1303: Pervert

Borderline NSFW stuff on the subject of hentai ahead. I’ll put a “Read More” tag in place for front-page browsers who want to skip past, though I’ll note there’s nothing outright explicit in this post.

I’ve been pondering how to broach this particular topic for some time now, and I guess in some ways I already have with posts such as these.

I don’t want to talk just about visual novels, though they’re a big part of this subject and by far the part I’m most familiar with. I want to talk about the concept of “hentai” in general.

Hentai, lest you’re unfamiliar, is generally used as a catch-all term to describe Japanese animated, video game or computer graphic content that is sexually explicit — the word is of Japanese origin and means “pervert”. The related term “ecchi” tends to be used in a similar context and is often also translated as “pervert”, but can also be read as “questionable” and is consequently more commonly used to refer to content that is “suggestive” rather than outright explicit. Compare, if you will, an image of two anime characters banging (hentai) with a female character flashing her panties (ecchi) — though these terms are both somewhat flexible in terms of what they refer to. (Interesting aside — erotic content in Japanese media is often referred to as “H” material, but the “H” isn’t short for “hentai” as I once thought — “H” is actually pronounced “ecchi” in Japanese, so there you go. You learned something today.)

Definitions aside, I find the very concept of hentai (as I’ll refer to all content of this type from now on for simplicity’s sake) fascinating. Unsurprisingly, it has something of a stigma attached to it — the very word means “pervert”, after all — but I’ll do my best to explain what I find interesting, and you can, by extension, be comfortable in the knowledge that I am certainly not in a position to judge anyone for their individual tastes, whatever they might be.

I forget exactly when my first encounter with hentai was, what the context was or how I came across it. I do remember I found it immediately striking, though, and very distinct from “ordinary” pornography. Freed from the constraints of reality, hentai is free to explore whatever it pleases — even straying into seriously “deviant” territory at times — and is always able to fall back on the argument that it’s clearly “not real”. While that doesn’t necessarily make it “harmless” as such, particularly from an early socialisation perspective, it’s a lot “safer” and less exploitative than pornography that involves real people. Consequently, it allows its audience to freely and safely explore concepts and ideas that they may not have thought to explore — or things that they know “should” (whatever that means) be kept to nothing but fantasy.

I recall a few early encounters with hentai. Initially it was just images, but I became curious as to the source of these sets of pictures after a while, as they seemed to, in their own way, tell some sort of story — or at least, within the same set, involve the same recognisable characters. I noticed that as in more “conventional” pornography, there was a strong emphasis on looking at the women from a male perspective — male characters tended to be depersonalised to various degrees, usually lacking a face, being out of shot or, on some occasions, being nothing more than a disembodied or ghostly penis. It was clear that this was intended to allow the viewer to put themselves in the role of the male character — to picture themselves in these sexual scenarios with these attractive women without the distraction of the dissonance between their own appearance/self-perception and the depiction of the male character in the image.

I discovered that most of the images I’d come across (no pun intended) up until this stage hailed from games — or, more accurately, what I’d later come to know as visual novels and dating sims — so I investigated further. I have no idea how I managed to find (and, more to the point, successfully download) full H-games using a dial-up connection in the late ’90s-early ’00s, but somehow I did. Early examples I found included True Love — which actually became something of a hit among my friends and I due to the fact it included genuinely satisfying, fun gameplay — along with Paradise Heights, Ring-Out and Three Sisters Story.

I’ll tell you the thing that immediately floored me about all these games: the fact that they were all far more than being “just porn”. Okay, some of them were more “porny” than others — both Ring-Out and Paradise Heights in particular had somewhat flimsy stories that were little more than an excuse to get you from one sex scene to another, and Ring-Out was a little too rapey to be comfortable or indeed titillating — but all of them, without exception, at least made an effort to have a sense of narrative progression and characterisation. Even in the more sex-heavy ones, there was a sense of who these characters were and why you should be interested in them — both sexually and non-sexually: amid all the erotic lesbian wrestling in Ring-Out was a tragic story about a young girl sold into sex slavery to pay a family’s debts; Paradise Heights explored the life of a voyeur; True Love was a relatively early example of the “slice of life” genre. Interestingly, in the case of Three Sisters Story, you actually ended up punished at the end of the game if you played through trying to bed as many of the characters as possible — something which greatly surprised me, as I was still working on the assumption that, despite the stories in these games, they were primarily “porn”.

