Speak, penis, for you have the floor… and the p[nyan]y.
My reluctant review of F[crash]k You! Actually F[horn]ks You Into the Harem ended with a mention of another series that was pushing the envelope, so much so that it took Funimation three episodes to realize it might as well have been hentai. And looking at it’s content, I really wanna go back in time to Funimation’s as of yet unclaimed office, stare the big boss/manager/whatever in the face and say, “With a premise like this, what were you expecting? Raunchier KonoSuba?”
No matter the intention, learning about this led to a Streisand effect in the animanga community, whereby, those who weren’t watching it yet, checked it out to see why Funimation would choose not to continue airing a current anime series. Once they saw why, it made sense.
If I was in charge of a streaming service, I’d put this behind an older teen or 18+ section. Simply change your user settings to be able to view hentai and ecchi freely and voila! Enjoy your culture, ladies and gentlemen.
The premise is simple: a fantasy world where every monster girl is available and about 90% of them work in a legalized sex industry, Stunk the human and his bestie Zel the elf embark on an adventure to f[crumble]k every monster girl they can find. Shortly after their quest begins, they meet an angel named Crimvael who has both sets of genitalia, but defaults male to lessen the confusion when being addressed by others. And wouldn’t you have it, the little angel is the most well-endowed of the three. It’s like Team Four Star’s take on Krillin, smacking him around all throughout the Abridged Dragon Ball run until finally giving him the golden ticket in Android 18.
A typical episode begins with the trio heading to a brothel under the ownership of a type of monster girl, they ask for the services and perhaps through power of Post Nut Enlightenment, their reviews of the girls read like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy at times. Aiding your prostate apparently brings out the poet when describing how well (or poorly) these girls use their bodies to help the reviewer reach a satisfying climax. Not the first or last time such an observation would be made, as PornHub comments and the Zenless Zone Zero community can attest.
D[clank]ks out, tits out, spurt like a faucet and cover in baby batter, rate us on Yelp, hope to clean your fluids off our floors again… but would you believe me if there was more than an absurd number of fetishes in this series? The culture of individual monster girls plays a significant role to some degree. For instance, minotaur/cow-girls have the biggest breasts and their speech patterns are cattle-influenced; the succubi are so extremely depraved that they can f[pop!]k you to death; fairy girls are predictably Tinker Bell-sized, so good look trying something remotely kinky; elf girls are all GILFs by default due their aging process compared to human beings, etc. etc. etc.
This also leads to a few dark moments in the series. Away from the brothels where penises get played with like any other toy, sometimes venues make a strip show of things. Venturing into even more inappropriate territory sheds light on a certain episode involving egg-laying. And that’s the most I’ll reveal about that episode. Another moment involves them making a sex doll in the shape of their bird girl friend and tavern waitstaff, Meidri. After the men take their turns, word gets around and let’s just say arms and legs don’t bend in three places for a reason.
Yeah, it begins on a funny note and evolves into WTF?! over the course of its twelve episodes. The manga is apparently still going on and it has two light novels. Competitive Harem Rapist still outmatches it by it’s sheer gratuitous sex and sexual assault scenes (everyone sins in that goddamn anime!!), but an animanga based around sex work and the various girls that can be found in the Red Light district… outclassed or not, I’d give it a watch. I saw it through to the end in 2021, and it’s worth a rewatch, especially for the opening:
Channel: mediafactory
Knowing what ecchi is now, it’s nice to see the ones that helped push the envelope, no matter how they age.
Normally, I have one topic ready to go every Friday and planned on several weeks in advance. This week and into the weekend, I want to try something different, something special. A lot has occurred both in real life and the entertainment sector that may become old and stale if I add them to the empty spaces on my planner document (which goes into March 2024 as of writing this), so for today, I’ll cover my thoughts on animation today, tomorrow October 14, I will cover an anime adaptation that I’d been looking forward to personally, and on Sunday, October 15, I’ll cover the misfortunes of a company that, honestly, feels like it’s been on life support for a while now, each with sneak peeks at the end. Unlike this one, no YouTube recommended channels will be featured for those posts–just this one. Now to begin proper.
