Amazume on bedroom etiquette

Don’t narrate.

Ryuta Amazume, Koi wa Misoji wo Sugite kara

The Four Horsemen

Content tagging is important and useful both for finding specific stuff you’re into, and avoiding specific stuff you really need to avoid. I generally don’t tag posts here, not because I’m philosophically opposed, but because I’m lazy and inconsistent. (If that means you can’t safely follow, then as the top post says, take care of yourself and no hard feelings.)

The four exceptions to the above general rule, and the things I will try my best to consistently tag, are what I call the “Four Horsemen”: rape, pedophilia, incest, and bestiality. These tend to be a hard no for a fair number of people, yet they show up in illustrated (as opposed to filmed) pornography at a rate that I can only guess is much higher than the general level of interest in that kind of content - to the point where I just sort of expect some of the above in any given artist’s body of work and am pleasantly surprised by its absence. The reason I’d guess for their over-representation is that A) they’re illegal and harmful to actually film and B) the appeal relies on contextual truth. It’s possible to film a simulated rape, or a young-looking person, or two people who pretend to be related, or a person having sex with an animal facsimile, but the viewer knows that either what they’re seeing is fake or someone was actually hurt in the process; the former kills the fantasy and the latter has obvious moral implications that, contrary to some popular opinion, aren’t automatically obliterated or overridden by the presence of some kink or paraphilia.

In purely fictional content, on the other hand, because nothing is real in the first place, everything is equally real within the story. Whatever you need to be “actually happening” is actually happening to the same degree that anything in the work is actually happening. Being as I am personally not specifically into any of the Four Horsemen (monster girls don’t count, shush) I can’t offer even anecdotal evidence that this is true, but it seems to make sense to me.

Toumasu's Monster Girls

Enough with the high-minded essays, let’s get down to cataloging my fetishes…

Niku Drill circle’s Kanemaki Thomas (aka Toumasu) have released a series of doujins called Jingai Shunman (Inhuman Spring) which sit on that intersection of worldbuilding and pornography that is my jam. The full collection can be found here but I’ve selected a few of my favorite covers above. Toumasu has a scribbly, evocative line style, and their female monsters are just at the tipping point between sexy and creepy for me. Good stuff.

Their twitter.