Hentai and related content isn’t just about games, though, as I noted at the start of this post. It’s also about manga (which I haven’t explored at all) and anime (which I have, to a limited degree). In the former case, a lot of erotic content comes about through the doujinshi (self-published) market, many of whom base their work on established properties without permission — something that is in direct contravention of Japanese copyright law, but which is such a huge part of national culture now that it just seems to be let slide these days. The fact is, doujinshi actually serve as a good means of existing works being promoted, and also as a means of new talent being discovered, regardless of whether the works they’ve produced are family-friendly or not — after all, a lot of manga absolutely isn’t family-friendly at all, even if it’s not specifically intended to be pornographic.

As for anime, in my admittedly limited experience, hentai and related works tend to be their own original thing. As with games, they vary in how “porny” they are — some are clearly designed as stories that happen to include a lot of sex along the way, while others are obviously designed as little more than something to get one’s rocks off to. The subject matter also varies a great deal — compare something like the horrific Urotsukidoji, which is full of rape by demons and strange techno-magical machinery, and, say, Tsundere Inran Shoujo Sukumi, which is little more than an excuse for pretty much every Japanese anime-related fetish (school swimsuits, school uniforms, catgirls, maids and so on) to be explored in rapid succession.

Once again, though, even the hentai equivalent of a “gonzo” porn movie — i.e. one in which the sex is the focus rather than any sort of plot — makes considerably more of an effort with characterisation and even a degree of narrative progression than its “real world” (for want of a better term) equivalent. Soushi Aiai, for example, tells the story of a couple of teens who know each other in real life but who are only able to finally admit their true feelings for one another through Internet sex sessions where one of them doesn’t recognise the other; the aforementioned Tsundere Inran Shoujo Sukumi sees the titular heroine buying the rather subservient male protagonist’s silence with regular, rather fetishistic sex after he catches her masturbating in the locker rooms, and subsequently falling for him; others spin off in a variety of different weird and wonderful directions. Okay, in many cases they’re not complex, deep or particularly thought-provoking stories, but at least they’ve made an effort — and sometimes they go much further than simply providing flimsy context for the shagging, much like a good (emphasis: good) visual novel does.

A peculiar offshoot of explicit hentai anime comes in the form of anime series that are more “ecchi” than “hentai” — i.e. they don’t actually involve any sex at all, and instead focus on suggestive situations that… oh, let’s not beat around the bush here, since we haven’t for the past 1,400 words: they’re big cock-teases. Examples of this particular style of presentation come in the form of stuff like KissXSis, which, when it’s not being incredibly (but alarmingly compellingly) inappropriate spins an amusing and entertaining tale about a high school guy’s awkward relationship with his older (and emphatically non-blood-related) stepsisters, both of whom are constantly competing for his affections (both emotional and physical); and the Isshoni Training series, which sees the cute anime girl Hinako encouraging the viewer to take good care of themselves across several installments in which she showers, performs an aerobics routine, sleeps (yes, there’s an entire episode that consists almost entirely of watching her sleep, which is simultaneously uncomfortably weird and strangely relaxing) and takes a bath with her best friend.

This kind of presentation — particularly Isshoni Training, which not only breaks the fourth wall but sets fire to it, stomps on its remains and then invites you to step through the convenient gap it’s left you — is often described as “pandering” or “fanservice” and neither of these are inaccurate descriptions, but those don’t necessarily have to be negative things. Isshoni Training in particular is something that — as sad as it might sound to those of us who live perfectly “normal”, well-adjusted lifestyles — might provide comfort to someone who is particularly lonely or who feels unable to interact with others for whatever reason. Whether or not immersing yourself in a fantasy world to such a degree is healthy or not is probably beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here, but when I think back to a time in my life when I was incredibly lonely — like immediately after my wife left, for example — I would have probably found something along those lines to be somewhat comforting.

Anyway. I’ve rambled on for over 1,700 words on this rather stigma-tastic subject, so I think I’d probably better leave that for now. Hopefully I have, however, at least given you a better idea of why I find this stuff so interesting far beyond “hurr hurr, it makes me feel funny in my swimsuit area.” I’m not attempting to convince anyone that everyone should like it or explore it — just that it’s something I, personally, find oddly intriguing.