Since I was a kid, I remember part of my day was complete or going expressly well when I could turn on the TV after speeding through my homework and catching up on my favorite cartoons. Funny enough, a lot of what I liked at the time is now remembered as genuinely creepy and weird. Observe:
And it wasn’t just this one. Courage the Cowardly Dog, Invader Zim, The Secret Show, Kappa Mikey, Martin Mystery, and several other shows that I was always convinced I was the only one watching. The draw for me, aside from a series of moving drawings, was that a lot of them were so unique. They had their own art styles, plots, some of them were spearheaded by comic book artists, such as in the case of Invader Zim’s creator Jhonen Vasquez and Kaput and Zosky creator Lewis Trondheim.
They also had an air of black comedy embedded in the structure of the series, often based on works published prior. When these shows were picked up by Nickelodeon or its sister network Nicktoons, they were often marketed towards children, though often needed to keep the darker elements under wraps to avoid censorship. Still, a lot of stuff got through the cracks. Like this scene: [content warning].
And this wouldn’t be the only time, shockingly, that someone’s organs were outside them.
For all the flack cartoons have gotten for being “childish” and “immature,” it’s easy to forget that the pioneers of old like Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM had darker themes in a lot of their old cartoons. Never mind the modern day creepypastas featuring Mickey Mouse and co.; think about how many old cartoons had gun violence in them. Where else do you think we get this meme template?
I bring this all up, not so much to rant about cartoons getting soft, but more so to contextualize why I think animation and cartoons have become something of a laughingstock in the West. Ridiculous violence and anthropomorphic animals aside, it’s not like this was all western animation studios were throwing out since the 1960s onwards.
Think about comic book adaptations, like all those of Batman or Spider-Man or the X-Men. All of those comics and many successors trusted their audience, no matter how young they could’ve been, to understand the complicated themes and plot points within. For one such example, the YouTube channel, Shady Doorags, frequently covers animation and animated shows and their many mature themes. Even shows that had a high child and preteen audience like Teen Titans was covered several times, and this episode he covered earlier this year seems to have been one of the more mature ones in the series.
When referring to mature animated shows retroactively, there’s now a distinction between a show that’s mature and a show that’s adult. King of the Hill, The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad are all mature and handle maturity in different ways, through satire, social commentary, the politics within certain hot-button issues (especially if those issues are still front and center today), or some combination of all these.
By stark contrast, some recent animated shows go straight for the fences without the maturity or class of some of the older shows. I need more fingers to count the themes in a South Park or King of the Hill episode, but I’d struggle for something like that show Fairview or Legends of Chamberlain Heights among others. The same goes for maligned reboots of well-beloved properties. You probably know about the 2016 reboot of Powerpuff Girls or Teen Titans Go! or worse Velma, or if not, you know them all by their sour reputations among fans of the original properties.
Whenever I look into the main sources of criticism, similar talking points come about. Lazy art-styles, crude and purposeless humor, mean-spirited humor, a grave misunderstanding of the subject matter, and often the worst of the criticism relates to pandering. Pandering to a demographic that had a hissy fit on social media; pandering to an underrepresented demographic, likely because that specific demographic is literally extremely few in number; pandering to demographics that suffer from an advanced case of white savior complex. The types that won’t really watch the property, but will lie on the internet to look more virtuous than the person they’re arguing with over the keyboard, even if they’re talking to someone who has volunteered before in the past.
Altogether, it brings back problems animation and fans of animation were certain they’d dealt with years prior and this new generation of animators seem to be fighting an old battle. I’m looking in from the outside, but some of the recent shows coming out don’t do burgeoning animators any favors, especially if you’re familiar with what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are responsible for. Sometimes I only know about it because channels like Clownfish TV have experience and expertise on their design philosophy.
When I started conceptualizing this topic, at first I was going to write from the standpoint of award shows, but then I remembered some of the shows I mentioned in this post in passing have gotten recognition from awards boards in the past and even now so if there’s a group of people I’m asking or nearly begging to respect animation, it may be the studios that greenlight them and some of the animators that work on them. From my old high school art class, I remember learning of the philosophy of knowing the rules before breaking them, as in, learn how to draw before you put your own spin on things, and this rings true for all of animation. There’s a stark difference between Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and the Pink Panther/The Inspector art-wise, and even animator-wise. Walt Disney and Friz Freleng were not the same people, but they both learned to draw somehow.
And this is true of today’s animators. You know the old saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a lot of skill, craft, and imagination to make a disciplined practice look so undisciplined. Think about how radically different medieval music is compared to Black Sabbath. And for animation, there was a lot of respect for the creators of this:
And the studios that brought us animations like this:
The simple and obvious solution for modern day animators is multifaceted, though to take an example from the military would be to look at who’s at the top of the chain of command. I would never doubt the capabilities of a studio today since most of the time they’re only doing what they’re told; rather my efforts would be better focused on the people they answer to. Clownfish TV mentions names like Disney’s pair of Bobs, Chapek and Iger, as well as investors ignorantly chasing lightning bolts with an open mason jar, confident that it’ll hit the bottle and not them.
Then again, if we’re looking at the investor angle, as risky as it is to put your eggs on an untapped market, it’s equally risky to go for the diminished returns for obvious reasons. Call it the centrist approach, but why not blend the two together? Put a few eggs in the new and unforeseen while keeping the rest in safety boxes, only moving when things go consistently south. If the new thing fails, you still have some pennies, and when the old things lose favor, you can pull out before you lose everything. Oversimplified solution? Well, again I’m no expert. It’s just something I could see myself doing if given the resources to do so.
For this week’s recommendation, I bring you to the channel sydsnap.
The channel, run by Sydney Maneetapho (née Poniewaz), covers anime and manga, but a more adult-oriented type variety of each, namely hentai. Sydney often recommends some of her own favorite series often for the sake of some guilty pleasure, but also because between all the exposure and nudity, some of the authors and artists behind these hentai have credits writing manga for general audiences, such as in the case with the author of Don’t Toy with Me, Nagatoro-san. She’s even interviewed several names in the adult entertainment industry, like retired porn actress, Kaho Shibuya, or active porn actress, June Lovejoy. If you’re looking for some recommendations or would like to learn more about topics of this nature, most of sydsnap’s videos cover this in detail or alternatively, a donation can be made to her associated Patreon page to get past the censors.
I will return tomorrow with an impression of a long-awaited adaptation.
April 1 is a golden opportunity for a lot of people to play practical jokes on each other, and there’s often no rules as to how this can go. As long as no one gets hurt then have at it. In the case of TV, even the news likes to have their go at the festivities. Personally, I think there’s more mileage in animation which brings me to the topic of this post’s title.
Perhaps by virtue of being an adult animation TV channel, Adult Swim has a knack for partaking in the jokes and merriment of April Fools’ Day. In some cases, where the program runs from late night March 31 to early morning April 1, they’ll engage in some tomfoolery on the shows they plan on airing, messing with the schedule, or other such on-air silliness. As a bonus for them, it’s an opportunity to air shows set to debut sometime in the future.
What interests me the most of all is that this isn’t exclusive to just the Adult Swim block. In the US, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and Toonami, all air on the same channel. CN is the primary daytime block; by 9:00 PM every night Adult Swim airs from Sunday to Friday all night, handing the reins back to CN at 5:00 AM; and on Saturday from midnight to 5:00 AM, Toonami airs.
All three have a rotating body of regular shows, some of which have gone down in animation history from Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Laboratory, Power Puff Girls, and Teen Titans on Cartoon Network; King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Adult Swim; and Toonami’s had a variety of different anime, the most common ones ranging from Cowboy Bebop, to FLCL, to Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, Bleach, and One Piece, some of which are still on the block albeit in the dead of night.
Every April 1, viewers of Adult Swim and sometimes Toonami are in for any given treat. The first round of AS pranks began back in 2004 as a series of slight alterations to the channel’s shows. They were quick to do the same to Toonami and as the years went on, they got progressively more spontaneous. The tradition was still ongoing even after Toonami was canned in 2008. The Wikipedia page for Toonami describes the cancellation of Toonami as low-ratings. But I think I know what the true culprit was for that. Toonami is normally hosted by a robot character known as TOM who introduces the audience to the show and over the years the first time around, he’s gone through more than a few appearance changes through interactive events known as Total Immersion Events.
These events have been a staple of the block for years and generally involve a crisis of some sort attacking TOM’s station where he and AI partner SARA host the programming block. After the crisis is solved or averted or sometimes succeeded into killing TOM, a new appearance is adopted and the appearance of TOM 4 in 2007 was why it was axed the following year.
I wouldn’t say TOM 4’s appearance straight up assassinated the block, but it was a major contributor to the dip in viewership.
For about four years, Toonami was dead until it was revived for April Fools 2012 with a return to form. TOM 3, or in this case 3.5, returned to catch the viewers up to speed that night, by airing some old shows that have been on the block years prior, notably Fullmetal Alchemist and Tenchi Muyo. It wasn’t until a month later that executives confirmed on social media that Toonami was back for good this time.
Ever since, the April Fools’ Day pranks haven’t stopped and occasionally there’s a crossover into Toonami as previously mentioned. One of my personal favorites has to come from 2018. Being a western animation block airing English dubbed anime, the block normally doesn’t air anything in Japanese unless it’s something along the lines of an interview with a mangaka, a director, a studio in Japan or something else. Well, for 2018, not only were Japanese-dubbed anime put on the TV, TOM and SARA themselves were also given Japanese dubs, as was the logo.
Normally, April Fools’ is where AS markets the premiere of an upcoming show or a show’s next season later in the year, and for Toonami, I believe they were especially excited for this as FLCL: Alternative and Progressive were slated to air later that year. Additionally, they put on the 2004 Masaaki Yuasa produced movie Mind Game, also in Japanese, because this April Fools’ wasn’t weird enough.
This still goes down as one of my favorite April Fools’ events from Adult Swim and I was almost expecting them to do it again especially recently. Last month, they stuck it out with the April Fools’ tradition as expected and poking around on the associated subreddit, I kinda got my hopes up a bit. Part of the charm of these events is that its unpredictable. The only thing a viewer can expect from these is a deviation from the schedule and an introduction to a new show or new season of an existing show. This tradition was honored and for 2023, audiences got a taste of new show Royal Crackers and another season was confirmed for The Eric Andre Show and Teenage Euthanasia.
I was expecting something for Toonami this year, but it seemed Adult Swim took the glory. The daily discourse these days has been that of the progress in AI technology, so to capitalize on that, Adult Swim used a generative AI (think DALL-E or Midjourney) to run their programs in the early morning hours of April 1, mildly disrupting the run of Smiling Friends and putting a rerun of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. It’s hard to explain in wording or writing so have a look at the livestream from that day.
In contrast, Toonami aired the shows as normal whilst paying homage to the joke that put them back on TV. The reason I expected a 2018-style makeover was because Toonami comes on every Saturday night at midnight and April began on a Saturday, but this was more of a miscalculation on my end. Toonami began about three hours earlier than the midnight setup that it has now. Double bills are also quite rare in this regard, so while Adult Swim did give us something stupid to laugh at early Saturday morning, this wasn’t guaranteed for Toonami. Again, April Fools’ Day pranks on AS are unpredictable after all.
So the joke is very much on me, but I still think it was fun this year. Another possible double bill April Fools’ Day prank could probably occur the next time April begins on a Saturday and because 2024 is a Leap Year, the next time that’ll happen coincidentally will be another Leap Year: 2028, which is the year I turn 30. Again, this is speculation. I’m not Nostradamus trying to see what’s in the future…
Significant changes to your life are in the future.
One more thing before I end this blog post, I may have a topic for the next week that’ll throw my schedule into the fray and it concerns FLCL mentioned above. Here’s a sneak peek:
Admittedly, this was from March 2022, but I’m gonna write about it next week because I didn’t know about it at the time.
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